A Surprise Harvest and a Great Egret on One Leg

Harvester Butterfly at Manayunk Canal. Photo by Ken Januski.

It was such a beautiful, though cool, day today that I went out birding twice, once in the morning by myself and later in early afternoon with Jerene. Broadwings low overhead started the day at Houston Meadows and they were followed by numerous sparrows, though many of them I just couldn't see enough of to identify. Perhaps a Lincoln's and then again perhaps not.

In any case seeing so many sparrows seemed perfect for the first day of fall. The seasons are changing and so are the flora and fauna. The real surprise of the day though were 4-5 of the butterflies pictured above. A Harvester, the only carnivorous American butterfly. My first thought, as we saw them along the Manayunk Canal, was that it was a skipper that I wasn't familiar with. When I checked my guides back home though I realized it wasn't a skipper. Nor a checkerspot, nor a crescent. Eventually I realized that it was a Harvester. And the guides said they were rare enough to be quite a nice find. So there it was: a surprise Harvester on the first day of what I consider harvest season.

Eastern-tailed Blues and Duskywings were also about as were a number of Slaty Skipper dragonflies which I've seen the last few times I've visited the Manayunk Canal. We didn't really see as many birds as I would have liked but I can't at all complain. Today was just a day to enjoy being out and alive, regardless of what birds, butterflies and dragonflies we saw.

Great Egret on One Leg.Watercolor Sketch by Ken Januski.

I haven't stopped my practice of doing a watercolor sketch of birds that I've drawn in the field. About a week ago I saw this lone Great Egret at Morris Arboretum, standing on one leg for much of the time. This is a quick watercolor rendering of that scene. I made him  a bit too big to fit comfortably on the paper. And yet at the end of the painting I think it worked just fine. This is another drawing with a brush watercolor.

Drawing Killdeer With a Brush

Killdeer. Wash Drawing by Ken Januski.

Killdeer. Wash Drawing by Ken Januski.

I haven't been able to decide on what to use as a more ambitious project, either in print or true watercolor. So I continue with these small wash sketches of birds.

Inevitably the small size means that a slight miscalculation in the placement of the brush and I have a bill or eye that is horribly misshapen or twice as large as it should be. This is of minor importance to me. The goal is to think about the bird in terms of mass and very few lines, to capture the essence if not the detail of the bird with very minimal means. In doing so I hope/believe that I'm internalizing the structure of the birds I sketch. And of course I can't forget the structure because I'm distracted by getting detail correct. There's no way to get it correct when working at this small scale, at least not with a brush, or without a strong dose of masochism.

I do think these have a sense of what Killdeer are really like. I'm sure that eventually I'll move on to something more ambitious.

Drawing With a Brush

Solitary Sandpipers. Watercolor Sketch by Ken Januski.

While out enjoying the cool weather early this morning I ran across a Solitary Sandpiper. Every time I see one I realize that if I want to portray them believably, even if abstracted or stylized, I need to understand them better. In particular I need to understand where the head and neck are in relation to their slim elegant torso when they're bent over hunting for food.

I'd thought that I'd been pretty successful as I kept reworking the field sketch below to get the outline right. Only now that I see it online do I realize how many problems it has. But no matter. It convinced me to spend some time sketching them from the many photos that I've taken, mainly within 5 miles of home, over the years.

I took up a method of painting that I used to love in order to do these sketches: sketching with a brush using a wash. I used to use India ink and Chinese brushes. This time I used watered down watercolor and my normal watercolor brushes.

There is something exhilarating in working like this. Part of the exhilaration is that you can fail pretty quickly! Since you have to make big strokes that encompass much of the shape of whatever you're drawing it's easy to get it wrong, and see that it's wrong. Oddly this adds to the excitement and tends to keep you focused. There's really no room to be tentative.

Because it's a light wash it's also possible to make other darker corrective lines without the drawing looking too bad. So it's far more forgiving than it at first might seem.

Perhaps best of all it combines drawing and painting. This is really just about the main problem for most realistic artists I think: are you painting or are you drawing? Does line, often outline, matter most or does mass, and sometimes color, matter most? Skilled artists learn to get some lines from the edges of color masses without enclosing everything in an outline or within strict edges. A great example of this is Winslow Homer.

He started off wedded firmly to line and outline. By the end of his career most line was implicit not explicit. He added line in subtle ways. Wash drawings like this really do meld both line and mass, and can easily include color as well. Of course the masters of this method are Chinese and Japanese artists. Hokusai immediately comes to mind but I haven't really studied art of that part of the world well enough to know all of the other skilled artists.  If you look at Hokusai though you can see an incredible fluidity. He was a master!

So having stumbled accidentally upon this method of working today I'm quite pleased. I'm forced to simplify the shapes of things and in doing so to make a commitment to what I think they should be. It's a great way to work and I suspect I'll be doing a lot more of it.

Below is the field sketch of Solitary Sandpiper, as well as Green Heron on a log, that sent me off in this direction.

Green Heron on Log and Solitary Sandpiper. Ballpoint Pen Field Sketch by Ken Januski.

Paint with a Brush - Number Two

I wanted to title this post, 'Think Like a Brush' or something like that. But I had this vague recollection that I'd already used that title. A quick search showed I hadn't used exactly that but something similar last November.

My point in the original post was that I came to the revelation of the quite obvious that when you paint you should paint with a brush. I know this seems self-evident but what I meant was that often people use a tool while pretending that it is actually a different tool, like mistaking a brush for a pencil. One makes linear marks. The other can make linear marks but can also create areas, volumes, space and atmosphere. A brush has far more flexibility than a pencil once you learn how to use it.

So that's the loose theme to hang around a couple of recent watercolors: Think Like a Brush. What I mean here is just a continuation of the first theme: once you've realized that a brush is not a pencil, or some sort of manual equivalent to a computer fill tool that just colors in an area, then you can start to explore what a brush can actually do.


The watercolor at top is a relatively quick watercolor of some Laughing Gulls at Reeds Beach in New Jersey. We had gotten there a few days before the migrating Red Knots and other shorebirds had arrived to feast on the Horseshoe Crab eggs. But the Laughing Gulls were already there, as wild and raucous as could be. Though the stars of the locale were not yet present I really wanted to portray another common scene, that of the Laughing Gulls.

My last watercolor of the Glossy Ibis required more control, at least in the bird, than I'm used to so I felt like doing something here that allowed a little more freedom for brushwork and design. I also wanted to keep the work transparent and not veer towards opaque watercolor as I'd done with the ibis.





One of the best ways to think like a brush is to allow yourself only 15 minutes to do a painting. And don't use any pencil guidelines. In doing so you really have to consider areas of color and value. You can't spend too much time on lines, or finely delineated contours. That's what I did in the quick watercolor of the Hermit Thrush above. I did use a small brush to articulate the eye ring and to make some of the facial markings. I knew I only had 15 minutes so most of the painting had to use broader brush strokes. This too is part of thinking like a brush. You have to make very quick decisions about which brushes to use and how to use them.

The painting really isn't complete. That's because I stuck strictly to the 15-minute limit. I can always do something more developed later. For now it forced me to decide what I thought was most important in the painting and that was primarily the bird itself.

I do think many people are fearful both of brushes and watercolor. Obviously great art has been done with them. But once you pick them up and try to use them yourself you can also quickly see how easy it is to make a real mess, probably an irredeemable mess. The best way to get over that fear of a mess is to just keep working and painting.

Learn to think like a brush.

Paint With a Brush?

Trick title right? Of course you paint with a brush. Well maybe; but one of the things that bothered me about the painting in my last post of the Lesser Yellowlegs and the lily pads was that it was a little too close to paint by number. I first drew in all the shapes and then colored them in. There was very little variety in types of brushstroke. In fact you could barely see any brushstrokes.

So in a brief 15-20 minutes last night and another this morning I decided to experiment with two watercolors that were done only with a brush, including the preliminary drawing.

They are Savannah Sparrows, seen at Brigantine NWR in October of 2009. They are based on photos I took. My intent was to try to force myself to use the brush more creatively, to take advantage of all it could do, and not just use it to color in shapes.

To a large extent I did that with the sparrows, though I did lose a lot of the detail that I'd hoped to show. But I didn't do it at all with the background. I think I should have gone for a bit more detail there and not so much impressionistic washes.

Still I'm happy with them. I think it's a start in the right direction, at least for me, with watercolor. If you paint the preliminary sketch with a brush it's a much easier transition to also using the brush for shape. It's a very natural flow.

I have to add that I also wanted to try this very beautiful sparrow, as so many of them are. But the detail always scared me off. For some reason knowing that I'd do it with a brush, and therefore just couldn't get too lost in detail, made it seem less intimidating.