Leave Well Enough Alone

Well sometimes things just don't work out. I'm afraid that's the case with the Piping Plovers watercolor. I'm including four or five different photos here showing the various tacks I took in trying to salvage this watercolor. It's a bit painful to me to watch but it may prove informative to some. Not all artworks are successes but sometimes it's interesting to see the process as it goes along.

After letting it dry I decided that the top half was just too dark. It would be better to make that area more uniform in tone and color. But because I'd already worked it so thoroughly I couldn't figure out how to salvage it, in particular how to put a lighter area on top of the dark blue area.

I began by going opaque and adding colors with white added to them to the top half. That looked bad so I decided to use a wet sponge to remove as much paint as possible. The top photo shows this stage.



That got rid of the darker areas but also created an overall light muddy tone to the top. All white paper disappears when you do this. You get a lighter overall tone but also one that is permanently muddy. So I thought maybe I could use a color at full strength, particularly one that was somewhat opaque, to try to revive the area. It might just be opaque enough to cover up the gray tone.




That helped somewhat but the top still looked very dull. So I experimented some more. Stupidly I went back to a method that had already failed, adding more white to the top as seen above. That was a disaster as you can see in the photo above.



Finally I went back in with some undiluted, full strength colors. My thought was that they might be bright enough, since they were full strength, to overcome the muddiness. The danger of course is that now I was painting more like oils or gouache and not at all like watercolor. But I'd become desperate to try to salvage this.

You see the results above. At this point I think the watercolor looked worse than when I started reworking it so I decided to leave it sit overnight. I didn't think there was much more I could do with it.




This morning I looked at it again. The ochrish background just seemed too strong so I tried some small experiments, scrubbing out, scraping the paper, and adding in some more color washes. At this point I think it's done. It somewhat holds together as a painting. The original background as seen in the photo of brilliant sand, with blue and orange washes, is completely gone. Instead this looks more like some sort of hilly terrain. So my original idea of showing the brilliant sand in its two colors has completely failed.

Still nothing ventured, nothing gained. Readers might wonder why I'm showing such a disaster. Well I hope that maybe it's informative. Most artists go through similar problems but often don't want to mention their failures. Most likely this is a failure. But the thing to do is learn from it and go on to the next success. That's the story of art.

I Don't Brake for Drying Waterclors...

But I really ought to. I decided to try another small watercolor based on photos I took of Piping Plovers in April. I posted an earlier watercolor of them in May I think. One thing that fascinated me about the scene was the way that the sand alternated between an orange ochre and a gray blue. I decided that I wanted to try to get that into this watercolor

The other side of this scenario is that from a distance the plovers completely disappear into the sand. So though it has orange and blue casts it also looks like just one color from a distance. So as I developed this watercolor I didn't really have a good plan. I just improvised with the sand, going back and forth between a strong contrast and a weak one. I also used a broad brush, rarely trying to get the texture of the sand. My problem is that I just wouldn't wait for the first coat of watercolor to dry.



So as I went back and forth with different ideas about the sand I kept going back into wet watercolor. Sometimes this works. At other times it can lead to a muddy mess.

I'm not sure where I'm at here but I suspect I'm pretty close to a muddy mess. So I decided to stop and write this post, forcing myself to let the watercolor dry, and also forcing myself to take a break and look at it without a paintbrush in my hand. Most likely I won't touch this again until tomorrow. I hope I can do something to resolve any possible muddy messes.

Quick Will Willet Continued

I believe this small watercolor of an Eastern Willet seen at The Wetlands Institute in Stone Harbor, NJ this year is done. I'm satisfied with it, especially as it's my first painting of a willet. More than most artistic mediums though, watercolor doesn't do well with a lot of reworking. So even though there are some parts that bother me, I think it's best to leave this as it is, while it still has some freshness.

Though Eastern Willets are fairly common shorebirds we'd only seen them a few times before, the first time being when we took a Cape May Birding Observatory workshop on spring migration. They have never been all that close. On our trip to Cape May this April they were all over the place. This bird was only about 10 feet away. So it was nice to be able to get such good looks at them. They are a fairly nondescript bird for a shorebird, though their bluish bill and legs are noticeable. Their feather markings though are pretty much the same all over. There are no noticeable areas of contrasting color that stand out. At least not until the willet flies when you do see a huge white stripe on the wings.

Now that I'm starting to force myself to work from life I hope that my next paintings of Willets will include some work from life. Hopefully that will be soon!

Quick Will Willet

A very quick post this morning before heading off to work. I didn't have time to do any work from life today so decided to return to watercolor and photos. This is the beginning stage of an Eastern Willet seen at The Wetlands Institute at Stone Harbor, NJ this spring. As usual the question is can I keep this watercolor alive? Stay tuned!

Pleasures of Summer Shorebirds

I continued my quest for more live field sketching today and was able to convince my wife to do the same! We spent about 2 1/2 hours at Morris Arboretum in Philadelphia. We hoped that we'd finally see a Green Heron there and sure enough we saw one very quickly and were able to get many looks and do a number of live sketches.

But the most exciting part of the trip was shorebirds. We're still beginners with shorebirds. We tend to see them at Cape May in the fall and this year in the spring. So we've finally started to at least have a handle on them. We generally can at least differentiate a sandpiper from a plover. As I've continued to read about them one truism I've run across is that they're migrating back south by July. But we never see them in summer. Maybe we would if we went to the shore in July. But we just don't see them in Philadelphia. 07.13.09 edit -> I should say "we don't see them." Others might. If we spent more time at Tinicum in summer I'm sure we'd see more shorebirds there. In fact we may need to test that theory very soon.

One of the pleasures of birding is when you actually see something that you've read about. That happened today when we found five species of shorebirds: Killdeer, Greater Yellowlegs, Spotted Sandpiper, Solitary Sandpiper, and Pectoral Sandpiper. The more we looked the more we found. I assume that all, except possibly the six Kildeers, were migrating. We had to puzzle through the Pectoral but I'm pretty sure that's what it is. It was smaller than normal but fieldmarks indicate that it's a female, which is smaller and migrates in mid-July. The sheet of Killdeer drawings includes the Pectoral in the upper right corner.

After looking at more guidebooks, getting a suggestion that it is a juvenile Pectoral, and looking at my notes (e.g. olive legs, always crouched, etc.) I'm now wondering if this could have been a Least Sandpiper. The clean line that ended the streaking on the breast convinced me it was a Pectoral. But it did seem sort of large for a Pectoral (which is one reason I thought female which are smaller), it was often in a crouched position like a Least, and the legs were sort of olive. And they seem to be early migrants based on what I've read. So many things point to a Least. Except the clean line on the breast streaking, which still indicates a Pectoral. So even with all my sketching and notes it may remain unknown for certain.

There's also a bad sketch of a Solitary Sandpiper. What's worst about it is that I've lost all of the white on head and neck. So it's both dull to look at and wrong in fact. Nonetheless I noted enough details as I drew it to clearly identify it when I went to the guidebook.

Which leads me to another reason to sketch birds: so that you SEE them better. There is an ongoing discussion on the PA Audubon birding list today about whether it might be wise to buy a good camera before good binoculars if you have an interest in birds. Most people chose binos, and I certainly would, but some people suggested a camera. My suggestion: buy the best binocular you can buy, and a sketchbook. Drawing a bird forces you to LOOK at a bird and make decisions about fieldmarks that you don't have to do with binoculars and surely don't with a camera. I was even reading elsewhere about people shooting photos and then going home and comparing them to a guidebook to figure out what they'd seen. This seems crazy! The beautiful thing about sketching, regardless of your ability, is that it forces you to look more closely.

I was tempted to ask the person who wanted advice on binoculars or camera if he wanted to bring home anything from the experience. If you want to bring home a trophy a camera will work, though you'll probably be unhappy with the quality of your trophy. It's not that easy to get a good photo. But if you want to bring home a better understanding of birds, an improved ability to identify them, and maybe an art work, then buy yourself high quality binoculars, AND, a sketchbook!

Near Temptation of Lens

I've spent the last week thoroughly immersed in the wildlife artist forum of birdforum.com. I was led there by Jo through a reference to the work of Nick Derry in my last post. What an enjoyable trip it's been. There are some really, really good bird artists there. More important, at least to me, is that not only is it good but much of it is based on field work. It's both observation-based and artful.

To make a long story short the time spent there has convinced me that I really do need to spend more time working from life. There is just no way around it. Fieldwork is what keeps you connected to the subject. So today I forced myself to work from life. Today I stayed in the backyard. Tomorrow I may go afield, if I can convince my wife that she'd also enjoy it.

I knew that we have had a hummingbird around quite a bit the last two weeks so I wanted to see if I could get some sketches of it. And I knew I needed to avoid 'the near temptation of lens.' No photos. I wanted to draw what I saw with my naked eye, or through binoculars, unadulterated by a camera.

As you can see I managed a few very small hummingbird sketches. It just didn't sit still. The one time it looked like it might (see bird on wire) a robin landed on tomato cage and scared it away. That sketch is really from a mental image. Even the robin wouldn't sit still. So his sketch includes two composite views.

Unidentified wasps and beetles landed on my drawing table or on the honeysuckle next to my chair. So they also got included. I've spent years drawing insects under a microscope but this was one of the first drawing them live. Wasps don't sit much more still than birds. I haven't identified this one but if I have time I'll do so later. Actually I think I have identified it. It's one of the thread-waisted wasps: a mud-daubing wasp.

The final subjects are floral: a helenium just budding up, a half-spent monarda and a honeysuckle blossom. The hummingbirds love the monarda and the honeysuckle. As common as monarda is it is really a spectacular flower. I don't think most orchids can top it for exotic beauty, especially if you look closely at each flower.

There aren't any great drawings here. But it was great fun forcing myself to work from life. I enjoyed it so much I didn't even notice I was using my old nemesis, watercolor pencils and waterbrush.

'Wildlife Art' and Me

I began drawing and painting birds in late 2006. The inspiration, outside of years of birdwatching, was the book 'Drawing Birds' by John Busby. I loved the plein air versions of birds that I found in it. They crackled with life. My own artistic background, outside of 3-5 years drawing insects in pen and ink viewed under a microscope, was 20-25 years of mainly abstract or non-objective work.

But I'd become very disillusioned with the art world and had stopped doing abstract art. After reading 'Drawing Birds' I was so excited about what I saw that I decided to try my hand at naturalistic art, using birds as subjects. The small watercolor at top, of shorebirds at Nummy Island near Cape May, NJ was my first bird watercolor. It was done in late 2006.

But I soon ran into a problem. As I started looking at 'wildilfe art', includng 'bird art', I found that most of it just left me cold. I don't want to elaborate on that here. If I had to generalize I'd say that it felt overly-precise and lacking in life.

My purpose in this post is not to criticize though. It's actually to mention two sites that I've found recently that remind me of the possibility of exciting 'bird art.' Both sites are listed on the right side of this page. The first is Nick Derry's blog. Though Nick also has a web site with more finished work this blog shows his sketches from life. I think that they are really exciting. The second site is a publisher, The Langford Press. The site is a bit clunky and has some broken links. But it also lists a number of wildlife-related books, part of the Wildlife Art Series, that look very interesting. I notice that some of the artists who publish there are also artists whose work I admired in 'Drawing Birds.'

I also reviewed 'Lars Jonsonn's Birds' at Amazon earlier this year and it is a stunning example of someone who does work that is both naturalistic and artful. So this is turning out to be a good year for me and 'wildlife art.' I keep finding more and more that I really like.

There is of course a great tradition of European and American artists who have been great artists while still using naturalistic subject matter. Durer, Courbet and Homer spring instantly to mind. But that seems less true since the 1900s. This is a huge subject that I really don't want to tackle in any depth. It may be due to the decline in popularity of representational art in the 'high art' world during most of the 20th century. But for whatever reason it seems to me that the most accomplished art and naturalistic art have been two different genres for 100 years or more. I don't see any reason that this should be the case. And I'm very happy whenever I find naturalistic art which also seems to be in the tradition of the best and most accomplished art. That's been the case this year.

Opacity - Refuge of Scoundrels

No, the opacity I'm talking about is not that of language, especially as exemplified by politicians, contemporary art critics, and economists. They probably all could vie for the Opacitator of the Year award. No what I'm talking about is opacity in watercolor.

Some people will know what I mean when I talk about this and others will probably roll their eyes. The best example I can give of this is Winslow Homer. I'm rereading one of my many books on him right now and once again I notice that as I look at his watercolors chronologically that they are skilled, accomplished and then out of the blue one day, they are really exciting. That is the day he abandons opaque watercolor for transparent watercolor. Some of the paintings(for example Applepicking) he did at Houghton Farm in New York in the late 1870s before going to Cullercoats, England are good examples. He achieves brightness as though he were painting in oils, by putting the lightest colors on top. So many of the highlights are light colors laid on top of dark colors. But you can't do this in watercolors. Except you can. IF you mix some opaque white with your colors. The white is more or less a new paper background and any color on it will be brighter, not limited through transparency to any darker colors underneath. But it comes at a price. The sparkling, luminous, transparent effect of watercolor is gone.

Sometime after his return from Cullercoats, and certainly by the time of his Adirondack paintings of the late 1880s, Homer more or less abandoned opaque watercolor for transparent watercolor, regardless of cost or difficulty. The result is a body of work that sings, the watercolors for which he's most famous.

I've always disliked opacity in watercolor so I've avoided it. Until today. I just couldn't think of any other way to salvage the reeds in this painting and make them regain the foreground. The results are mixed and I might try a little more work on it. But largely it's done. I do think it looks better than yesterday but I've lost some of the brilliance that is the main reason for working in watercolor. Still it seemed worth trying, at least this once.

Snowy Egret in Progress

I was so happy with my Laughing Gulls watercolor of last week that I've had it in my mind ever since then that I need to return to larger, looser watercolors. Outside of the small pen and ink insect drawings that I did about 10 years ago of insects viewed under a microscope I've always worked large. That changed when I took up birds as subject matter about three years ago as I explained in my post about the gulls. Because I'm so new to birds it seemed better to start small. But that can be inhibiting and after I finished the gull painting I found that there was a freedom in that painting that reminded me of my old abstract paintings.

I also enjoyed the process of doing a sketch and then testing colors before I began the real painting as I did with the Laughing Gulls. So today I looked through the many photographs I've taken of birds over the last year and decided to try a Snowy Egret seen at 'The Meadows' at Cape May this spring. I went from 7x10 paper to 11x14. The top two photos are of the preliminary sketch. The reflections in the water looked absolutely impossible but I was happy with the water in the gull painting so I wasn't intimidated by it.


Perhaps I ahould have been intimidated by the water and its reflections though, especially as I refused to use any masking medium to save the white paper where all the reeds were in front of the water. One day I'll probably need to take up the use of a masking medium. But today I decided to take my chances without it. You can probably see the problem. As I paint the water the brush goes into the foreground reeds and distorts them, or I shy away from them and end up with an odd white space surrounding them. But I decided to work this anyway. You never know what will happen until you try it.


I think I'm through with this for today. It's a bit duller than it looks online. And most of the reeds are disappointing. So most likely I'll see if there's anything I can do to rescue the reeds(I doubt it) and make the colors a bit more vibrant(more likely possible I think). I did what I wanted in this painting: work in a looser method. It hasn't been completely successful. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. I suspect that I will continue to work in this fashion. I should add that I also suspect that this method will never be popular in the world of 'wildlife art.' Photographic precision seems to be more the norm there. That is fine. But I find no enjoyment in working that way. So most likely this painting is a harbinger of thimgs to come.

House Sparrows (and Echinacea) in Watercolor Pencil

House sparrows?! Who cares! Who wants to draw/paint/look at House Sparrows? Well this is easy to understand. In our backyard they outnumber other more interesting birds by about 10 to 1. Yes they are common. But they're still interesting birds and can make for good subjects. I believe it was a number of watercolor studies by Chloe Talbot-Kelly in 'Drawing Birds' by John Busby that convinced me you could make some very good drawings/paintings using them as subjects.

I've chosen them today because: 1) I vowed I'd finally do some work from life this summer when bad weather could no longer be an excuse; and 2) they were the only avian subjects that would sit still. A Ruby-Throated Hummingbird made a 5 second appearance but you can't draw much in that short time.

The accompanying sketches are nothing special, though I'm satisfied with them. But I'm so much happier with watercolor pencils now that I'm using a better quality paper, and now that I'm being more patient and not going back into the painting while it is still wet. The new Moleskin watercolor sketchpad is a great help. It seems a bit expensive but for me it's been worth it. What a pleasure to not worry about the quality of the paper, not worry about buckling.

As I've said many times before, so many that you might think 'he doth protest too much', I do believe that you get better art when working from life. There is a connection to the subject matter that is just missing when working from photos. But I've done very little work from life recently in spite of all my claims of its superiority.

So I hope that this will be the start of a real effort on my part to work more from life. I'm sure I'll continue to work from photos, maybe as soon as this afternoon or tomorrow. But I also want to spend more time working from life. I'm sure all of my work will improve in quality as I do so.

One last thought. You might wonder, well why doesn't he show more detail in the birds? Simple, they were too far away to see any detail except with binoculars or scope. So for today the challenge was to do sketches of them knowing that I wouldn't be able to include much detail. My answer was to include more of their surroundings. I've never really painted the sky before and haven't had much luck, or patience, with foliage. But I had no choice today. The birds were so far away as to be very small. That meant taking on skies and foliage.

It was such a nice day, low 80s with a breeze, that I found myself back outside later in the afternoon, after posting this. The Echinacea Pallida continued to call out to be painted, especially with the nearby sunflower and the Bronze Fennel behind. So here is version number two(I tried this for the first time last weekend).

It still leaves something to be desired. The details of the Echinacea are lost. The fennel is just so airy that it's hard to render in paint. And I'm still overwhelmed by all the foliage of the sunflower and the Echinacea. Still it's enough of a challenge, and the results good enough, that I'm sure I'll keep trying to do a good painting of this subject.