European Blackbird on Winter Cattail Day 17 of 30 in 30 Challenge

European Blackbird on Winter Cattail

Pastels, pastel pencils on paper 7" square

This is one of the paintings done after Blackbird 2 earlier this month. DAK723 gave me the cattail reference in snow, but it looked more like a component of a landscape than an actual scene. It needed something and I knew from first sight what it needed was a bird.

So this was in some ways one of the easiest paintings I've done and others one of the hardest, having to redo that bird an inch long was tricky! I like how it came out though, it makes me smile. Also first use of some of my new Terry Ludwig pastels.

Day 12 Penguin Cartoon

Penguin Cartoon on Hummingbird Page

W&N Markers on Moleskine WC journal

Yesterday when I painted the hummingbird I placed him to the right because of the direction his head pointed. I wanted him pointing at the other painting on the page. I had no idea how well this would work till I finished the penguins cartoon from oldrockchick's WDE photographs. By accident, it looks like he's reading the caption and startled by what the penguins are doing!

The birds came up with this. I just drew it. I looked at the photo and the caption just popped into my mind - one of them folding his head back down to hide it in the middle of his back as if embarrassed, the other one putting his beak up all snobby as if to say "I'm not with him." I realized as I sketched it that this was just mutual, they had the same moment in different ways!

Sometimes a good idea doesn't come out perfect. There's a botch in the cartoon where an area of ground got too dark and the Moleskine paper let me lift it more or less to a better value, but also damaged the paper surface. Now I know not to scrub and lift these watercolor markers on Moleskine watercolor paper. Every painting is an experiment. Even failed trials are worth learning from.

But if I were going to publish the cartoon I would either clean it up in GIMP or I'd redraw it from this version. That's fine. Call it a preliminary painting and move on. That's what journals and sketchbooks are for!

Pen and Watercolor Flowers, Life Sketches

Pen & Watercolor Flowers

Stillman & Birn 7" square Zeta journal

I had still more time after working on the pastel landscape and changed mediums to get some distance from its problems. So I opened up my photo collection in my Kindle and found lots of flowers from the SFGH memory garden. Picked out three that I have no idea what they are. "Daisyish" is not a proper species name or common name, it's just the lower left one is in that category. Then there's "red and yellow long trumpetish ones" and "weird shaped one with the two big petals like butterfly wings and a nozzle." Such scientific nomenclature. Anyone who knows what any of them are, comment and tell me!

Then after I went out, I sketched several San Francisco residents just hanging out in the Tenderloin and some beautiful old houses visible from the fifth floor family health center Gold Team clinic. The nurse took a look at it and recognized which buildings they were, so I'm very happy I got the likeness! No pigeons have commented to tell me if I got their likeness though.

San Francisco Residents and Housing

Pigma Micron Pen, Moleskine Pocket Sketchbook (plain)

No, that's not a silhouette, one of the pigeons was black and the other two were different shades of gray or blue/gray. I've seen many different colors of pigeons and even the birds in my city have diversity. Everyone flocks together. There was a pretty shine on the sun side of the black one that I may actually develop later in pastels from memory - he was pretty as a grackle, very iridescent neck, blue sky highlights on his sun side and rich darkness on the shadow side. I watched him walk around quite a bit before I finally got settled and had the sketchbook out. 

So today's been very productive, much more sketching and drawing and painting than usual. I'm feeling good but very tired.