Birds... and a guitar player (he's singing to the birds)!

Here are some birds and one guitar player that I've painted lately.

A peacock who, apparently, has not yet spotted his lady love.

Only two swans a'swimming... the rest are in warmer waters...

An owl on a branch in late winter.

Spring will come... eventually...

Here is the great blue heron. We see them where ever there is water... they like wetlands and ponds and rivers... (and I like them!!!)

Here he is... the guitar player...

Back to Basics!

I just finished my last drawing for the Back to Basics online course, through the Strathmore Online studios. The instructor is Earnest Ward.  He is an artist and an adventurer and a storyteller and... in short, everything that I have tried to be... and am still working on being. He is also a very kind and attentive instructor, which I really appreciate. Earnest has a blog, too, which is a detailed and illustrated guide to how he creates his art. You can find it right here!

This workshop has been so much fun. For me, it was a review on how to measure and how to figure perspective. Picking the subject matter for my drawings was very enjoyable. But... those darn ellipses... they are still awfully challenging... and I am a work in progress... one of these days, I'll get them.

Here are the four pictures that I made for the workshop:

The first project was to make a line drawing. I liked the instructor's onion portrait so much that I decided to do one, too! By the way, I haven't eaten that onion yet. It just continues to grow while sitting on the kitchen table.

OK, so here is the infamous ellipse! Arrgh! Well... I'll just keep working at that. Anyway, the second project was to do the line drawing and then add shading to it. This gives the viewer the idea that the object is three dimensional. It is kind of an optical illusion that artists do. We draw or paint on a two dimensional surface and then, through shading and foreshortening and various other tricks, we give the illusion that the item is three dimensional.

I started off this drawing with graphite pencil and then added pen and ink. The cool thing is that I learned how to do stippling, which is the shading that you see here. It's all little dots. Oh my goodness! I really enjoyed making those little dots. It was delightfully mindless. It was so much fun that I actually stippled a little bit too much and had to get rid of the excess with white-out (white out and erasers are always my friends).

So this is the last one. It was done on toned paper (tan) and it is mixed media. It incorporates the following media: graphite pencil, charcoal, white chalk, colored pencil, and wax pastels.