Drama in the Pine Tree

Yesterday, I was grousing to my spouse that I haven't felt like I have had the time to just sit and notice, lately. I am a little irked that the hummingbird feeder is out. I’ve filled it 4 times (we don't fill it very full) and I have yet to see a hummingbird. Last year, there was time to slow down and notice. It was one of the few gifts of the pandemic. For various reasons, the pace of life is picking up and I don’t want to give up the noticing, but it takes time and I haven't found the right balance. 

This morning, I went out start watering the flower and garden beds, but before I started I decided to sit and notice. 

In our 70 year-old pine tree outside the back door, I’ve been hearing loud, slightly annoying chirps and since there is an active cardinal’s nest and a robin’s nest, it was time to stop and look. The chirps were especially loud and shrill this morning. While it was hard to zero in on the exact location of where they were originating from, it was on the side of the tree where the cardinal’s nest is located.  

I spotted one and later a second baby cardinal in the tree. I think they are called fledglings at this stage. They blend in amazingly well when they aren’t moving. It’s hard to get a good picture. The little ones are starting to hope around the tree and, occasionally sort of jump/fly from one branch to a slightly farther one, which made me tense up whenever they did this. Many years ago, we saw a male cardinal tending to a fledgling on the ground under the same tree and I know these youngins have a much better chance of survival if they don't fall out of the tree. 

What wasn’t hard to see was the pair tending to them. They seem to be everywhere all at once, so it was not surprising that they both look skinny and a tad ragged. 

There was a certain level of drama with the various activities of the adult and young cardinals, which spiked to 16 on a 10 point scale when a squirrel tried to navigate its way through the pine tree near the fledglings. Until I talked to my neighbor this morning, I wasn't aware that squirrels will eat young birds. 

If you have ever seen small birds run off a big raptor in the air it was a bit like that, but it happened in the confines of the pine tree. The male cardinal sounded and kept up a distress call which brought the female, who also started yelling at the offender, and they more or less attacked and herded the uncooperative squirrel away from the fledglings. It was quite a sight to see and was very loud. Not long afterwards, a robin and another bird tried to land near the fledglings, so there was a repeated and very loud enforcement of a "no go" zone.  Later, subsequent violations of the "no go" zone (no stopping or standing here, just move along) were much less violent and loud. 

When things settled down a bit, it was time for a little food for the babes.

I am so glad that I took the time this morning to experience this and also to write about it. It leaves me in a place where I feel more rested and ready to face a busy day than when I first woke up. 

Hello There

 Hello to my blog. I’ve missed you. 

In my time away, I have kept up with daily project work and I completed Suhita Shirodkar’s class. It covered a lot of ground in 4 sessions. That is not a criticism, although the leap in the 4th class was more than I was willing to do, so I did my own thing and did not turn in homework to be evaluated. 

I still have a long way to go with tackling figure drawing. Here are a couple of attempts from Suhita’s class when we were working from photos. These are all fairly small drawings and the point is to try to capture people in a sketchy type of way, but where there is also aliveness and a sense of movement. I found that I could start to work some things out if I practiced drawing the same person more than once. By the third try, I thought I was getting more believable posture and "movement".

I am starting to develop a dislike of feet, since I just can’t make out their shape. 

The leap in class 4 which I was just not prepared to make was trying to sketch an entire market scene from one of 6 phots that she provided from a trip to Barcelona. It was just too hard to figure out what to include, modify, how to represent everything and so on, so I just didn’t do it. Instead, I did play around with trying to capture and fit in just the people relative to each other in some scenes as a way to push myself a bit. Here’s an example of that. 

While I think all of this has been good, I’ve really been hitting portraits and figure drawing a lot these past few months. It’s been good, but  truthfully it's starting to feel like work. Since I started a new job 4 weeks ago, I don't need more things which feel like work, since I am still in that stage where I am just plain tired a lot of the time, from getting up to speed on things. 

That means I need something that feels more like rainbows, unicorns, and cotton candy, so I’m diverting to something fun and not intense for now. I am trying a new medium for me, gouache.  I saw that Shari Blaukopf had an online class on painting scenes with skies in gouache and it seemed like a good way to learn about this medium. I signed up and bought supplies. 

Here’s the first attempt. I think my clouds and the hills in the background look a little flat, but this is a first attempt. 

I will get back to having more focus with defined projects at some point, but for now I just need some fun. Plus, I have some wonderful sunset pictures from my friend’s cabin and some other good sky pictures that I can explore after I’m done with this class. 

Takeoffs and Landings

Given that I have a gazillion pictures from yesterday at Crex Meadows Wildlife Area, I just have to post more.

Here are some takeoffs. 

Here are a couple of landings.

My dad was a hobby pilot and I spent a lot of time with him in a 4 seat airplane. From that time, the words "XXXX, you have been cleared for take off or XXXX, you have been cleared for landing" are seared in my memory.

Three Long Necks

Yesterday, I spent the day with a friend at Crex Meadows Wildlife Area in Grantsburg WI and took a gazillion pictures. When this was happening, I took as many as I could, so I think of them as a series. I have better, clear individual pictures, but this set draws me in. 

Maybe it's because of the closeness after all of the social distancing of the last 14 months. 

What I Have Been Up To Lately

Saturday was the first of 4 weeks of taking Suhita Shirodkar’s class called People Alive. The class is on Zoom and she is a well organized and good instructor. The first week is about capturing silhouettes and adding details with an emphasis on less being more. You would use these types of people in the back of a urban sketch. It’s a continuation on my overall project to work on figuring drawing. 

I only play with watercolor occasionally and it's been at least 12 months since I've picked them up, which has added some additional challenges. In Saturday's class, there were 3 building blocks to the overall concept we were learning, which means I can focus on one new building block for 2 days before moving on. This is the best example I have so far of a simple silhouette with some details added. Tomorrow's new concept is to work in more than one color.

Yes, it's an elderly couple leaning towards each other and walking together. 

The other thing I've been up to is tearing down paper for pamphlets and finishing several pamphlets.  Both of these are approximately 8” x 6” with one in "portrait mode” and one in “landscape mode”. Both contain Arches Text Wove paper. The covers were made from a full sheet of linen card stock paper. The texture mostly comes from several layers using bubble wrap. 

I don't think I've ever met a bright color combination that I don't like.

What To Keep and What Can Go

I went through a lot of my drawings and most of them went away in this morning's recycling. The sketchbooks and loose papers were starting to take up too much space and there was not a reason to keep most of them. This blog captures what I want to capture for the most part, since it’s good to be able to look back.

There is a difference in looking at a picture of what I created with my hands versus looking at the actual thing and because of that, the things I kept take me back to a place I wanted to go and want to be able to return to, for now. In making this determination, I kept the bar very high, so I did not keep much.

Since both of my gray cats are gone, I kept some of the drawings of them. I also have kept the very first painting I ever did of a cat and Ella was my subject. It’s not very good, but it was the best I could do at the time and it makes me smile when I look at it. I posted about it here.

This is one of drawings that I kept. It goes back all the way to July 2017, so it was about 1 1/2 years into the drawing and painting journey. I posted about it here. It's a small, simple drawing, but it brings back very good memories. 

One Last One

Here's the last one for Art 4 Shelter. I decided to paint from one of my recent bird pictures. 

Trumpeter Swan - Crex Meadows Wildlife Area 

Have I mentioned lately how much I love the Neocolor II crayons?