All Musings
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I've been working on a variety of different birds on my livestreams the last couple weeks. I have a list of local bird requests that I want to get through so I can start to explore more on my New Year's goals list. And I've discovered as I've made them that the process for making them was a comfortable glove that felt good. Their creation happened very quickly, and sometimes I was even wrapping up the livestreams earlier than the three-hour slot I'd dedicated to them.
I've made four birds recently: a Canyon Wren, a Townsend's Warbler, a Bittern, and a California Condor. The last was a real stretch for me because it was a bird in flight. I've not done flying birds before--at least not like this one. I think I have an aversion to wings because I don't have a good grip on their anatomy. It feels wierd to draw things I'm not sure about, and as a bird illustrator I've not done due diligence on researching the bodies of the birds I've drawn--I've been attracted to the play of light on the surface of the feathers instead.
But this time I took a leap, and decided to lean into drawing what I saw. And sometimes that can be a bad idea, honestly, because what we see and what we think we see are two different things. Our brains try to trick us into slipping into symbols of shapes instead of the shapes that we're acutally looking at. It's a tough thing, and artists spend lifetimes short-circuiting that instinct. So I thought maybe this was an opportunity to practice my capacity to see in a different, more complicated and challenging manner.
I really had to buckle down and observe. And connect shape "dots"--proportion, placement, accuracy... It's interesting how I do that in some ways but not others. My own habits tell me I should be doing selections and filling them with textures, but to do those selections I have to navigate the outer edge of each shape of shadow or structure or highlight or hue that I see. And that's not what I was doing on the California Condor image. I was building up shapes with paint strokes that determined the nature of the shapes. And wow did that make me feel a bit disoriented!!
But in the end, I'm happy with how it turned out. And I think I have a bit more confidencde when it comes to painting flying birds. I think I need to practice it a bit more, and I'm actually looking forward to seeing the inspirational resources I can draw upon for nice dramatic images! It's a new opportunity for me, and the more I make them the less scary they'll be.
So I've made each of these images available as greeting cards on my Goimagine shop. And soon they'll be part of yet a fourth collection of local birds that can be seen here in Humbold County in northern California along the Redwood Coast!
Here are the greeting card listings:
And here are the speedpaint videos for each:
Alrighty! Onward!