American goldfinch, eating sunflower seeds on the hoof
What do you do when you have a galleryful of artwork up for sale? Do more artwork!
As a kind of warmup for the next batch o’ art, I’m out in the garden with binoculars and a scope, sketching the birdies. Don’t know exactly what I’ll do with the drawings, but one never knows, and it’s good to keep your hands busy and your mind engaged. In this hot dry weather (summer arrived last week and someone shut off the rain and turned the heat up) the pond and waterfall is highly attractive to a lot of wildlife, as is the fruiting pear tree which is ringing the dinner bell for all sorts of omnivores and frugivores. There’s a lovely lady coyote, very pregnant, who’s been coming out in early evenings to pick up fallen fruit and devour it on the lawn. I wish her and her soon-to-be pups well. She’s an enchanting creature, in a thin summer coat, with an elegant long nose and wise, angled eyes in a sensitive face. And I’m keeping the cat indoors anyway.
Red-bellied Woodpecker, drawn through the scope.
Drawing The Motmot 
Save some pears for sweet homemade pear liquor. But keep your eye out for the trickster tho.
Gorgeous drawings!
These are really fabulous!
I would love to see you draw — I’ll bet you have the fastest pencil west of the Mississippi! These are really fantastic — we have goldfinches feasting on the coneflower heads right now, but they are much too fast and “hoppy” for me to manage a drawing, so I can’t imagine how you do it!
🙂 And a belated congratulations on your show opening.
Thanks for your comments- and, Linda, you’ll notice all those extraneous lines circling around my birds. Those are where I try to zero in on the shapes as fast as I can. One of those lines might be right, so I leave all of them where they are. By the way, if you move your whole arm, not your fingers, you can really get some speed without hurting your wrists. Try sketching from the shoulder. Big fast movement- see if that works!
These are such beautiful drawings! Thanks for sharing your process.