Throwback Thursday: Bee Eaters!
Here are a pair of paintings from early 1997. I did the Little Bee Eaters as a wedding gift for my friend Mike. The Carmine Bee Eaters were an engagement gift for my (now) wife, Liesl. They were based on photos I took at the awesome Bronx Zoo Bird House.
Looking back at older paintings is odd for me. Some I still love; others are just okay. The few outright failures you won’t see here. I still think these two paintings are fun, but there are a lot of things I’d do differently now. For starters, I’d change the backgrounds. At the time I did a lot of airbrushed work. Honestly, the airbrush was a bit of a crutch, which is true for a lot of artists. I wasn’t good at large, controlled washes of paint, so I’d “squirt in” a nice gradient or solid background. Although smooth, they look a little boring to me now.
Occasionally the airbrush is still the right choice, such as for super-dark colors. While I still like the airbrushed backgrounds in some paintings, in others it bothers me. I have spent a lot of time working on larger, controlled flat and gradient washes and definitely prefer those now. I tend to do more painting into the backgrounds now. Often I’ll have some middle distance objects rather than the blown-out low depth of field and blurry backgrounds of these two paintings.
An artist’s work evolves as he or she progresses. With most paintings that I’ve done, I have areas that I’d like to improve or at least change. I suppose if you don’t say that, you’ve stagnated. Watercolor is by far my favorite medium, allowing me to create tons of detail relatively quickly. It has beautiful, accurate colors, and the white of the paper can almost glow through the transparent pigments. Watercolor is easy to store and the pigments clean up easily.
Along with its multitude of benefits, there are some drawbacks to using watercolor, namely that it isn’t remotely forgiving to edits. The paper is quite delicate, and though you can scrub away a mistake, it almost never comes completely off. Once scrubbed, the paper’s surface is forever changed and doesn’t take color the way it should. Most mistakes or bad choices are there for good. Knowing this makes me really appreciate a well-done watercolor.
Throwback Thursday: Bay-breasted Warbler Transparent Watercolor
This small watercolor of a male Bay-breasted Warbler is from around 1998 or 1999. I did the painting based on photos of a cooperative male in Magee Marsh at Crane Creek, Ohio.
Original painting is available here.
Cedar Waxwing Transparent Watercolor Time-lapse Video AND Step-by-step
Cedar Waxwings have been on the top of my wife’s request list for a long time. She has also been asking me to post a time-lapse video of a painting, so I did both on this one. The good news is that she got what she wanted; the bad news is that partial credit or blame goes to her too! The video has about eight hours of painting compressed into 6.5 minutes. I’ve heard the expression “as boring as watching paint dry;” hopefully, watching sped up watercolors isn’t as bad.
Filming the time-lapse was a learning experience. I discovered that fluorescent light and time-lapse video don’t play nicely together. Although invisible to the naked eye, fluorescent lights are actually flickering all the time—though too quickly to see. The frame rate of the video amplifies the effect, kind of like the way wagon wheels seem to be moving backwards on old Westerns. Once you speed up the video, it becomes both highly visible and annoying! Toward the end of the project, I turned off the CF and ring fluorescent lamps, using incandescent and halogen options instead, which resolved the annoying banding issues. Live and learn.
Recording and watching the painting process was interesting and at times irritating. Here are some observations that I made: These paintings take a long time. It was only 7×10 inches, but it took about 8 hours. That’s just the painting. Including the time for sketching, masking and research would easily add a few more hours. It’s pretty interesting to me to see how quickly the early stages zip by and how long it takes to put in the million details that make for a crisp, highly rendered painting. As you can see, most parts of the painting have a myriad of layers of paint over them. If I do more time-lapses in the future, I’ll try to have a more visible palette so you can see the colors being mixed. This time I was trying to focus more on the painting’s progress. The annoying parts, like forgetting to turn on the video and missing a chunk of time, were a bummer. Also, the small camera was always in just the wrong place and got in the way of my swing-arm magnifier. When I was younger I could see all the tiny details unaided, but now a little help is appreciated.
I love Cedar Waxwings. Growing up we didn’t get many in our lawn. Currently we have a good population due to all the fruiting trees and shrubs we’ve planted over the years. We’ve even had the pleasure of finding waxwings nesting in one of our cherry trees. When we moved in, this yard provided a blank slate of sorts in regards to landscaping. It had grass, a few dying foundation plantings and four spruce trees. Liesl and I immediately started planting, keeping birds, butterflies and other wildlife in mind, and we now regularly reap the rewards.
Throwback Thursday – Bearded Barbet Transparent Watercolor
This painting was especially fun to work on. I took numerous photos of Bearded Barbets at the Toledo Zoo. Images taken in zoos have their limits. Often the backgrounds leave a lot to be desired. After a lot of research, I thought I’d paint the bird on some palms native to their home range. Palm fronds always offer interesting intersecting and overlapping patterns that make for a lively canvas. The sea of bright green would really help pop the complementary reds of the bird off the page.
Barbets come in a variety of colors, some drab and some colorful. Most have bristly feathers by their bills. They are related to woodpeckers, sharing characteristics like zygodactlyate feet (2 toes forward and two back.) Bearded Barbets are named for their bristly beard of feathers. They are native to the Ivory Coast of Africa.
Throwback Thursday – Extinct or Presumed Extinct Bird Paintings
I thought I’d compile all the illustrations of extinct or presumed extinct birds that I did a while back on one page. It is very sad to think they are all gone forever.
Eastern Screech Owl Transparent Watercolor Step-by-step
This drawing sat on the back burner for a long, long time before it made the transition into a painting. I did the sketches for this at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2000. That may be my all-time favorite natural history museum. While my wife was at a business conference, I spent three days sketching specimens at the museum. What a blast!
The drawings sat in an old sketchbook for ages. I always wanted to paint it, but other things seemed to beat it to the top of the “to do” list. Recently, I was rifling through the old sketchbook looking for something to quickly paint before the holidays. I decided its time had come. These days I typically avoid “bird on a stick” compositions, but I thought the simplicity of this pose would work if I really bragged it up with some outrageous autumn colors.
Mya: Mixed Breed Dog Step-by-Step Transparent Watercolor
It was fun to work on this commissioned painting. Mya is not only a very pretty dog, but she has an interesting back story. She was discovered in Mexico where she was living on the streets and “counting down her last days,” barely able to lift her head up. She won the doggie lottery that day, finding a loving family and permanent home in Colorado! Since then she has become quite the adventure dog, going just about everywhere her owners travel.
The reference photos for her custom portrait were great. Mya’s age varied in the shots, but she always looked completely in her element while hiking around the Rockies and other locales.
I love her brindled coat and awesome half-folded-over ears. She has some serious personality!
Grass-Carrying Wasp Pencil Sketch p67
There is no doubt about it, pain is an excellent teacher. Hornets, wasps and bees make for some vivid memories. Like many, I can still remember my first bee sting. It was in the clover of our backyard. Other stings make for memorable moments, like was the time I was on a steaming hot, dusty bus full of college students on an Everglades trip. We were driving on the old Tamiami Trail when a wasp zipped through the window hitting me in the head. I’m sure that from its point of view, it was a pretty terrifying experience. Justifiably, it decided to sting me repeatedly on the forehead. That made an already long day much longer.
I remember being terrified of the Mud Daubers that frequented the puddles around the swimming pool, lapping up water. Despite the high number of insects and their fearsome appearance, I don’t recall a single person getting stung. Even thought they have Darth Vader’s looks, they are known (by those in the insect world) to be easy-going. I found the Horseflies by the pool to be much worse. Likewise, people don’t like Honey Bees much, but they typically are fairly tolerant and don’t sting much.
Over the years I’ve probably been stung by more Yellow Jacket than anything else, usually after hitting thier nest with the lawn mower. Supposedly when one gets killed it releases a pheromone that simultaneously attracts and enrages the other Yellow Jacket in the hive to attack. Although I can’t see a pheromone, I definitely buy into that theory.
This summer I got blasted by a Yellow Jacket from a hole near our mailbox. Worried that the mailman or little kids nearby might get stung, I had to do something. After a little Internet research, we came across a recommendation for a highly effective and completely non-toxic method of eradicating the hive: the cake plate trap. Near dark, when they are less active, you’re supposed to place a clear glass bowl over the nest hole. Because this trap allows them to see light during the day, they won’t try to dig a new hole to escape. Thus, they eventually starve, and the bowl can be removed after 8-10 days.
By the middle of the first full day we used this trap, the bowl looked like a horrifying corn popper of death, with hundreds of highly irritated Yellow Jackets in the “red zone,” desperately trying to fly through the glass. Within a few days, the ground under the dome was piled with their bodies. Though gruesome in this aspect, we appreciated being able to get rid of them without using any chemicals or getting stung in the process.
I used the same method with a second hive, and it remained covered for less than a week before a skunk removed the bowl. It dug up the rest of the nest to eat the comb and larvae. Skunks apparently are some tough critters with low standards of cuisine. Of course I suppose it’s possible that Yellow Jacket larvae are delicious, but I’m not about to dig them up to find out. About a week after the skunk’s visit, while I was mowing near the eradicated nest, my foot shot through a hole, uncovering the cavity where the comb had been. That would’ve been pretty painful if the wasps were still alive and kicking.
Now for some wasp facts…
The good news is that only the females can sting; however, both sexes can scare the pants off you. Personally, I can’t discern the gender of a wasp, so I think of this as a way to determine if I’m an optimist or a pessimist.
The stinger is an adaptation of the female’s egg-laying ovipositor. This explains why the gentlemen don’t have the same weaponry. The ovipositor evolved as a way of parasitic wasps laying eggs into their insect hosts. Once injected inside the victim, the larvae digest the insect, usually a caterpillar, eating it from the inside out. They then pupate in little silk cocoons on the skin of the host. Not necessarily a happy subject, but a great way to control those garden pests.
The venom that makes these stings so memorable evolved as a way for the wasps to subdue their hosts when laying eggs. Knowing how uncomfortable a Yellow Jacket sting is for a human, I can’t imagine getting blasted by one of these guys if I were a tiny insect! That has to be a life-changing moment.
Some stingers evolved with saw-toothed edges, and others are streamlined and flat. Those with the smooth surfaces can sting multiple times. Honey Bees have barbed stingers which typically, but not always, pull out of the bee. This gives you a chance to remove the stinger before all the venom is pumped in. Unfortunately for the Honey Bee, she received a death sentence when it ripped off the back end of her body.
Throwback Thursday– Female Anhinga Transparent Watercolor
This painting was from 1999-2000. Anhingas are interesting birds. At times they are really attractive, but occasionally they seem rather awkward. This female anhinga has some molting feathers on her head. They have a few nicknames including Water Turkeys and Snake-birds. When hunting for fish they swim with their bodies submerged and their heads above water, which emphasizes the serpent-like necks. I thought it would be neat to really emphasize the colorful eye area on the bird by reducing the palette for the rest of the painting. The black, white and brown feathers of the back and wing were a good challenge in transparent watercolor.
This painting was selected for the 2000 Adirondacks National Art Exhibition.
Throwback Thursday – American Toad & Dwarf Lake Iris (Transparent Watercolor)
Michigan has great diversity in its animals and plants. Some are very common and can be found in many states, while others are incredibly rare.
The American Toad is a common species. I’ve seen them my whole life. Their fantastic bumpy skin and muted colors made for a painting challenge in watercolor. To get the texture of the toad, you have preserve the white of the paper while painting around hundreds of little shapes. This is the sort of thing that might drive others crazy, but I enjoy detail work.
The Dwarf Lake Iris is an endangered plant. These beautiful, tiny plants can almost exclusively be found along the Great Lakes shoreline in the state of Michigan.