Painting the Prairie

 I always figured I'd be a career illustrator. And I was, for a long time. I did my first illustration for pay as a freshman in college, and slowly built a clientele from 1976 onward. By around 1988, I was chugging along doing commissioned watercolors at (gulp) $50 to $75 apiece. I wonder where some of those are now. Lots of book and magazine illustration; some packaging art; even got some drawings into The New Yorker.  I enjoyed it all. 

Around 2004, I decided that it was time to write and illustrate my own books. If I kept taking illustration jobs, I'd never be able to create a book of my own. Bill helped me with that, so much. "Just do a compilation of stuff you've already written! Your columns would make a great book!" Well, I had years of columns from the Backyard Bird Newsletter, which was sent out to a smattering of Bird Watcher's Digest's subscribers in the off months when the magazine wasn't coming out (it was a bimonthly, six issues a year). And they were pretty good--I was writing with a lot of heart and fire at that point. So they'd been published, but not to a wide audience, and they needed to be put together in a book. Bill was so right: it was a good, accessible, nonthreatening way to put my first book together. And I had the best little partner helping me along then. That boy could sell books.

Chet Baker, May 2006, age 3, with Mether's First Book.

Letters from Eden came out in 2006, with a truly ridiculous number of paintings and sketches inside. I really loved illustrating my own writing, and decided to do that from then on. There followed The Bluebird Effect in 2012, and Baby Birds in 2016. Saving Jemima came in 2019. After saying yes to almost every job that had come down the pike since 1976, it felt weird to turn down jobs, but I had to if I was going to finish my books. It was while I was writing The Bluebird Effect that I also realized that daily blogging was a huge block to my productivity, so I cooled it a bit on the frequency of my posts. Every day? Really? What was I thinking??

As I think about it, painting commissioned watercolors is in many ways a return to my old illustration days, when I enjoyed the challenge of creating a work of art with specific elements requested by the client. Some are very loose (perhaps just giving me the species of bird and leaving the setting up to my discretion), but most are pretty exacting and specific. People want a bird in a specific place, and sometimes it goes farther than that. The painting I'll show you now is one of the most exacting I've done, but I loved every minute of creating it. It presented more than an ordinary challenge.

This client is an ornithologist who has studied phoebes for much of his career. He wanted a painting of a Say's phoebe in the Smoky Hills of Kansas. This is a region known for distinctive chalk bluffs which rise up out of the ancient prairie like buildings. It's also known for its limestone fenceposts (lacking trees, I suppose, they made them out of the material at hand). My client wanted those in the painting. And native sunflowers, and yucca (!). He wanted the phoebe to be large in the frame. That would be the biggest challenge of all--to convincingly place a very small bird in a limitless landscape. 

  That is, in fact, the challenge that I face over and over as a bird painter. If someone likes a bird enough to request a painting of it in a specific place, they want to see the bird in detail. But how do I convey the vastness of the Kansas prairie, while placing a 7" bird in it right up close? Much to think about.

I don't have photos of my compositional phase, which is a lot of scribbles in soft pencil on large paper.

I shot some drafts to the client and got approval and tweaks, too. One of the things that became abundantly clear was that I couldn't use a limestone fencepost as a perch, because the post was too huge in relation to the bird. To be true, the post would have to be maybe twice the size it is in this draft composition, which was unacceptable to my eye. So I decided to put the bird on Maximilian sunflowers, which are in much better scale to its size.

The post is probably 1/4 the size it needs to be here in relation to the bird, and even that is getting a bit too big for the composition. Let's go to Plan B, push the posts into the middle distance, and put flowers up front instead.

Then I painted the most important thing: a half-sized study of the painting which would be my guide for executing the real thing. I just Xeroxed my sketch onto some watercolor paper, stretched the paper and painted it as quickly and messily as I could. In the process, I figured out what to do and what not to do; what to paint first and how to handle a very complex and (to be honest) rather vexing foregound.

I traced the composition onto a large sheet of watercolor paper (Winsor & Newton), then stretched the wet paper on a board using packing tape on the edges.

When it dried, I applied masking film and masking fluid around its edges to the parts I wanted to paint last. Then I could paint the landscape freely over those masked parts, knowing I could peel the mask off and have nice white paper to work on when the landscape was done. You can see here that the sunflowers and bird are masked off as a chunk. Same for the chalk bluff in the middle distance, and the white limestone fenceposts staggered across the prairie.

I learn a lot by looking at my colleagues' work, and I decided to try a technique the Barry Van Dusen explains in his magnificent book, Finding Sanctuary, which was published by the Massachusetts Audubon Society and Puritan Press.

If you're curious, here's my post about Barry's work, and a guest post from Barry himself.

https://juliezickefoose.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-most-beautiful-book-i-own.html

If you click that link you probably won't come back to see my stuff! But I hope you do.

Anyway, Barry mixes a neutral tint (I think it's ultramarine, burnt sienna and ultramarine violet) and paints the shadows in his paintings before adding any color. This is completely different from the way I usually work, but I wanted to try it here. I'm self-taught, and never learned the proper way to paint.

Here I go, tickling in those shadows.

So far, so good. I marched the shadows up to the middle ground. I was so excited to see how it would look with the prairie greens over the tinted shadows!

Well, that's cool! Here's a little close-up of the far-out ridges. I love those shadow colors of distant hills.

Something about having the shadows already in made it less scary to handle these wide-open spaces.

My work always gets harder, the closer to the foreground I get. 

Grasses are my nemesis. Making them look realistic without getting too regular and fussy always stretches me to the limit. I look at Cindy House's pastel paintings and just cannot believe how well she handles grass. She ENJOYS painting grass. There's So Much Grass here. I knew, because its leaves were so delicate and thin, that I would be unable to mask out the yucca plant in the right foregound, so I painstakingly painted it in opaque gouache over the grassy foreground.

Only when I had the foreground grasses under control would I allow myself to start on the Maximilian sunflowers and chalk bluff. I peeled off the masking film and rubbed the dried masking fluid away with my fingers and a soft white eraser.

Because it was September, I could go out and cut Maximilian sunflowers on my very own prairie patch and paint it from life! That was awesome.

Oh look! A song sparrow. I think I know him...

The sunflowers brought a needed touch of green to a rather sere landscape. I did not want to do a big green painting. Greens can get away from you. So I kept them very dialed back.

Here come the sunflowers!  I still have the limestone fenceposts masked out here. 

I got absorbed in the fenceposts and painted the chalk bluff, too, before I remembered to take another shot.

One of the ways you say, "It's sunny" is to paint deep sharp shadows on things like bluffs and fenceposts. I could feel the light pouring through, and the sky wasn't even in yet. 

I couldn't wait to paint the sky! All the shadows were in--now I need a sky that will convince you it's sunny out!

But first the Say's phoebe--such a subtly beautiful bird it is. I painted a fresh immature with cinnamon wingbars and a strong cinnamon wash below.

All in but its black tail!

It's sky time, y'all. No progress photos on the sky--that happens too fast to take pictures, and all wet on wet! I am particularly pleased with the perspective of the clouds going off in the distance, and the sunny space they create in the landscape beneath. They're blurry, which for me evokes the prairie wind, which never stops. The sunflowers are tossing in that wind.

I didn't want to pack this one up to send. Sometimes I wish I could keep my paintings. But off it went, to Kansas, where it truly belongs.

Say's Phoebe in the Smoky Hills, Kansas.  Private Commission, October 2021 Watercolor, 14" x 18"

A Real Simple Recommendation

Dear readers,

  My alert sister-in-law Laura brought to my attention that Real Simple Magazine is looking for a coffee table book to feature in its August issue. She knew just the book to recommend. Why, so do I. Now, it would be cheesy for me to enter the fray, recommending my own book. But you?
                                     My putting you up to it wouldn't be cheesy at all, would it?

If you frequent Facebook (and who doesn't, these days?) and you feel like giving The Bluebird Effect a boost, or even its little sister Letters from Eden, and you do actually keep them on your coffee table because you love leafing through them, please tell Real Simple that. Here's the link to Real Simple's Facebook request for book recommendations.

Thank you so much!  Let's give this book wings!

And while I'm at it:

BOSTON AREA ZICK ALERT!!

On Saturday, April 21 at 10 AM, I'll give a talk on my experiences raising baby birds at the Mass Audubon Drumlin Farm Sanctuary in Lincoln, MA.  It's at 208 S. Great Rd,  and the contact phone number is (781) 259-2200. We'll have a field trip afterward, walking Drumlin Farm's bluebird trail. There will also be a book signing, so if you haven't got your copy yet, come get one signed in person.


For Boston area folks, I'll be on the Emily Rooney show, interviewed by Kara Miller, on WGBH sometime around 12:30 pm Thursday, April 19, so tune in your radios.


And Joe Viglione will interview me on Visual Radio (that's TV, actually), at 1:30 on Friday, April 20 in Winchester, MA. 


Back to packing and figuring out what to do with the bats and turtles and greenhouse while I'm away. Oh, Bill.....

The Bluebird Effect Arrives!!!

 Friday, January 13 was a LUCKY DAY for us at Indigo  Hill. A very special box arrived via a hollow-eyed UPS deliveryman who had fought his way over the newly poured skating rink that is our road and driveway. (He left two other boxes with us, meant for neighbors further down our road, not wanting to push his luck).

Chet Baker was immediately intrigued and offered, in his own helpful and forthright way, to open the box for me. It was a continuation of Christmas as far as Chet was concerned. He got very good at chewing open boxes at Christmastime.

 You do not need an X-acto knife, Mether. I have my teefs.

 When his teeth failed to cut the tape, he began a rapid digging motion that sooner or later would have hit pay dirt.

Luckily Bill of the Birds had my camera set to video. Chet's attention is a bit divided between the mystery box and a stack of strawberry pancakes on the kitchen table. It was a snow day and the kids were enjoying their second round. Cute doggeh vid alert! Oh noes!

Inside the box were the first two copies of my new book,

  The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds with Common Birds.  

Yep, that says "Foreword by Scott Weidensaul." Squeeee! Scott has a brand new book , The First Frontier, coming out from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (yaaaay!)  at the same time!

My editor, Lisa White, explained that while these two copies of The Bluebird Effect were sent by air from the overseas printer, the rest are probably on a container ship (imagine!) making a slow crossing of the Pacific Ocean, and from landfall on the West Coast being borne by truck to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's warehouses. Release date (shipment from the warehouse) is February 20, which will translate into early March availability and shipment from my studio. So close! the time will fly. I've been busy taking pre-orders and I expect that to only pick up as the time gets nearer. I gotta say, the cash flow is much needed and welcome. Thank you!

I absolutely couldn't believe I was holding it in my hands. But the weight of it is very real--just an ounce short of TWO AND A HALF POUNDS of brand new book. And an inch thick, which doesn't sound all that thick, but it is a brick in the hands.

You most def would want to avoid dropping it on your foot. That would hurt, and perhaps bust something.

It has the most delicious sweet-corn yellow pebbly cloth-covered boards, spring green endpapers, a strong tight cloth binding, and an engraved spine. It has a dust cover that feels like textured watercolor paper.  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt pulled out every last stop to make this book exceed even my extravagant vision for it. And I am deeply grateful for that. Amazed and grateful, and awestruck. Thank you Lisa White, thank you designer Melissa Lotfy, and thank you Martha Kennedy, cover designer extraordinaire. Against their better judgement, they let me get up to my elbows and scrubble around in the design pot and for that, too, I am very grateful.

Melissa Lotfy's design is fun-loving and lavish, giving the hundreds of bits of artwork lots of space and room to breathe.

In creating the illustrations, I wrote my notes by hand, but nice and big so they could be read. (I've heard from people who had to take a magnifying glass to Letters from Eden to read my notes. Sorry about that...I hadn't known they would go into a book when I made them).

Lookit that osprey diving through the text! Sploosh!! This is a full-sheet watercolor painting, 30" high and it reduced down to a crystalline-perfect image. I page through the book with my mouth hanging open each time.

Piping plovers skitter over the sand, running from a wave. Honestly, the watercolors look like they were painted right on the pages. The paper is beee-yoo-ti-ful, too.

I think my favorite paintings are the ones with active brush strokes and feathered washes. I knew those would probably work best for the book, so I laid on those watercolory effects. And work they do, giving the illustrations a life of their own. Some of the birds look like they're flying right off the page, they're so crisp and clean.

Somehow, Houghton handled my pencil drawings so as to capture every stray line and nuance. Gorgeous. It's a picture book; it's an art book,  310 illustrations with 80,000 words of explanation. It's a memoir about my life with birds, injured, orphaned, endangered, or otherwise in my care.

Most of the sketches were done directly from living birds, so there's springy life, an uncomplicated essence and motion, in the drawings that studio drawings lack.

There are some little departures, like this story of an injured white-throated sparrow that turned into a kind of prose poem. 

And some treasured mementos, like this hurried memory painting of a leucistic turkey vulture that flew right over our house--and that I saw again near Woodsfield, Ohio, a year later. There is a great deal of  magic in turkey vultures. I explain in this chapter how the turkey vulture came to be my totem bird. So it's not all Science Chimp stuff--there's plenty of romance, too.

Bill and I oohed and ahhed and reveled. Bill said, "I've never seen a better printing job on any book." Coming from an editor and author of dozens of books, that's high praise. I concur. And I'm picky to a fault. Just ask Lisa, Martha and Melissa!

Our kitchen, stopped in mid-griddle on a snowy, strawberry-pancake, no school, very lucky Friday the 13th. Daughter Phoebe Linnea taking these photos of us. Thanks, Phoebs.

Yes, it's finally here.  And it is more substantial, and jaw-droppingly lavish than I ever dreamt. It's going to make the most beautiful gift book!

Well, two copies are here. The rest, dodging winter seaspray somewhere on the Pacific, rocking along on a slow boat from China. But they'll be at the warehouse before you know it! And I'll order a whole mess of them to inscribe to the recipient and send out from my little studio. I've converted sweet Charlie's aviary into a framing station/shipping depot. I can feel her loving, lonely spirit every time I walk into that room.

You can click HERE to pre-order The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds with Common Birds. And if you wish to add  Letters from Eden: A Year at Home, In the Woods or Backyard Birding: Using Natural Gardening to Attract Birds, the same link works, too. There are clickable banner ads in the right sidebar of this blog, too.

 I've got boxes that will hold one, two or all three. And if you want more, I can do that, too. Ima be a busy squirtle come March!  Be sure to tell me to whom you'd like them inscribed.

Can I get a Wooo--Hoooo?!!

A Singular School

An Author Visit. I had never done an author visit to a school before. I could never have anticipated what that entailed, the months of preparation on the part of my school contacts at Clermont Northeastern Middle School in Batavia, Ohio. In order to accommodate an author, in this case for the entire day, they have call assemblies, figure out how many kids they can pack into each assembly, and in general discard any semblance of their normal schedule. Speaking to middle school students is different from speaking at nature festivals or bird club banquets. For one thing, festival goers and bird club members don't have to sit on the floor. There are other differences, too. Middle school students get a lot more excited than bird club people. And that, my friends, is a beautiful thing.

I visited Clermont Northeastern Middle School on November 7. And it was clear to me as the excitement for my visit built up that overhauling their schedule was the least of CNE's preparations. I had first received an inquiry from a gracious and lovely person named Pam Murphy, who was familiar with my work, but who retired from her position as school librarian in the year that ensued. She must have made a good case for hosting me. Library aide Sherri Newberry and science teacher Melody Newman took up Pam's torch and made sure the students were familiar with Letters from Eden. Mrs. Newberry got all fired up, made Letters a centerpiece of her library classes, and read several chapters to her students. In a unique electronic outreach, they and several other teachers took pains to familiarize their students with my blog.

Ooh. Wait a minute.

When the 5th through 8th grade students began digging into the archives of the last three years, I was extremely happy that I've taken care from the very start to keep it reasonably clean, rant-free and kid-friendly. Once a post goes up, it's up, and there it stands for anyone to read at any time. So do the comments.

Pause for other bloggers to think about whether they want 5th through 8th graders reading their blog archives...waiting for their next post...

OK, go get yourselves a glass of wine and come back. Pour me one, too. The genie is out of the bottle. I am not going back to edit old posts. I yam what I yam, as Popeye says.

Not only had the kids read much of my book and begun following my blog, but Melody Newman had spearheaded an effort to have a feeding station put up and a bird blind built overlooking the feeding station...all in time for my visit. This fact really didn't sink in on me until I walked into the blind, redolent of new plywood, and sat down to look at birds visiting the spanking-new feeders. This is not just any bird blind. It is a masterpiece, built as an Eagle Scout project by CNE alum Nick Adams. Here is Nick, with his sister Caitlin, me and Melody Newman. You'll see more of Caitlin later. This is the night before the school visit, and she doesn't know what she is about to discover. Neither do I, but we look like we're expecting something good, don't we?photo by Sherri Newberry

And here is the blind that Nick built, on weekends and evenings for "I don't know, exactly. A really long time."
photo courtesy Melody Newman and Sherri Newberry

I could live in this bird blind.The students were obviously proud and happy to have an official school bird blind. Have you ever seen a middle school with its own bird feeders and observation blind? Me, neither. The middle school I attended was an enormous, dark, windowless prison, a maze of dreadful dark halls and windowless cubicle classrooms. Did I mention that there were no windows? Every bit of vegetation had been scoured away, as if to eliminate places for prison-breakers to hide...But I digress. Shudder...

Clermont Northeastern Middle School was much, much better. It was great. Though the feeders had been up for only a week, cardinals, white-breasted nuthatches, blue jays, white-throated sparrows, white-crowned sparrows, and even a red-bellied woodpecker visited the feeding station while the students and I looked on. I was impressed at the birds' adaptability; they were probably already well-acclimated to the sight and sound of active kids, and our wiggling around in the blind didn't faze them. It was the perfect way for kids without binoculars to get close looks at wild birds on school grounds. Imagine.

It became clear to me that Mrs. Newman is the kind of person who can't help leaving a legacy behind. She cares deeply that her students truly connect with nature, and she puts that caring into action. Thanks to her, plantings around the school building were bird-friendly, fruit-bearing shrubs and trees. A beautiful pond graces school grounds, afloat with Canada geese, home to snapping turtles and minnows, because Mrs. Newman refused to allow it to be filled in for a parking lot. She and her students can be found out there with dip nets and buckets, figuring out what all lives beneath its quiet surface. A school with a pond.Is the sight and sound of Canada geese skimming in to land on a pond, a wriggly crawfish in a child's hand, the sight of a young snapping turtle surfacing to breathe, worth as much as a few extra parking spaces, a slab of hot asphalt? Mrs. Newman thinks so, and so do the CNE students. The pond is an aesthetic oasis and a place of inquiry.

But there is an even greater legacy now. Behind CNE, on its land, is a very fine stand of old timber, many trees in excess of 100 years old. Dominated by fine, straight oak and hickory trees, it is precisely the kind of stand that, in southern Ohio, might long ago have been cut and sold for lumber. How it escaped timbering this long is a wonder and a mystery. Finally, though, tough financial times and its undeniable monetary value combined to bring it onto the block. The old trees were spray-painted and marked for cutting. Melody Newman said no. And then she yelled NO!!!! long and loud, and a lot of other people yelled with her. She and her students had made a nature trail through that forest, and they meant to keep it. Were these trees, this mature forest ecosystem, worth more than their value as timber? Mrs. Newman thought so, and she'd have lain down in front of the bulldozers if she had to. She may yet have to. There is as yet no formal protection of this woodlot, no covenant to ensure that it will remain forever wooded. But for now, it is safe. Here's Mrs. Newman in her element.
Here is the outdoor classroom that Ivan Glasgow built for the school's science classes. Mrs. Newman's vision at work, again. It's in a beautiful natural amphitheatre and it has all the comfort and wonder of the woods in it.photo courtesy Melody Newman and Sherri Newberry

And it was through that beautiful forest we walked on November 3, and it was there that we found the most magical thing imaginable.
Oh. What's THAT?Next...It's a bird! It's a mouse! It's a...

I love to torture you kids.