Why Don't You Make Notecards With Your Paintings on Them?

I have been asked this question an estimated 1,072 times over a 38-year career as an illustrator. I guess the proximate answer is that it costs money to do that, and career illustrators don't tend to have a lot of money. Now that I've segued into writing and illustrating my own work, not much has changed. Still no capital to do anything with, though I dream. For years I've watched the marvelous Dutch artist Marjolein Bastin flourish, selling cards featuring European songbirds to the American market. Good for her. She does lovely work. But part of me always wondered why that couldn't be me. Wouldn't Americans prefer cards featuring birds they know? Why have a European blue tit when you could have an eastern bluebird?

So when the well-respected New York stationery company, Galison, approached me last year to ask if they could make notecards with my paintings on them, it didn't take long for me to say Hell Yeah!!

Paint four of my favorite birds (I got to pick!) in seasonal settings for high-quality notecards that you can send through the U.S. Postal Service to surprise someone with a piece of Real Mail?

With the backs decorated with my sketches and botanical studies? 

And four designs, four of each, for a total of 16 cards with 17 pretty envelopes, and all of that in a sturdy keepsake box with magnetic closure?

 Oh yes yes yes! I was on it like Bluebonnet. 

Sketches and mockups flew back and forth (electronically) between Whipple and New York City. Without meaning to, I totally grossed out my contact at Galison with this photo of my desk full of reference material. She said she couldn't look at this picture. Well, I don't make this stuff up. Gotta get it somewhere. Detached wings from roadkills, study skins, real sumac in a vase. Real reference material means accurate paintings. That's how it's done at Indigo Hill Arts, where we take bird painting seriously.

The finished flicker in staghorn sumac. A painting I've always wanted to do, since I've seen this scene in nature several times. Maybe not quite this colorfully, but a flicker in sumac is a fine, fine sight. Perhaps North America's most ornate bird, and one I love very much. 

Though cardinals were suggested, I decided the winter image had to be cedar waxwings in mountain ash. Cardinals have been done, and done, and done. I've raised three waxwing babies and I love their rollicking sense of fun. The best part, after painting those tiny red tips on the flight feathers? Taking a toothbrush, dipping it in Chinese white, and flicking it all over the finished painting. Snow!

 Spring would feature one of my favorite warblers, the Canada. See, I got to pick!  I'd put him, fanning his tail, about to launch after an insect, in blooming mountain laurel, because that's where I love them best. What a gas to paint the spectacles and necklace on this magnificent little bird, then top it all off with the candy cake decorations of mountain laurel buds and blossoms.

And Galison wanted the cover painting from The Bluebird Effect for the summer piece. Fine with me! Male eastern bluebird with chicory, a little yellow vetch and wild rose--doesn't get a lot summerier than that. Right about now, in fact.

The bluebird would go on the cover of the keepsake box. It's a really nice heavy box, and the magnetic lid closes with a satisfying car-door thunk.

Throughout, my handwriting and sketches. I even wrote the copy on the back of the cards. It all feels very personal, like pages torn from one of my sketchbooks. I loved the whole experience of being involved in creating these cards. Thank you, Juanita! Thank you, Galison! Thank you, Russell Galen, for your help in negotiations!

So. You want 'em yet? I got 'em! Thanks to my fabulous Web Witch, KK, I've got a little purple card-ordering button on the right sidebar of this blog, and on

juliezickefoose.com's home page

 or you can just

click here

to find out more and order

 I'll wrap 'em up and get them to you via the U.S. Postal Service! 

If these do well, I'd love to do more. More birds, then flowers, insects, mammals, reptiles...the sky's the limit.

On Quiet Waters

One good outing in a boat can be absolute magic for the soul. Forget chicken soup. I need the sound of trickling water under a canoe hull, the gentle rock of a boat on calm water.

A couple weeks ago, we mounted an expotition to North Bend State Park, not far over the West Virginia International Boundary with Ohio. About nine years ago, a dam went in, making a long, meandering flooded lake with lots of fascinating elbows and appendices to explore.

David and Mary Jane, Chet Baker's West Virginia parents, alerted us to this place, and all the birds they'd found nesting there made us anxious to explore it. So they brought their huge aluminum canoe, and graciously took our kids in it, while Bill and I zooped around in our one-man canoes.

Get a load of these reflections.

It was immediately clear to us as birdwatchers that we were entering a gallery of cavity-nesting birds the likes of which we'd never experienced.

For the flooded trees all died at the same time, and this made for easy excavation by flickers, red-bellied, hairy and downy woodpeckers.

Flickers, in fact, were going nuts all around us, courting and fighting. These two males engaged in some terrific stunts and dances, vying for a single female. See their black malar marks, or "moustaches?" Those small black dashes on the side of their faces (not the breast crescent; both sexes sport that) mean they're boys.

The males kept engaging each other, approaching, posturing with bills erect. There was a whole lot of woika woika woika-ing going on.

The female flicker's the top bird in this photo. 

Very noisy and amusing, they were.  What a treat to see flickers breeding--outnumbering the starlings, which compete for the cavities the woodpeckers dig. This is one of North America's most ornate birds. All the spots and dashes of jet black on warm brown plumage--they wouldn't really need the golden underwings and tail, or the white rump, or the gray toupee, or the little vee of scarlet on the nape...but flickers have it all.

Sometimes when I see a flicker on the ground I'm reminded of Africa's beautiful hoopoe, which is why I sometimes call flickers the American hoopoe. But usually only to myself or to Bill, because most people have no idea why I'm calling a flicker a hoopoe.

Good grief, they were spectacular. I love this photo--it captures the crazy antics we witnessed as the three birds chased and swirled above the mirrored water. Yes, that's gold in the spread wing of the lower bird. Oh, for a bigger lens, better light, closer approach. But you get the idea.

But flickers weren't the only woodpeckers nesting in the flooded forest of North Bend State Park. There were red-bellied, hairy and downy, pileated too. And then there was the most beautiful woodpecker of all...Bill's totem bird. 

The place is absolutely lousy with red-headed woodpeckers. I hope you're swooning, because we sure were. Red-headed woodpeckers are durn rare any more. Why the loveliest woodpecker must be our rarest...sigh.

More of these red, white and jet beauties anon.

Sumac-A Wildlife Survival Food

I love to capture images of birds at the feeder, but a hundred times more satisfying are images of birds eating what they're supposed to eat--the native seeds and fruits that abound in our yard, fields and forest. It's hard to get close enough with a 300 mm. lens without scaring the bird, so my pictures are often taken through the window of my big, heated, supremely comfortable blind: my house.
American goldfinches and pine siskins are always working on the seeds of the gray birches we've planted all over the yard. What they knock to the snow, the juncos, tree sparrows and field sparrows clean up.

Sumac rings all our meadows--five species in all. Here, a red-bellied woodpecker works on the fruits.
Turning about, he shows the origin of his seeming misnomer. I love this shot.


To me, the northern flicker is so impossibly beautiful that I can hardly believe it exists. I love, love, love to paint flickers. There's so much to do! This is a male, with a black moustache mark.

Sumac is a good food for wildlife because there's nothing in it that spoils or ferments, and it stays fresh from when it first ripens in October until at least May. It's always available, kind of the way All-Bran is always around. It may not be your first choice, but it's food.

As I shot the flicker, I was wishing hard that I was closer, that it wasn't so gray out...and yet the images have a simple beauty that I love.

Who thought up all those markings? They are perfect. The bird is cryptic from above, spectacular from below--good for a ground-feeder. Flickers huddle on the ground, digging for ants in the summer, and they're all but invisible to predators with those brown-barred backs.

Yet when they wish to make a splash they've got all the badges and bling they need.


Ahh. That's the one. I must paint it someday.

Beautiful Woodpeckers

Among my favorite birds to paint are woodpeckers. I love their markings, their colors, their bold architecture, and most of all their head and bill shapes. They seem to draw themselves.

Who’s this, hitching up the side of the studio birch?What else could it be?? A juvenile female yellow-bellied sapsucker. She’s got a bindhi of ruby on her forehead, but her throat will stay white.She’s been punishing my poor birch tree, drilling row after row of sap holes. It’s a wonder the thing doesn’t just break in half. What a mess!

I had to marvel at the perfection of her camouflage. Could she blend in any better with the wounds she’s wrought on the birch trunk? Even her eye looks like a sap hole.She’s not the only birch torturer, though. The red-breasted nuthatches are using sapsucker wells as a place to bash their sunflower seeds until the hulls come off. I can almost hear the birch saying ow ow ow ow. Sick trees give more sap, and the sapsuckers know that. I read a study calling them “victim trees.” The more woodpeckers bang on them, the more high-quality sap they give, until one fine day they just up and croak. Nice.Does anyone NOT love flickers? I remember getting pretty annoyed with them when I was a kid growing up in Richmond, Virginia, the way they drilled on the downspout early on summer mornings when I was still trying to get my 12 hours of shuteye. Oh, how I wish they were still that common. And how I wish I could still sleep until 1 PM.

This little gal seemed to want to be photographed from every angle.

Be sure to get my red chevron.And my crescent chest.
Ahh, flickers. How lucky are we to have such an ornate and lovely woodpecker still among our avifauna.