A Painting for Sara: Part 2

I would imagine that some of you were eager for Part 2 of my watercolor step-by-step. I was, too. But then, frost. If I don't respond to the biggest events in my world, if I don't write about them, then I'm not really living in the world. So instead you got a video of morning glories gone plasticky, and the exhalation of a humid, warm greenhouse. Death and rebirth, in five minutes.  And oh my. Looking outside, there's a gigantic full moon balloon sinking on the brightening western horizon. And I notice, even by moonlight, for the first time that one of the pines we planted in 1992 has leaned over, gone all yellow overnight, and died. Life. It creeps in, demands one's attention, minute by minute. 

When we last left the painting, it looked like hell. But the foreground branches were done! Now I could turn my attention to the forest behind. At this point in the painting, I usually make a couple of paper dolls that I tape in place, so I can see what I need to do with the background to make the birds sing. These paper dolls take a matter of minutes to paint, and I sometimes wonder what my work would be like if I painted my final paintings with such speed and abandon. There's power and joy in painting on copy paper, of not caring a whit how it looks. You're just getting the information down and moving on.  Some of us do our best work on cocktail napkins. It's a no-risk, no-investment proposition.

In this bit, you can see that I've gone in and painted sunlit branches where all those ugly white slashes were. I've been careful to lay in the darks around the masked areas, so when the masking comes off I can paint brightly lit foliage and it'll stand out nicely. 

Now the tree trunks that I masked out get painted, and that gives the forest depth, to have some light trunks in the foreground, and darker ones in back. I'm noodling away at all those sunlit branches. The paper dolls in place make me happy and help me remember that when I'm done with the main meal, I still have dessert waiting! I call painting the birds "dessert." I still have the foreground ferns to deal with, but that'll be fun. You can see here that I've masked out some ferns and some random shapes in the right foreground. I made those shapes by dipping crumpled Saran wrap in masking fluid, then dabbing it on the paper. This produces a pleasing organic effect that would be nearly impossible to create on purpose. Nature is full of such random organic shapes, so a painting that imitates her should be, too.

Outside, the bonsais are at their absolute peak. I love Halloween for so many reasons, and my beautiful trees are one of them. Life again, going on, the party raging just outside the door. I've done a lot of partying this fall. So beautiful, so protracted, so satisfying.

I find The Bacon waiting at the front door like a trick-or-treater, with a ghastly memento. He wants to bury his lucky bunneh foot in the couch. Um. Sorry to disappoint you, Bacon. He brought both hind legs from a well-picked carcass he scavenged somewhere out in the meadow, and asked to bring both of them into the house. A reasonable dog request, denied by a fussy human.

I start painting the sunlit row of ferns in back, taking  washes of of bright yellow-green into the masked area. The play of light and shadow brings the painting to life. I've made a bit of a problem for myself, though, and now have to integrate this very bright line into the rest of the mass. I do this by mixing up the darks and lights in the contact zone.

Now for the ferns in the lower right corner. All that masking, painting ghostly fern shapes with masking compound, is worth it. I paint pale fronds with ease, simply running a light yellowish wash over the fern shapes I've masked out. Painting some similar ones in darker green around them adds a pleasing dimensionality. I paint loose, wet russet forest floor trash into the random shapes created with Saran wrap dipped in masking fluid. Paper dolls are off, and I'm drawing in the details of the warblers with pencil. 

In this closeup of the spruce branch, you can see the paler needles that I  masked, which lay over the darker ones I painted first. Really, painting the birds is the very least of making this painting. I could get away with a vignette, just a bird on a branch, but that's not how I roll. Sara loves Hog Island. I am determined to make her a scene that will take her back there, let her smell the hay-scented ferns over the salty tang of the ocean, even in the depths of a Buffalo winter. OK. Deep breath. Time for dessert!

Every warbler has its own yellow. Magnolia yellow is very rich, with some orange in it. 

I want to see how the green back of the female is going to work with the background. Hmm.

Black stripes help define it. It's such fun to see the black go in. Such fun to put it in!!

I take the female nearly to completion before turning to the delicious velvet-black mask and breast stripes of the male. 

It's late on the afternoon of November 6, and a shaft of sun comes in the west studio window, slamming onto the painting! Yes! Just what I was trying to paint! It's like a benediction.  I can almost smell my hay-scented ferns start to emanate their sweetness in the warm sun.

Liam comes running in to see. He and I talk a lot about light as he draws and paints with markers in the living room and I paint with watercolors in the studio. I so love these times when he and I are home and I can give him pointers on his art, and he can reciprocate with observations on mine. It feels rare and incredibly precious, and it is. We will look back on it as some of our happiest times.

Birthday Prismacolor/Copic marker spree! What a joy, to be able to walk into an art supply store with my son and swoon together at the sights and smells before us. To give him a pair of experienced eyes for his work, to help him refine his own. To encourage him to branch out to drawing objects from life, in the round. A bit scary, but he's more than up to the challenge. To have children who share my interests, and then take them farther--it's a great blessing. Phoebe's doing a lot of snorkeling in Panama, studying coral reefs at the moment. !!

It's not all coconuts and warm caressing seas in Panama, but this photo by Avery Cheng suggests it.  Let it be so. 

Elaine Shen caught Phoebe doing what she does everywhere she goes--connecting and engaging people. Little people, all the better.  Sigh. This photo just takes me apart. Evan, Southern version.

Where was I? Oh! Painting. You see the problem.

In go the stripes on the male! I call Liam in again, to see what a difference a little black makes. Whoa!

I leave the painting for a day or so to season. I know I have more work to do on the birds to round out their forms, as they're looking a bit flat.  It's good to walk away from your work now and then. It's necessary.

When I return to it a couple days later, a problem in the lower foreground leaps out at me--that hard 45 degree angle of green cutting into the spruce needle path through the ferns. That's no good. I fix that, and do some more work in the ferns around the female bird, to help her pop a bit. It's finally ready to sign. 

For Sara: Patron, Friend and Great Teacher and Spirit.

Time for another deep breath. I take a bunch of photos of the painting, pack it in foamcore and cardboard, so nobody could bend it if they tried; scribble DO NOT BEND all over the package,  drive it to the post office, and slap a lot of insurance on it, sending it Priority with tracking.  It's always a scary thing to do. And three days later I get an email with this photo of a very happy Dr. Sara Morris with her new office-brightener. Bawww!! For you, who give your students everything you've got, the pair of birds instead of one; for you, the ferns and spruces, the sea and sky, the time and extra effort--for that radiant smile.

Painting Imperial Woodpeckers-Part II

Why do I mask all those nitty pine needles, and cuss for hours trying to clean up the boo boo's that masking fluid always leaves?

Because, with enough cussing, it winds up looking cool. Realistic. Ooh! Almost time to paint the birds!! It's been a long day, and I've got more to do on the habitat first. I go into the second day of painting, still cleaning up pine needles.

Those rough scumbled edges on the trunk shadow are deliberate. I want to make sure it still looks like a painting, not a photograph. I want the paint and the process to show around the edges.

I'm excited to start the birds. I always start on the feet. They're non-threatening, fun, hard to mess up, a good place to start. I have to get in the mood to switch from habitat to birds.

Huge claws, and from what I can tell from skins, they were pale--horn-colored, perhaps-- as were the scutes on the legs and feet. I recall Nancy Tanner, widow of ivory-bill authority James Tanner, telling me that ivory-billed woodpeckers had very pale, whitish feet and claws, so I go with her advice and my hunch. 

Here she comes, emerging from the clouds. The strongly recurved crest is typical of a female imperial woodpecker. Female ivory-bills showed it too, to a lesser extent.

I try to convey how bouncy it looks in the video. I decide to paint all the blacks on the male, too. I'm guessing on eye color. I have always thought their eyes would be more white than yellow, though most artists depict them as strong golden-yellow. I tend to follow George Sutton's lead, because he painted ivory-bills from life. That's as close as I'll come to knowing the eye color of the imperial.

See how, in painting the sky wash, I've swept a little blue in where I know the white wing patch of the climbing bird will be? I knew I wanted that white patch against blue. These decisions must be made quickly. Wet washes won't wait.

Here comes the red of the male's crest.

That's why I've made him emerging from the hole--so I can put that red against the tree trunk.

Shadows on the birds, highlights in Chinese white stroked across their foreheads and shoulders...I think I'm done. Never mind the pinkish sky here--snapped late at night under incandescent and flourescent light.

The next morning, when the sun finally breaks through, I take the piece outside to photograph it with my Canon 7D. It does such a good job, handheld, that I can see the texture of the watercolor paper (140 lb. cold press Winsor-Newton) in the jpeg. And it nails the colors. Amazing color shifts occur under flourescent and incandescent light.  Pardon the progress photos--they were snapped in varying light conditions (mostly poor) and some with my iPhone. I was working so fast I could hardly stop to photograph it. When it's going well I don't stop even to eat. I keep a jar of almonds on the table and keep going.

That's how I work best--with a wicked deadline. See the painting and my review for The Wall Street Journal here.

Or, if you click on this image, you can probably read it right now.

Photo by Myra Owens, kindly scanned and sent to me. Couldn't find a Weekend WSJ in Marietta...but some hard copies are on their way as we speak. 

Painting Imperial Woodpeckers

I am excited.

photo by Myra Owens, thank you!! If you click on it, you can read it!

In their Weekend May 11-12, 2013 edition, The Wall Street Journal  published my first book review, and one of my paintings to accompany it. It's a review of Tim Gallagher's excellent book, Imperial Dreams, about his quest for the most likely extinct imperial woodpecker in the Sierra Madre Range of northern Mexico.

You can read the review at this link. 

Longtime readers know that April and May are crazy life-in-a-blender months for me and my family. To the usual mix of nature festival speaking engagements, teaching and travel, add the track meets of our two (ack!) teenagers, various banquets and ceremonies and functions. And then put spring migration and wildflowers and morels and the endless phone calls and now endless Facebook questions about baby birds and nests and what do I do with this bat/bird/injured turtle? 

All of which I answer

So I wrote this review and the editor liked it so much he wondered if I might illustrate it too? When could I get a painting to him? 

Um, third week of May?

Hm. Not soon enough. We may need to go to print earlier.

Um, first of May? (sweeping an arm across the drawing table to clear it)

Because I really, really wanted to paint this bird for this newspaper.

So I didn't fool around. I got down to deal with it. 

 Coming to the concept and drawing took a couple of days. Over and over, I watched the only photographic record of the imperial woodpecker, a video made by William Rhein in 1956. I was almost born in 1956.

I decided to paint a nesting pair. Why not? It's a fantasy, right? A what-if scenario. What if these incredible birds were still alive somewhere and breeding in the Sierra Madres? I went there to live for three days. At least in my painting. The sketch is very basic, but it's got all the information I need encoded. I know where the darks will be, how it will roll out.

I masked out the birds's heads, a bunch of Apache pine needles and branches and got busy.

Pasted that paper down and sprayed it down and threw on a sky wash. They come out how they come out. There's no going back over a wash like that.

 Ghosted in a mountain range from one of Tim Gallagher's photos. I love the purples and mauves. And laid in the suggestion of more pines behind them.

 I decided to put in a couple of big emergent pines to further darken the backdrop against the foreground needles. In the end, those foreground needles would take longer to paint (and correct) than the whole rest of the durn painting. It is ever thus. Grass, pine needles...big old pain in the butt for a watercolor painter.

You can see that I've masked the parts of the birds I don't want to get blue--their heads, backs and white wing patch on the climbing bird. And you can see the ghosted masked pine needles.
I have yet to remove the masking compound ( a rubber cement like liquid).

I put some needles overhead, too, to make it look more like what I saw in the film. 

I can't wait to get to the bark of the Apache pine. It's so fluid and colorful. So I start striping varying shades of brown with a big round brush, just moving my hand and brush freely from the elbow, running up and down the trunk.

I want sun on that trunk. And the way to get sun on the trunk is to give it deep shadow. It really starts to pop when I wash in the shadows.

If I want the pine needles to pop, I've got to bring some darks in behind them. 

Time to get down and deal with the dang needles. Ugh. I peel off the maskoid by rubbing it with my finger. It makes little plastic boogers everywhere. And then paint the white needle spaces. But most of it is cleaning up where the maskoid blobbed or didn't cover or just generally made a mess. Why do I do this? Every time?  We shall see--in the next installment.