White Whale

I beak here about birds a lot; I've been keen on them since I was eight years old. At the crest of my early fandom, I kept a mental list of local species I considered must-sees based solely on how colourful they appeared in my Audobon guidebook, and how cool they were to reproduce with my Crayolas. Over time I eventually spotted and life-listed several: the American avocet, the evening grosbeak, the ruddy duck, the ruddy turnstone… the ruddy anything, really. But the blackburnian warbler – that miniscule, black-white-and-orange, canopy-dwelling white whale to my birdwatching Captain Ahab – continued to evade me until I was ready to concede ever seeing one.

It's only natural then, that three decades later – and a few years ago – I was raking the goop and sand left behind by winter from my lawn when my white whale beached itself along my sidewalk on the fringe of downtown Winnipeg. My thankless job was complete, and I headed inside to cop the reward. I returned to the front steps with a drink. A watched pot never boils, and a sought-after bird never presents itself until you say fine, I'm just gonna go ahead and sit on my stoop and enjoy this fine bottle of beer. As I drank – and I swear to you, it was just the one – a most brilliant blackburnian warbler in its Sunday-best breeding plumage descended from the elms above and promptly set about pecking at the detritus from my clean-up. Only a few metres away, in the flesh (and feather).

Right then and there, with a beer in my hand and my favourite bird on the lawn I thought: Life's a pretty sweet fruit. The end.

The Birds And The Birds

A couple of years ago some co-workers of mine engaged in a Big Year challenge, which for bird-nerds like myself is the nerdiest, birdiest, bird-nerdiest thing a bird-nerd can engage in and OK, you don't care anymore. But I joined in, and for a year in which my daughter was born and my birding time fluttered out our drafty chimney, I tallied 122 species. Many days were squandered in a zombie-like state, and I probably wouldn't have been able to differentiate a black-backed woodpecker from a three-toed woodpecker even if a rep from each species was woodpecking right into my eye sockets.

I identified 133 species during the second year of keeping track, including three I'd never spotted before (brown creeper, long-eared owl and Nashville warbler). I also saw a harmless black-backed woodpecker, pecking a tree. Three dozen or so of these birds passed directly by my office window, merely requiring a crane of my neck and a subtle shift of my duff (a Harris' sparrow ambled onto my ledge and peered in one blustery spring afternoon – I opened my file and dutifully typed Harris' sparrow). I'm sure I've mentioned before that I work in a marsh – otherwise my annual list would consist of 1) pigeon, 2) house sparrow and 3) Toucan Sam.

These types of numbers wouldn't impress the hardcore, or even above-average birdwatcher. I'm no Claes-Göran Cederlund. I can't tell my thrushes apart, let alone my confusing fall warblers. And hawks? Empidonax flycatchers? Forget about it/them. But I'm keeping a log once more this year. It always starts off tremendously slow, when it's just us and the resident hard-asses and crazy-asses holding court until spring when the migrants return. I've listed 11 species this month, and that likely won't change until the snow and ice begin to ebb. A Northern hawk owl has been the lone standout so far, and that was actually pretty cool.

262: Drawing The Shades

Kerry and I bought ourselves an introductory class in letterpress and bookbinding techniques at Winnipeg's Martha Street Studio for Christmas. The sessions began later in January, just wrapping up last week. It was an invaluable experience for myself – I've always wanted to plant my butt at Martha Street and get dirty doing something decidedly un-digital. That it was something the two of us could share made it all the more sweet. The place kicks ass.

The basic bookbinding stitch techniques we learned bent my brain into a pretzel – always a sure sign that I'm learning something. I'm now unashamed to admit I had never needle-and-stringed anything before, beyond coasting through one term of a junior high home-ec class on charm and procrastination. Though I didn't exactly master the skill, I can at least be a tiny bit pro about it now and say hey, the stab stitch is my favourite stitch.

I was more enamoured with using the ink, chase, quoins and other old-timey tools of my trade with the presses. Again, all very basic stuff in this class – which was ideal. Scrounging through the studio's trays of type I found a face I liked, and set to work making these flash-cards – for lack of a better word – to underline yet-to-be-created illustrations I'd create to hopefully match. These pieces eventually became a quartet of simple, geometric – and above all, hand-made – cards featuring two-toned songbirds, shaded in brown and black for Illustration Friday's current theme of shades.

No computers were consulted/harmed/touched/even thought about, in the creation of these pieces.

258: "I Want To Draw A Bird."

So, when I really want to draw something – and know at the end of it all I want to be happy, I draw a bird. Anyone who's visited here in the past eight years knows this by now. Writers are told to write what they know; illustrators, I'm not sure if they live by this creed or not. Lots do, I'm sure – really good ones don't have to care. I do. I started this site all those years ago to venture forth and see if I had a style. Or could develop a style. And as I drew and drew and struggled and tried different things, I came to the realization it was this, this technique all wrapped up and on display in single drawing of an evening grosbeak. My style has found me, rather than the other way around.

Not to say this drawing is any sort of revelation. It's not. I knew I hadn't genuinely drawn something for quite awhile (as is often the case). When this happens, and I want to make sure I still 'have it', or a semblance of 'it', I draw a bird. It comes to me often like a craving (or a nagging): I want a brownie. I want to get out of the city. I want to draw a bird.

And I get to work drawing the bird. I pencil-sketch it, so lightly you'd think I was confident enough to go straight to pen and ink. I draw a basic framework with a thin-nibbed pen. Go over the more integral lines with a thicker pen, and again with a chisel-tip pen. A patchwork of short strokes in small fan shapes, over and over, and over again, for feathers and texture. Finally, a go-around with a brush pen, to rid the thing a bit of its careful, calculated feel and add some spontaneity. Big, brush-penned needles to cover for my disinterest in adding feet (yes, even with this amount of detail there is laziness peeking through). Then, I scan and I colour.

I've also noticed over time that many of the birds I particularly enjoy – and enjoy drawing – share similar characteristics, textures and tonal ranges. That might be the designer in me talking, but I made this Kuler-style chart anyways, and realized it was the case.

254: Felt Love

Kerry recently needle-felted these four birds.

 

I have no idea where they're headed next.

 

But I'm sure they'll land in the hands of loving recipients.

 

I'm just happy I had the chance to photograph them; give myself something constructive to do other than stare slack-jawed in amazement.

237: The Tanager

So, the other day I was in the cafeteria lineup at work next to our resident naturalist (and all-around bird expert, who also leads Friday morning songbird banding, for which my camera and I are most grateful).

In typical bird-nerd fashion, I asked her where I could go in the area to improve my odds of spotting a scarlet tanager, one of the most vibrant and colourful songbirds around these parts. Since my early childhood days of bird geekdom, I've still only seen them in field guides.

She told me, essentially, what I already knew ­ tanagers like deep forest and high tree canopy, largely away from prying eyes.

But it got me to remembering my apartment-dwelling days. I spent upwards of four years in a fourth-floor suite overlooking a city park through the canopies of huge boulevard elms. And every May for a few short weeks, the treetops outside my windows would be filled with brilliant and wonderful little birds passing though during spring migration. Warblers, thrushes, kinglets and thrashers; from street level I'd have had zero idea they were even up there. Probably, much like that elusive scarlet tanager.

I created this digital illustration in homage of my search. I'm often hard-pressed not to look at a big fat tree and think of what's up there, out of sight in the leaves. But they're obviously there. The field guides say so.

This is almost an entirely digital concoction. The bird and leaves are scanned outlines, vectorized in Illustrator. The tree itself was originally a high-contrast silhouetted photo, inverted and simplified. The background is a tinkered-with scan of faux-wood panel. The leaves were repeated in an analogous array of greens, rotated and bunched for copy-and-paste sessions in Photoshop. For a closer look at the overall piece, you can click here.

236: Four Month Check-In

It's hard to believe I'm now a third of the way through my photo-a-day challenge. And this past month has been exemplary of the highs and lows while conducting such a venture. There's the obligatory days where you want nothing whatsoever to do with the project. Days where an image falls in your lap. Days where there's even too much to choose from when boiling down to a single submission. This past month in particular, saw the arrival of my new camera (and replacement macro lens a week later), spells of brilliant and terrible weather and an extremely photogenic trip away to New York City.


It's ironic then, that in choosing my favourite snap from the past 30 days, I find myself not particularly drawn to any one shot. But in selecting this portrait of a savannah sparrow, I realized one camera-friendly reason why I love this time of year – bird-banding mornings at work. And though I was told the brightly-coloured warblers, ever the stars of these sessions, overflew the area this year, capturing a wonderfully-textured bird in the hand like this chap is still worth the time and effort.

As always, check my 365 progress as the set grows and grows, here – or view it slideshow-style, here.

230: Screech

For the past couple of weeks I have been scoping out a certain tree in the neighbourhood, as it was rumoured to be harbouring a screech owl. Friends of Kerry's had spotted it on more than one occasion in a notch of a grizzled tree about two kilometres from our house, but were reluctant to disclose the exact location. Owl hogs.

Luckily, I was able to recognize the tree from the photo they showed. We found it during our frosty walk a couple of weekends ago, but the owl wasn't included. Two more visits by bike this past weekend were equally fruitless, though the ride – my first of the season – was muddy, filthy and tons of fun. Yesterday though, I struck paydirt, and the owl and I had a decent 10-minute shoot before direct sunlight disappeared. It seemed half-asleep, but tracked me with a mean stinkeye (below) as I navigated around with the camera.


I am hoping this is the little fellow's home and not just a hangout; it looks more than suitable. It would be great if I could track its progress over the summer.

229: Subterranean Homesick Owls

Illustration Friday's current theme of subterranean – very specific, which I like – allows an opportunity to display wares from a weekend spree of woodcut-based monoprints.


In January, a friend offered me a couple of small blocks of particle-board and some cutting tools to try my hand at carving, something I hadn't really done since high school (on linoleum, I think we all did this in high school). After a few sessions of trial and error, I carved myself a nice little cut of a burrowing owl (above).


Actual printing went down on Sunday; about a dozen or so decent copies (above) run off on a small but effective homemade press at my friend's place. These I am quite proud of.


For Illustration Friday's purposes I scanned one of the black-ink prints (above) to further the piece digitally, though I hoped to retain the print's sense of hand-craftedness. Burrowing owls are unique among the owl set for nesting in abandoned prairie-dog dens, among other subterranean abodes, and the stark, confined nature of these prints suited an idea I had in mind. Where the concept – and this write-up – takes an odd turn is in the piece's source of inspiration. Subterranean, for some reason or another, made me recall the mining sequence about midway through Dance, a two-minute animated National Film Board vignette that used to fill space on CBC when I was a kid (any Canadian worth his toque should recognize this tune).

Click here, to view the illustration larger (and on black).

226: Portrait Of A Metal Duck

A culmination of the past two Monday night Creative Nights – last week: drawing, this week: colouring/styling – this drawing enabled me to get the pens out and work on some hatch-based texturing. This is a roughly one-foot-high welded metal duck sculpture sent to Kerry and I as a gift some time ago, which I situated at my new drawing desk last week and treated as a still life sketching subject; the sketch itself ended up almost actual size, resulting in a pair of stitched-together scans to make the final image in preparation for finishing up tonight. No theme, no reason, just drawn for quacks and giggles. A larger version, with a look at some of the detail, can be viewed here.

221: Small Wilderness

This is my submission for Illustration Friday's theme of wilderness. The word conjures up images of vastness and scope. True, the wilderness is big. But step inside it, and you'll see it can also be quite small.

I love the wilderness, and I'm most grateful that I live in a place where true wilderness is a stone's throw away. I realize a great many people in the world don't have the ability to say that. The wilderness – and all that is in it – continues to be my number one source of inspiration; anyone skimming through this blog will notice this. I couldn't have come up with a more inviting theme for Illustration Friday.

I'm still dickering around with my woodblock carving, and I don't want it to seem that I have nothing to show for Monday night Creative Night. I hope to display my wares someday very soon. For now, you can click here to see this sketch in greater detail.

219: I've Come Undone

It took my friend Amy's Illustration Friday theme suggestion of undone to pop up in my email yesterday to realize a) I haven't completed an IF assignment in weeks, and b) I still have a whole wadge of incomplete MayDay illustrations from last spring that I never expounded on. Combined, this is the reason for the tubes-unclogging stream of sketchery you just scrolled through to at last reach this paragraph of explanation.

These are all unfinished (undone) works from the once-a-day creativity marathon my wife and I went through earlier this year (me, drawing; she, writing) – sketches dating from the first to final day of May. A select handful of other pieces from this adventure passed lovingly and thoughtfully through digital post-production to show up here since then (click here to see the results). But not this undone crew, who, once June arrived, did not see the light of day again – until now. The year is almost through, and, nuts to Photoshop, they need airing out.

Click on these links to see any of them larger. They are, from top to bottom: cowboy singer/troubador Pop Wagner, a vulturine guineafowl from the Assiniboine Park Zoo, my sister's dog Kayla, an unexplainable pen-and-watercolour skeletal bird of some sort, a big fat prairiedog and a toucanet (both from the zoo as well).

218: The Brown Owl

This owl I drew in the spring as part of my May sketching spell, but I spent some time tinkering this past week to add colour and texture (and also performing bits of digital surgery, moving the bird's right foot inwards and adjusting a previously-awkward right wing). The original sketch was drawn entirely with a black brush pen. All told, done for hoots and giggles, nothing more.

The verse comes from the poem The Great Brown Owl, by Jane Euphemia Browne.

209: I Doodled...Again

This past week, I enlisted in another doodle swap, an insider circuit of mostly-American graphic designers partaking in the ever-popular hobby of creating artist trading cards (ATCs, for hipsters in the know) – 2.5"-by-3.5" non-digital artworks mailed back and forth between game participants. My first-ever swap was documented earlier in the year.

This time, I ditched the randomness and stuck to a theme – that of, well, birds with glasses. Six of the even dozen I created are here; the full set can be viewed on my Flickr photostream. These pieces were all sketched lightly in pencil on pre-cut Strathmore watercolour cards, overlaid with light, one-tone washes, then inked up nice with both fine-nib and calligraphic-nib pens. Shadows were then quickly accented with a light grey marker. All told, each entry took between 15-25 minutes to complete.

205: Magnify This

This doodle represents my personal take on Illustration Friday's current theme of magnify, as well as a sneak peek of another stress-free artistic venture I took on to see me through the fading days of summer.

Loosely drawn first in pencil, these birdies were afforded the quickest-of-quick rose red watercolour washes before being inked with .01-nib and calligraphic pens.

I'm not sure what all else to add – except I have a lot of material piled up and ready to display in the near future. Please stand by.

196: Drifting In And Out Of Snow

It's funny (to me anyways) that at the moment summer finally hits my home town – and hits, big-time – illustrative thoughts turn to such cold imagery. But when you come from a place that can conceivably get snow during parts or all of 10 of 12 months in a calendar year, the white stuff can drift into your consciousness quite easily. To wit, to hoot: this owl – sleeping under a blanket of drifted snow.

And since it's too hot to go into further detail, I will insist only upon viewing this link where you can see the piece in its more feathery, detailed glory.

The original line-work was drawn with a Pigma brush pen.

192: Warblers vs. Swallows

Clockwise, from top left: common yellowthroat, barn swallow, yellow warbler, tree swallow.

When I bought my macro lens last fall, I was excited about the prospect of using it at the weekly spring/summer bird banding sessions where I work. This past Friday they were netting little birds left and right, and were a bit too busy for me to get in too close. Even still, I left with a good collection of photos and reference material for drawings or other work. I'll probably attend a few more times, before summer comes and many of the rarer, more colourful catches move further north to nest.

I have deep respect for pro nature photographers, and their unending patience ­ especially for these tiny songbirds. These birds were all (temporarily) captive, held either by the feet or in harmless (trust me) fist-grips, and yet they still fluttered, juked and shook in and out of focus.

189: True To My Word, Part One

It's been eight May days, and I have drawn eight times – tonight, aided by three glasses of red wine, I drew a red squirrel from a photo taken during our 2007 road trip around the Great Lakes. And wine goggles be damned, it's not that bad. But just to prove I've been hard at it, here's a sampling: my May 2 submission, a brown- and black-ink brush pen sketch of Pepper the saw-whet owl, drawn on some graph paper. This took about 20 minutes.

I've been making good use of the brush pens. The black one in particular is beginning to die, and the increasing dryness of it is providing a nice effect.

186: I Doodled

A couple of months ago or so, my Alabamanian friend Mary devised a simple enough scheme to exchange small pieces of art through a small doodle swap. Twenty or so folks joined in, and were divided into a pair of groups who exchanged addresses and were given a send-out deadline in mid-April. And nice for me, since in a few weeks these things will begin randomly dropping in my mailbox – if all goes according to plan – on ten separate occasions.

Some folks, I believe, are theming their cards; me, I went straight to the heart of doodling and created ten individual scribbles with little or no link to one another. Some were über-quick, some I spent more than a handful of minutes on. A couple I even tore up and started over (going against everything the doodle stands for). I used a scrap of brilliant orange posterboard, littered with X-acto scratches from its previous life as a cutting surface for old Howiezines. I used two pens – one ultra-thin and a thick calligraphic nib – and a brown-ink brush pen, with bits of pencil, white watercolour paint and blue ball-point thrown in for good measure. I rubber-banded the lot and let them bang around in my backpack a week or so to erode them a touch. And as a bonus, on the backs of the cards I pasted equally-random photographs.

Shown above are four of the total ten. I'm not divulging who they were sent to, nor for the moment offering a closer look until the swap is complete – keep pants on.

185: Pepper!

Last week's grouchiness melted immediately at the sight of Pepper, on display at a local birdfeed and supply store as part of a fundraiser for a local owl-related charity.

On a hot tip from friend Steph, Kerry, my dad and I headed to see some hot live owls, originally slated to include a long-eared owl and a burrowing owl, which I was very excited to see up close (rare as they are). Instead of the burrowing owl though, there was Pepper – a one-year-old northern saw-whet owl (Aegolius acadicus).

I have never seen a saw-whet owl – common enough as they are here in the wild – though I've heard plenty during my annual volunteer stint as part of a local springtime nocturnal owl survey. But they happen to be my favourite bird. In the whole. Wide. World. As such, Pepper merely had to bat his big Bat-Boy eyes and everything seemed suddenly alright again.

No disrespect to Nemo (above, top left and bottom right), a long-eared owl also in attendance – you were OK, too. But please view some close-ups of Pepper here, and here.