Rawr.
Archive for the ‘Artwork’ Category
Posted on Jun - 07 - 2009
Waxwing & Robin Study
While on my way to Grass Lake early yesterday morning, I came across this Cedar Waxwing lying in the middle of the road. The back of the bird was a bit smashed up, but I keep plastic baggies and a box of latex gloves in my vehicle for such occasions (nestled beside the jar of [ Read More ]
Posted on Apr - 19 - 2009
Phoebe
We’ve reached the lull, that period of spring migration where the usual early arrivals have already settled in and we wait eagerly for the coming onslaught. I spotted a Barn Swallow wheeling overhead yesterday, decidedly early for this species. It won’t be long now. Here’s an Eastern Phoebe, found on a windy day near the [ Read More ]
Posted on Mar - 06 - 2009
Woodpecker – Completion
What? March? Really?! Time I finished up with this. I used Payne’s grey almost exclusively while building up the first three quarters of the painting. As a result, I had to fight with it a bit to warm up the lunar palette, and it remains a very cold piece. Sometimes you go too far. But [ Read More ]
Posted on Nov - 19 - 2008
Little Brown Jobs
I paint a lot of sparrows. Most avian art depicts flashier subjects — the warblers, the orioles, the hummingbirds, and other celebrities of the birding world. But I love the Emberizids and their earthen colours, and the subtle patterns of their mantles, and even their shy, skulking natures. Even if I’m awful at telling them [ Read More ]
Posted on Jul - 29 - 2008
Red-headed Woodpecker
A quick painting of that gorgeous Pelee inhabitant. Mixed media.
Posted on Jul - 20 - 2008
American Redstart
Nearly a year he’s sat there on the easel in my living room, so very near completion but not quite. Painting is always an exciting process in the early stages — the life studies, the preliminary work, laying the initial compositional sketch down on that freshly stretched sheet. As time goes by, however, it becomes [ Read More ]
Posted on Jul - 01 - 2008
Rose-breasted Grosbeak and Sumac
I can’t say the background does much for the Grosbeak’s plumage, but I had some big gobs of Yellow Ochre and Paynes Gray left in my watercolour tray from a previous work and felt the urge to use them. Loki, my three month old Dusky Parrot and practionioner of the hallowed psittacine philosphy of “everything [ Read More ]
Posted on Feb - 24 - 2008
Snow Day on the Metz
It’s been years since I’ve pulled out the acrylics, but I just wasn’t up to the challenge of all that white in an unforgiving and potentially muddy medium like watercolour. The option to revise, of course, means that I did just that — and lots of it. Weeks of repainting, reworking and frustration, but she’s [ Read More ]
Posted on Jan - 03 - 2008
Pine Grosbeak and Crabapples
I’ve had only fleeting glimpses of the Bohemian Waxwings in the Arb this winter, but Guelph’s other visiting attraction, the Pine Grosbeaks, are much more approachable. Numbers vary from a handful to several hundred, but if one spends a little time by the crab apple trees behind the university’s Bovey Building, they’re bound to show [ Read More ]
