The other day I put up the bird feeder that my wife had given me for my birthday last month. It’s one of those feeders with a camera so you can see the birds up close.
Within 2 hours, we had a squirrel and shortly after that, chickadees, nuthatches and redpolls. I’m getting more than a hundred pings each day with all the hungry birds that come to feed.
Here’s a drawing of one of my visitors, a chickadee who came to rest on one of the lower branches of our oak tree. I drew this on a sticky note to save time and show that you can draw with any kind of supplies that you might have lying around, even when you’re taking a short break at work 🙂
Last summer was the first time we’ve been dip-netting in almost 11 years. So we’ve been eating our haul of salmon almost once a week this winter, which is probably a net positive for our health. We’re already making plans to go again in the summer, but I couldn’t help but think, at least for a moment, what if the fish ate people?
As I walked out onto the Campbell Creek trail, from the entrance near our house, there was a twittering cacophony of birds. The snow crunched beneath my feet, but the sound was no longer audible. I pointed my camera at the chokecherry bush, holding my breath for steadiness and to prevent moisture from my breath condensing on the now cold glass – the temperature was hovering somewhere just above zero degrees Fahrenheit.
Bohemian Waxwing
I took a growing number of photos. And the birds would scatter at every movement. But once I remained still for a bit, a brave one would return and slowly attract the others, and they would continue feeding on the gradually fermenting berries.
A rift in the ice opened up as temperatures hovered above zero degrees F.
I walked down to see ice crystals near the edge of the frozen creek. Ice thickness is unpredictable on rivers, but I felt somewhat comfortable as cold as it was. Near the edge, ice flowers bloomed on a sheet of translucent blue ice.
American Dipper
A little further upstream in another spot of open water, I spotted my dancing friend, the American Dipper, bobbing up and down between underwater dives for small fish and insect larvae. The ice-cold water forms beads, rolling off his downy feathers as his performance continues.
Sunrise at the snowbank
Further down the creek, I stopped to look at the sun and possibly generate a few micrograms of vitamin D that is in short supply during the dark winter months. The light glittered on the hoarfrost covered branches and on the soft white pillows of freshly fallen snow.
The quiet, peaceful stillness of freshly fallen snow, insulating from city noise and birdcalls in trees overhead bring a sense of calm that’s rare in a busy life. Carrying a camera every day brings a lot of opportunity to capture images that inspire drawings. And in the evening before bed, I can quietly focus, practicing drawing from the photos I’ve taken myself. And I really like that.
Hi everyone. Here’s a quick sketch of a kingfisher that I saw a couple of weeks ago when it was about zero degrees Fahrenheit and most of the water was frozen. The cat tail pond, fed by warm runoff was open and active with ducks and this kingfisher. I saw him swoop down over the water several times to get minnows and other small fish.
I spent about 10–15 minutes on this sketch, and the DaVinci Eye app made the whole process so much faster. It helped me lock in the proportions right away—something that would’ve taken much longer if I’d used a grid or other traditional techniques.
The pencil I’m using is sharpened to a long point, which seems to help me see more clearly what I’m doing.
I’d like to do a larger, more polished version of this when I have time.
Let me know in the comments if you’d like to see that, and don’t forget to subscribe using the link below.
We were at the beach earlier this fall at Pt. Woronzof in Anchorage and came across a rather thick cable sticking out of the water.
Here we see a thick braided copper cable with a flexible polymer insulation layer and an outer jacket. My guess is that this cable carried power over to Fire Island at one point in time.
Then kids started throwing rocks at the piece of cable sticking out of the water and I managed to capture one splash right at the base of the thing… and I imagined it like a worm coming out of the water… because I really like Dune.
This inspired the following conceptual illustration that started out as a picture of my kid sitting on a rock.
I decided to draw my kid on top of the severed cable instead and I thought that looked cool.
Below is a short animation of my coloring process.
I’ve recently been dabbling in digital tools as part of the creative process. Below are a few of examples of how I used photography and digital image processing to achieve something that I think feels a little different.
Here’s some #pixel art from my walk today. I wrote a python script to pixellate a picture from my phone and remap the colors to a limited palette. I also used Microsoft Paint to manually add some of my own color.Here’s one more piece of #pixel art from the neighborhood walking trail generated with a photo that I took on my phone while out on a walk.
Basically, what’s happening here is that I’ve given the computer a list of 8 colors to use – a palette. And the computer simplifies the image and finds the best color match from the limited palette I’ve given it.
For this drawing I used a fountain pen with a bent nib – to be able to color in large areas at a time. The foreground is dark with detailed leaves and gradually transitions to light through a few ripples in the water with the trunks of a few trees.
I would be lying if I said this was completely my original thought. It is based on a photo that I took, which was in turn inspired by an M.C. Escher print, which was included in a biography about the artist that I have kept in my possession since I was a teenager. I was recently re-reading this book to help me fall asleep at night – something it does very well because it is almost as dryly written as a history textbook.
