This mountain bluebird is my entry for Everyday Matters challenge #125: draw a bird.

Drawn from a photograph in the book Born Wild by Henry H. Holdsworth; a photo book of young animals in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.

The top one is a pencil drawing and was a study in composition.  We spent a good hour or more sketching out different compositions until we found one we liked.  I liked this one because it is just plain silly… looks to me like the scene of a crime.  There is a cat out there somewhere hiding from the authorities.

The bottom picture was a pen study in shading and line quality.  The gist of the exercise, as far as I can tell, was to demonstrate how lines can be made to simulate shading from a distance.

I had great plans for drawing and painting for hours at a time.  But the reality of camping in Yellowstone and Custer State Park (South Dakota) was that we were either driving, hiking, sight-seeing, or cooking/eating/washing-up almost every waking hour.  We did manage to shoot close to 1400 photographs while we were out there (hooray for digital photography!  I would NOT want to pay for all that film to be developed), so maybe I’ll try drawing from some of the pics we snapped.

I did manage to spend one afternoon painting at our campsite.  This was our home for most of the trip.

Yes, that is a Garanimals key chain.  No, I don’t have kids.  Yes, I am a full-grown adult.  That’s just how I roll.

And for the record, I don’t actually wear Garanimals.  Although if I did, it would certainly have prevented a number of fashion faux pas committed by yours truly over the years.

I’ve been in an artistic funk for the past couple of weeks; waiting for inspiration to strike.  It hasn’t.  Fortunately, the Everyday Matters list has lots of things to choose from — no need to wait for inspiration.  Too bad the list can’t come to my house and kick my lazy butt off the couch sometimes.

I stopped on my way home from work this evening to sketch parts of this tree in Oz Park.

Oz Park was commissioned in honor of L. Frank Baum who wrote the Wizard of Oz , and also lived in the area at the end of the 19th century.  It has statues of the Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Lion throughout the park, and is a nice place to go watch people play with their dogs.

This sketch was the result of some recent advice I offered to an aspriring sketcher who was trying to deal with a paralyzing case of fear of failure.  One of those bits of advice was “set a timer for two minutes; go!”.  It occurred to me that the same advice could also be used to overcome the ‘I don’t have time’ excuse that I like to use.  So this is my two-minutes worth (well, actually, the line drawing was two minutes; adding the color was probably only another five or ten minutes after that).

There are plenty of things wrong with it.  Certainly, the colors are completely wrong, because I didn’t have any paint with me at the time; so it was ‘get home, get out the paint, and fake it as best I could’.  And that’s all fine.  The point of this exercise was not to be realistic.  It was just to keep the creative juices flowing.

I’ll tackle something a little more serious when I have more time.  When I don’t have that kind of time, I have to make myself do more of these quickies.  Sometimes quantity is just as valuable as quality.

Edit: just for the record, I did continue on to the grocery store immediately after the art store.

My plan for this sketch (another view from the back of our condo) was to make the telephone pole the center of attention.  I thought framing it with the flowers and planters we have on our deck would help with that.  Unfortunately, I think the foreground objects have taken over instead of retreating to the background.

I think the single biggest mistake I made in this regard is that I made the plants too colorful, and added too much contrast.  I think if I had made them more sillhouetted, that would done the trick nicely.

Or, I could have cheated, and just done a strategic crop.  But what would that have proven?

I’m also not happy with the how flat the background buildings came out.  I wanted to push them to the background, so I knew I had to leave details out and avoid putting too much emphasis on their color and structure.  Unfortunately, I think I went too far the other way.

Oh well, they can’t all be winners.  Plus, I learned something as a result.  And hopefully, I won’t have to make the same mistake a hundred times before I finally learn how to deal with it.