Oriole and Finch

More Life List Notebooks

Awhile back I wrote about a pocket notebook project I was working on, well we are getting ready to make some new notebooks and these two species just might appear on those upcoming notebooks.

Snowy Owl

Horned Grebe

To find out more about Life List Notebooks or to purchase notebooks check out www.lifelistnotebooks.com 

Winter Birding Notes

I just wanted to share a few pages from my winter field notes...

If you have ever noticed small flocks of 10-30 birds that scatter from midwestern country roads as you drive by on a winter day it is very likely you are seeing Horned Larks.  

Another common winter bird is the Dark-Eyed Junco, we typically get Slate-Colored Juncos, but I recently had a western subspecies, the Oregon Junco show up in Illinois.

I always enjoy watching the Red-Headed Woodpeckers collect acorns in recently burned oak forests.

Warbler Portraits

 Chestnut-sided warbler

 Black-throated blue warbler

 Black-throated green warbler

Yellow-rumped warbler

Kirtland's Warbler

One of my favorite warblers - and one of the rarest! 

Cerulean Warbler

Cerulean Warbler!

House Wren

A House Wren perched on early spring Saucer Magnolia branch.  I did this illustration for a donor to the park where I work.  

Life List Notebooks

I mentioned in a previous post that I had been working on a new project, well here it is.

I have always kept lists of the birds I see in the field while working on different projects or simply bird watching, but I have never had a notebook dedicated to birds.  Last fall I decided I was going to find and buy a birding notebook and start keeping a life list on January 1st 2016.  Well, I couldn't find what I wanted on Google.  I found some artsy handmade ones on Etsy and some hurricane-proof Rite-in-the-Rain ones, but I wanted something durable enough to last a month in my back pocket but cheap enough to justify having a new one each month.

I found pocket notebooks for beer drinkers, stargazers, wine sippers, comic book artists and even cheese tasters but not for birders, so I decided to make my own!

Then I started thinking how cool it would be if each notebook featured a bird portrait and a cover color to represent that bird - a small feature that would keep the notebooks fresh and completed ones would create a rainbow of birding adventures on my shelf.  So I started with some herons...

Great Blue Heron

 Green Heron

 and Little Blue Heron

I also wanted each notebook to have a little bit of information on the featured species, so they do...

Each inside cover has fields for personal data...

The back inside cover has a Handy Map of Bird Anatomy and some common birding abbreviations...

Each notebook has 23 of  the two-page spread shown below - plenty of room for information, bird lists and a small sketch or two!

If your a birder or know one you can purchase Life List Notebooks at www.lifelistnotebooks.com

I have a some others planned so stay tuned...

Common Loon

Common Loon

Carolina Wren

Great Blue Heron

It has been a long time since I added some new stuff to the blog.  I am working on a new project and will have some new sketches/illustrations coming.  Here is a portrait of one of my favorite birds - Great Blue Heron!

Northern Harrier

Living in rural east central Illinois I see my fair share of red-tailed hawks along the interstate and country roads, but there are two other birds of prey that I see often and are more exciting - American kestrels and northern harriers.  I recently illustrated an American kestrel perched as I always see them.  I seldom see northern harriers perched but I often see them almost motionless hovering over fields looking for prey.  It is an amazing sight to see how they are able to almost stop and float - I wanted to try and capture this image.

 

 

 

Northern Parula

 

Most of the time I like to draw birds and other subjects without a background, I prefer the crisp edges and it is much faster.  I decided to try and put a very Spring-like background behind this Northern parula.  The bird is almost all done in colored pencil while the background is almost all watercolor.  Below are some in-progress photos.

 

 

 

American kestrel

I have been wanting to do another bird illustration and almost everyday as I drive down county road 1100 I am inspired by an American kestrel perched in a fence row.  I finally got around to doing the drawing.  It is roughly 12"X12" and all colored pencil.

Barred Owl

A barred owl on a snowy blustery day, and some in-progress snapshots.  Watercolor, acrylic and colored pencil.

Blue Jay Feather

 

An old sketch of a blue jay feather

River Clean Up

When the summer is dry and the rivers reach low levels it becomes all to clear how much garbage pollutes our rivers and streams; even the most pristine stretches of water.  It is a great time of year to cool off in your local stream and pick up some garbage while your at it.  Here is a sketch that I made for a local river clean up a few years back; beer cans and tires....

Cerulean Warbler

Cerulean warbler (Setophaga cerulean) is a small warbler that often forages and nests high in the forest canopy especially on the edges of canopy gaps.  Some of our tallest trees in the eastern forests are tulip-poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera) – so here is a sketch of what you might see if you look up to the tree tops in a high quality forest this time of year.

Winter Wren

The sugar maples (Acer saccharum) are leafing out and the winter wrens are singing!  Colored pencil.

"Maggie"

Two of my favorite spring images - leatherwood (Dirca palustris) in flower and a magnolia warbler!  Colored pencil.