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!

Sketches

A few sketches from my field journal from this long winter.

 

 

A lot of days like this this winter.  Im not sure where this year ranks in snowfall numbers, but right now 2013-2014 winter ranks as the 4th coldest on record in Illinois.  For the Dec-Feb period we had an average temperature of 20.8 degrees, the coldest on record 1977-1978 at 19.6 degree average temperature.  The 1981-2010 statewide average for Dec-Feb is 29.0 degrees.

 

A portrait of a 100+ year old white oak showing the scars of storms and neighboring treefalls.

The Monarch of the Woods - Bur Oak

 

In 2001, as a college undergraduate, I started working for the Committee on Natural Areas at the University of Illinois.  One of my responsibilities was to record tree falls that occurred in University Research Forests, one of these sites, Brownfield Woods, quickly became my favorite! Brownfield Woods is a 60 acre remnant of the original “Big Grove” prairie grove present in Champaign County, IL pre-settlement. Although Brownfield has a history of very selective timber harvest and cattle grazing it is often referred to as “virgin”.  My first encounter with the Monarch of the Woods came in 2001 and it has been one of my all-time favorite trees ever since.  At 71” diameter at 4 ½ feet above the ground (DBH) it is the largest tree in the forest.

The 2^nd largest tree in the forest, another bur oak fell on April 2, 2006 it was 70” DBH, a cross-section of the tree ages it somewhere around 380 years old.  To put that into some historical perspective – the acorn that produced this tree germinated around 1626; less than 10 years after the Mayflower landed in Massachusetts.

In 1926 C.J. Telford authored a paper on Brownfield Woods and at that time the largest tree in the forest was the same tree that holds that place today.  Telford called this tree the Monarch of the Woods and it still is today, in 1926 it had a DBH of 65” and over the last 88 years it has only added 6” of trunk diameter.  Below is a photo of the Monarch in 1926 and one taken this month (2014).

  

It is hard to get the feel for how big this tree is especially considering it is a forest grown specimen not an open grown tree.  Here is a panoramic self-portrait made from 5 photos of the tree and I.

 

 

Here is another sketch I made of the base of the tree showing the mossy base, areas of smooth patch fungus (harmless) and of course the large burl that is about 8-9 feet up on the trunk.

 

 

 

 

 

Charley Harper again!

I have not updated my blog in quite some time and that is primarily due to the fact that we welcomed a new baby boy, Clark, to our family in June.  Clark has kept us busy and I have not had much time to draw or paint since his arrival.  When my first son, Sullivan, was born I painted a large mural of animals in the style of Charley Harper for his bedroom and later painted a series of small paintings to spell his name also in the style of Charley Harper. See those two projects here and here.  My wife asked if I could do one for our new baby’s room and suggested that it be a night scene with an owl that spelled his name.  So this weekend I finally took the time to paint what I had been thinking of since she first made the request. 

The animals that I am trying to represent are – Snowy owl, little brown bat (2), white-footed mouse (2), raccoon, and saw-whet owl.

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.