Snowy Day

Here is my best attempt to capture one of those days in the woods where snow clings to every possible surface and is falling at the same time.  Watercolor

Polychromos



I have no formal education in art and I really don’t know much about the technical side of colored pencils but I do know that I get really frustrated when I break a pencil point or worse when the pencil lead breaks somewhere down inside the pencil. I can’t tell you how mad I get when I sharpen a pencil and then notice that the led is wobbling from a crack 1-2cm inside the pencil. This seems to always happen to me with Prismacolor pencils and since I often sketch in the woods it can be aggravating especially when I don’t have a sharpener besides a pocket knife. At some point I found that Crayola pencils were much more durable in the field and inexpensive, a basic set can be picked up at any Walgreens or CVS, so I have used Crayola for quite some time. Recently I had more than one suggestion to try Faber-Castell Polychromos, so I did. The local art store had a bunch of the 25th Anniversary Polychromos sets on sale so I picked one up. I was pretty disappointed with the colors in the set but really liked drawing with them, so I ordered a bunch of greens, browns and grays. So far they are great and I have not had a single broken lead.

Here are some sketches I made in the field with my Polychromos.



An old eastern hemlock snag.

My field set-up for a quick sketch with the new greens, browns and grays.

Some of the stuff in the fen that day.

A dead twig with what I think is common green shield lichen

The bright orange twig and buds of black willow stood out against the grays of the day

Skunk cabbage starting to flower and stink

Delicate Thuidium moss as green as it is in June

Bright red twigs of red-osier dogwood

and

Sensitive fern AKA bead fern fertile fronds (these are the beads)

Northern Red Oak

Looking up into a nice northern red oak on a sunny clear blue February day. Watercolor and sharpie pen.

Forest Floor in June

Another still-life with Solomons plume, some oak leaves, bloodroot and oak apple gall.  This is a glimpse of the forest floor on a Sangamon River bluff in east central Illinois.  Colored pencil - Prints Available.  Not familiar with oak apple gall, take a look at this page from my field journal.

February Shed

A nature still-life of a shed deer antler.  Colored pencil - Prints Available.



Walking the Chagrin

A sketch I made while taking a break from fly fishing.

Fecundity of Cattail

When attempting to control an invasive species it is important to know the potential of a particular species to reproduce by seed or by vegetative means. It is also helpful to know how long seed of that species is viable in the soil, for example if seed is viable for 3 years then I can feel pretty good in 2016 if I stop seed production in 2012. Narrow-leaf cattail (Typha angustifolia) is one of the nastiest invasive species out there. It has destroyed and is destroying native wetlands all over the eastern U.S. T. angustifolia has an amazing ability to reproduce: an individual cattail head (hotdog) can have as many as 700,000 seeds and under ideal conditions seeds can remain viable in the soil for more than 100 years. Furthermore vegetative reproduction has been reported to be very high; as many as 98 vegetative buds per mature plant. Let 1 single narrow-leaf cattail into your wetland and your in big trouble.

These pages from my notebook were done while I was working at the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes (NCSL). You can follow NCSL’s attempt to restore an urban wetland choked with T. angustifolia right here.

Canada Geese: When they can successfully breed in WalMart parking lots by the thousands there are too many; I have heard them referred to as ‘sky carp” which might be a better common name…

Post Deer Season Depression

Yesterday was the last day of bow hunting season in Ohio, a day that can cause anxiety and even depression for deer hunters.  Here is a poster I made back in my days of working with deer hunters.  Cheer-up fellas there’s always next year!

Shagbark

I have added a lot of sketches of fruit and twigs of the hickories - here is a field journal sketch of shagbark hickory (Carya ovata) bark.

Pawpaw

Today I planted some pawpaw (Asimina triloba) seeds that will be used in a future floodplain restoration project.  It is a great little native tree with a unique tropical tasting fruit.  Here are some sketches of the spring flowers.  The flowers are unusual in that they are the color of raw meat and have a foul odor this is because they are pollinated by carrion flies and beetles.  Pawpaw patches are often clones of each other and since the plant is self sterile these isolated clones will never produce fruit.  So if your pawpaws are barren introduce some new genes to the patch and if that doesn’t work try throwing some road kill under the trees or try tying rotten meat to the branches to attract the proper pollinators.  Once you get the trees to fruit you will have to work hard to beat the raccoons and opossums to the fruit…