This morning a friend emailed me when she got the announcement that the book will finally be in her hands by September, she said I was to think how long the gestation period is for an elephant, triple it, and that how long this project has taken, and I did not abort during the process. Now I have a baby elephant I have to finally let go into the world. I kind of like this analogy.
I am drawing and painting again. It feels good, my mind open to the simple act of creating.
Here is the process of working three little Eastern Screech Owls. I was lucky to be with the man who was banding these little creatures about a week before they fledged. The male was action, clacking his bill, the protector already his bill clacking got so much he kept falling backwards. The two females were more relaxed, and mostly sat hunkered down. My choice to do these images in graphite and paint - acrylic - was easy. Their downy feathers are mostly gray at this point, but their eyes were a pale yellow green, and their bills were pink to pale green blue. I did have a problem, which took some time to solve. It was extremely humid when I was working on the first two birds, I do not have air conditioning so the paper had become ever so slightly damp. The technical and lead holder pencils I usually use scratched the paper surface and laid down very little and very uneven graphite. So I switched to a set of pencils I had been given years ago, made by Palomino, I had rejected them in the past as too soft, laying down more graphite than I wanted. But they proved to be perfect. I did find I needed to do some blending to diminish the paper tooth texture. I did not use a stomp for this, instead I used a #9H pencil which I find works better, I very lightly added an additional layer of graphite which at the same time blended the previous layers. By the time I got to work on the final bird the humidity had gone and the paper had dried, so I was able to switch to y usual pencils. The Palomino now being too soft, adding substantially too much graphite. There is no visable difference between the birds.
Steps:
