Hello
I am new to the forum and suspect this has been answered elsewhere but where? Anyway you may all have different views and methods.
My question is when you go in the field birding and getting information for your artworks, what equipment do you take and use, and what is your methods for getting the data that you need?
Pete,
I'm going to answer this question as well as some of the ones you asked on my own thread, The Abstract Bird. You should take what will encourage to go out and work and not discourage you from leaving home.
For me that means keeping things very light. I've found that if all I need to sketch when I go out is a sketchbook in my back pocket and a pen then I'm much more likely to go out and to sketch. The first photo below is a Moleskine large sketchbook, large being about 5x8 inches I think. I've used much bigger sketchbooks and find that I rarely use them in the field, or if I have them I spend much more time birding than sketching. Plenty of very good artists have shown work on this blog that is done in much larger sketchbooks. So working small doesn't work for everyone. At some point I'll probably go larger but for now I know it's best to work small.
The next photo is the open Moleskine sketchbook. On the left a Wood Duck, hardly recognizable House Sparrow and a Hairy Woodpecker, all except the House Sparrow done in the field a few days ago. On the right are sketches from today, mainly Least Sandpipers and one Great Blue Heron.
These of course don't show the details that you ask about on my thread. I really don't care about portraying details much. Often they're at the expense of liveliness. But I also want to understand the structure of what I draw. I use the field sketches like those above to keep learning about the structure of birds. Today for instance I learned for the first time that there is a light V on the mantle of a Least Sandpiper. I think things noticed in the field by seeing them and sketching them stay with you.
I also take photos at times, and very occasionally videos, with my little and light Panasonic Lumix FZ28 camera. A photo from today is below. In them I can find some of the details that I don't see in the field or don't get down on paper. But details, at least to me are worhthless if you don't have a sense of life in your pictures. I think that sense of life is best gained by field sketches.
Often as today after I've sketched a bird like the Least Sandpiper I'll try to reinforce some of what I saw by doing a drawing or watercolor based to a large extent on a photo that I took. Sometimes I'll combine it with field sketches from the day. Below you see today's one hour attempt. ICK!! It didn't work. Oh well. Tomorrow I may try again. I really did it more to show you my process than for any other reason.
All in all a sketchbook in my back pocket, a pen in my front pocket, a light point and shoot camera and good quality binoculars are all I need. As a bonus my camera will also shoot video and so occasionally I'll try to take one or two. But I'm able to do all of this with just a few pounds of gear.
Because it's so easy to pick it up and head out I do so often. If I had to load up a bunch of photo gear, maybe video gear, perhaps large sketchbooks and possibly a paint box I'd rarely get out.
I think the most important decision you can make when starting is: what will encourage me to get out and see and draw birds. My guess is that for most people that is a very light package of gear. It's of course always possible to get out with photo gear and take a lot of photos. But the question is whether most beginners will then be encouraged to work from the photos that they took. My guess is that most people take the photos but then don't make any art based on them. So for me it's a perilous path. Of course not everyone wants to draw or make art. They may be perfectly happy with their photos. But if you want to draw and paint birds I'd try to get out with as little gear as possible.
As for other inspiration I'd recommend three books right off: John Busby's Drawing Birds, Tim Wootton's Drawing and Painting Birds and John Muir Law's Law's Guide to Drawing Birds. The first two are the most inspirational. I think they show you how exciting art featuring birds can be. The Law's book I avoided for a long time because I never like the work I saw from it. But I heard so many good things about it I finally bought it. It is much more of an instructional manual than the other two. But there are a lot of helpful ideas in it, even the seemingly simple idea of starting off all your bird drawings with just two circles, one for the head and one for the body. It works much better than you might expect. For inspiration though look to the first two books.