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JTMB's Bird Art (2 Viewers)

Hi everyone,

Well, I got back yesterday from my 11-day adventure in central Oregon. 6 days were actually on the river, plus two 6-hour driving days to/from the area, and 3 days sketching and birding around the beautiful Metolius River. The float trip itself was on the Deschutes River, of which the Metolius is a major tributary. I filled up 18 pages (36 sides) of a 12 x 9 inch Stillman & Birn Delta series sketchbook on the trip, so I was busy...which also means a number of the sketches (especially the birds) were done pretty quickly. And my quick sketches are of course not in the league of a number of the folks here - but were great fun and very educational. First off, here are some posts of primarily Osprey. There are dozens of nests along the river. 'Our' nest - located only about a hundred yards from our campsite - has really gotten quite big over the years as the pair continues to return to the same site. This year, they fledged three young. I wasn't quite sure at first, but eventually saw all five birds in the (very crowded!) nest - with the youngsters identifiable by their orange eyes. (In the US, most hawks start with yellow eyes as juveniles and their eyes are orange as adults, but Ospreys are the opposite - starting orange and ending yellow). Anyway, the first image here was very fast sketches of an Eastern Kingbird that was flycatching by our first night campsite. The sketches are probably 30 seconds or less and are done with fountain pen. Then I did the same thing with the Osprey, trying to get various profiles. For these sketches, I had only binocs - I hadn't even unpacked the scope from the dry bag yet. In the second image, I used the scope and the lower right Osprey was done in a bit more time...pen first, then added watercolor later. The third image, with the page of Cliff Swallows, were also done quickly. The fourth image is of two other species I saw on the trip - Western Scrub-Jay and Green-tailed Towhee, the latter a species rarely seen in my home area and one I always look to find when in central Oregon. The 5th image (and the 6th, in the next post) used the scope and a bit more time. In the last image, in the first headshot sketch, when I added watercolor, I made the bill too 'hooked'.

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love that final page esp the one looking down...what a marvelous book you made, welcome home and thanks for sharing it with us.
 
Terrific work, John - there are couple of osprey sketches that really stand out for me; the one bottom right on page three and the one peering out top right page 5 - superb! The colour work adds much to the flavour of the moment - very nice indeed.
Welcome back to dry land.
 
love that final page esp the one looking down...what a marvelous book you made, welcome home and thanks for sharing it with us.

A really nice and lively collection of drawings John. I think they all have a sense of excitement to them, and all seem connected to their subject. That's one of the great things about field sketching I think, and why it can get so addictive. Putting them in a single sketchbook just for the trip was a great idea. I'm sure you'll enjoy it for years and find subjects for many new works.
 
Thanks Colleen, Tim and Ken!

Here is the next batch. Common Mergansers (in non-breeding plumage) are plentiful on the river and one day on the trip, I found a group of them early in the morning lounging on a small beach area. My sketching location was on the railroad grade (not the tracks, obviously!), probably thirty feet or so higher than the river. I had my scope set up and sketched with the primary objective of getting their shapes accurate in a couple different poses. The sketches were all done with fountain pen, and watercolor washes added to a couple of them when back in camp. The landscape sketches show the view downriver - the first one from our campsite, and the second one from where I was sitting to sketch the mergansers. The canyon is about 1,500 feet or so deep at most points, with basalt cliffs and steep eroded canyon walls the whole length of the float trip. Not as spectacular as the Grand Canyon, but spectacular in its own way. No public roads go through the canyon, just the railroad, so it's quite isolated.

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A pleasure to see John. I think they all show that you are starting to enjoy working from life. Once that happens it's hard to stop. I think these may have more of that sense of enjoyment than anything else I've seen from you.

Though I like them all numbers 2 and 3 are probably my favorites. It looks like you made great use of your trip and your new sketchbook.
 
Thanks again, Tim and Colleen!

Here are a few non-bird sketches to give some context to the trip. The pictures that show the smaller stream and Ponderosa Pine forest are from the Metolius River, a major tributary to the Deschutes where we were floating. It is one of the most gorgeous rivers in the US, in my (and many others) opinion. I took a bit more time with the Metolius sketches than the ones of the Deschutes, which were quite quickly done. The flat area and bank across the river in the first image is the railroad grade that runs through the canyon, which explains why it looks unnatural relative to the rest of the canyon.

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Hope your group didn't get skunked. I don't see any fish portraits. Just kidding. I'm sure you caught many and might very well have put them back.

I probably wouldn't have said anything except that the sketches of the fishermen remind me of a large abstract painting I did of our local stream with me in it with my flyfishing line snaking across the canvas. And then I sketched a little fingerling trout in the water the other day. Fish on my brain I guess.

Hope you'll be able to keep up this output with local birds and activities. I think there is just something exciting about a sketchbook with almost daily work (not that I at all have accomplished that myself!!).
 
Thanks Tim, Phil, Matt and Ken!

Ken - Plenty of fish were caught, no problem there - but as you suspected, our fishing is all catch and release with barbless hooks. All the trout in this river are native, no stocking is done at all. (Steelhead are both wild and hatchery-reared, but our trip focuses on trout.) Because of the art, I don't fish at all anymore, even though I taught the other two guys how to flyfish 26 years ago when we started - and created two maniac fisherpeople in the process. :-O It is possible to keep two fish a day on the river if you want (slot regulation - no smaller than 10 inches, no bigger than 13; designed to protect the young fish and the larger breeding fish) but almost no one does because it is such a quality fishery. The river is actually world famous among both trout and steelhead fishermen. So sketching the fish is a bit tough because with catch and release fishing, you try to minimize the stress on the fish - usually the fish isn't even taken out of the water, it's just netted, the net kept under the water, the hook slipped out carefully (with barbless hooks, removing them is very easy and using flies, the fish is almost always hooked in the lip, not further down). Then if the fish is really tired from a long fight - which tends to be the case with large trout in this very strong river - you cradle them under water with their head upstream into the current and move them back and forth to get water over their gills. A minute or so of doing this has them strong and ready to go again.

I think I'll pull out some pix of when I used to fish and had snapshots of some of the trout I caught and do a sketch of them...!
 
what a collection! a priceless treasure trove of memories from what looks to have been a fanatastic trip - as Ken said, the pleasure of working in the field really shows!
 
Thanks Nick, Gaby and Ed!

Spurred on by Colleen, I've been doing plein air pieces since getting back from the raft trip. I enjoy painting with oils, particularly plein air, but haven't done too many of them. So, as Colleen did with her seascapes, I'm going to be doing a lot of plein air landscapes in oils while our summer (and hopefully into the autumn) provides good outside sketching weather.

Here are two of the five I've done in the last five days. I love old barns and so picked landscapes with barns in them. There is a (admittedly slight) birding connection in that there was a wing-tagged Red-tailed Hawk perch hunting from the largest barn in the first photo. I was excited to see that bird and read the wing tag number because I know the person who tags these hawks in our area. He runs the Falcon Research Group (www.frg.org) which you should check out for groundbreaking satellite tracking info on the tundra subspecies of Peregrine Falcon migrating between Chile and the Canadian far north. He captures young Red-tailed Hawks each season at SeaTac International Airport in Seattle, since the young birds are unsophisticated about the planes and are a risk for getting sucked into jet engines with bad results for the bird and the plane. (They leave the adults, who have figured out to stay away from the planes.) He relocates the birds to Skagit County, about 60 miles north of Seattle, wing-tags and bands them and then lets them loose. Turns out this bird was a female captured in September of 2010 and released the same day. It had only been reported twice before my sighting, all three times where I was painting - not too far from its release site. So, this young female made it through her first winter successfully, a critical time period for young raptors.

Ah, but I digress...back to the paintings.

These are both in oils, on 9 x 12 inch canvasboard, done plein air in about two hours each. The first is in Skagit County, and the second is in Carnation, WA, about 13 miles from my house. I purposely used color schemes that did not replicate local color, and also used a limited palette of six colors plus white.

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