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JTMB's Bird Art (2 Viewers)

Thanks Mike, Gaby and Phil!

I wasn't going to post this sketch, but then decided to go ahead. It is of a female Rufous Hummingbird at our feeder, which hangs right outside the kitchen nook window about six feet from my computer workstation. It's always great to see these little flying jewels whose attitude and aggression are completely counter to their appearance. We also get Anna's Hummingbird, but Rufous are more common and any other species besides those two would be a rarity for our area (at least two other species have occurred a few times). This was a quick sketch, done first with fountain pen, then with watercolor washes added. Less than an hour in it in total. It's on 10 x 13 inch Arches wirebound watercolor sketchbook paper.
The sketch isn't meant to be very finished, but I thought it might be of interest to you folks from countries where there are no hummers. We are fortunate in this hemisphere to have a good number of hummingbird species.

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I mentioned a few posts back about my upcoming float trip in central Oregon. I hope folks will forgive me for posting a few non-wildlife sketches that I've done over the last couple days to help counter the building excitement for this upcoming annual ritual, one my two friends and I have done now for more than a quarter century. I've started a new sketchbook that I'll be using on the trip and rather than wait until the trip actually starts, I sketched a title page for it, and did some other sketches from photos of some recent trips. Here they are.

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Forgot to include one sketch, this one is of the larger of the two rafts we take down the river. My two friends, their gear and our common gear ride in this boat, and I and my gear ride in the smaller raft shown in the previous post. The river is very wild and remote, with some significant rapids - despite all the years we've run this river, the heart rate always elevates heading into the rapids.

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John,

Absolutely brilliant pre-travelogue intimacy. This would make a great little read in graphic novel/comics format.
I hope we get to see the story develop..it would be astonishing!
But? Sasquatch? Brrrr! Be careful out there!!!:eek!::cat:

Have a real WILD time and enjoy every moment because, I'm sure we all will, when you report back...
o:D
 
FANTASTIC John, have a great trip, hope the journal is waterproof, its wild everywhere today a gull ate one of my pastels when I wasn't looking.
 
I mentioned a few posts back about my upcoming float trip in central Oregon. I hope folks will forgive me for posting a few non-wildlife sketches that I've done over the last couple days to help counter the building excitement for this upcoming annual ritual, one my two friends and I have done now for more than a quarter century. I've started a new sketchbook that I'll be using on the trip and rather than wait until the trip actually starts, I sketched a title page for it, and did some other sketches from photos of some recent trips. Here they are.

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brilliant- there's a thriving cult of the authentic in this subforum and they sit right in that
 
Your paintings are fun to follow, especially your friends because they look as if they've never done anything else than going on such trips O:)
 
Thanks Phil, Colleen, Ed, Tim, Mike, Ken and Drellas! It's good to see that some of my excitement about our annual ritual comes through in the sketches. Drellas' comment in particular was funny and very true. During our working years (two of us are now retired and one is partly retired) we so looked forward to these trips as complete escapes from the workaday world (and it's easy to feel you have escaped when you're in a canyon with no phones, no internet and no public through roads). That's why we made a pact after the first one that we would try to do them for 20 years (and this year is our 26th!) and with just the three of us - no family, no friends, just us.

So yes, Drellas, we all definitely wanted to feel (and I guess that translated to looking) like these trips were our lives. :-O

We put on the river this coming Sunday, so right now there is a pile of gear on the floor, all ready to go except for cleaning the cooler and loading the food and ice. Oh, yes, and then the slight matter of a 6-hour drive south to get to Ken's place, and then about a two hour process the following day of loading the boats, all the gear, and getting the truck key to the shuttle driver, and then - finally - wading into the bracing water (no waders this time of year, just shorts and bare legs) to get the rafts in position and loaded and we're off.

So here are two more anticipatory sketches from previous years' photos. The first at least marginally fits the forum theme, as it shows an Osprey nest in one of the platforms built for just that purpose. Many of the Osprey nests in the canyon (and there are dozens, perhaps hundreds) are built on railroad telegraph poles (now used for wires that constitute a landslide warning system for the trains to be aware of blockages on the tracks). But those poles are a bit low and have some hazards to the birds, so the ranchers and Indian tribe (whose huge reservation makes one side of the river off-limits for about half our float) put up these platforms to encourage the birds to nest there. Many of them are occupied shortly after being put up. The second sketch is one example of our sophisticated camp 'kitchen' area, with a tarp we hang using three oars lashed together as the main support for the rope holding up the tarp. We often don't put up any tents, just sleeping out under the stars on cots, but it's always wise to have a covered area to scramble to in the event of a thunderstorm.

These sketches are quite quickly done, so they definitely are pretty rough from an artistic viewpoint.

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I couldn't find a good link but the most striking camp watecolors I've ever seen were by John Singer Sargent in the Canadian Rockies. Just full of light and color, most of it coming from the tents!
 
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