Hi folks,

I haven’t been on the site (or done hardly any art) for a couple years due mostly to a couple surgeries – the first one being rotator cuff repair on my dominant arm, which really prevented art during the long rehab/recovery process. But I’m back at sketching and hoping to do some plein air landscape painting as the weather warms up.

This year I’m planning on sketching each bird species I see during the course of the year. We did an annual bird count on January 1st for a local Audubon society, which started my ‘year list’ for species. We saw 43 species that day, so I haven’t caught up with all them yet. The total is up to 68 species now, but of course the addition of new species slows down dramatically as the year goes on – by year’s end I should have around 150 species or so, depending on how dedicated I am to get out and ‘chase’ birds.

The journal I’m starting with is a Stillman & Birn Alpha Series 8 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches. Because I have such a backlog of species already, I’m doing pretty quick sketches now starting with pencil, adding ink sometimes, then coloring with Pitt brush pens. A couple of the images here are done with Copic markers, then cut and pasted into the S&B journal since the Copics show through to the other side of the paper in the journal.

I won’t post all the sketches (some are pretty bad being out of practice…!) until I get current with new species. I will do some watercolor and gouache when things slow down because the Pitt pens, which I really love, don’t have a wide enough color selection to accurately show the bird’s plumage so some of the odd coloration you see here is just based on available choices.

So here are a few of the first 38 that I’ve sketched so far.

It’s great to see a lot of folks I remember from when I was last active! I’m looking forward to going through your journals to see what you all are doing.

C&C welcome as always.