Painting birds with inexpensive and expensive paints...

The Bateleur is a snake eagle. I painted him with FolkArt brand matte acrylic paints.

 I painted the owl using M. Graham and Winsor & Newton gouache paints.

This morning while I was holding my goose Sam on my lap I watched a very large bumble bee sniffing the flowers on the gill-over-the-ground that was growing near us. The bee was so heavy with pollen that he bumbled down into the short stems of the plant and had a hard time pulling his large body out of the flowers!

I hope you are having a nice spring...

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 Under Wings

Water soluble Derwent pencils

Hello friends!

 My word-Blogger is weird today. Different way to upload photos.

I'm still playing with Derwent water soluble pencils. They are fun for loose drawing.

Loose painting and drawing is so popular now. Lots of YouTube artists are teaching how to loosen up. It's a beautiful way to do art-but very hard for me.

I love naive art, folk art, children's art. But also abstract and realistic or representational art. 

The important thing is to just keep the sketchbooks filling up, and the paints being used.

I hope you have a grand day!

Health update sort of and just a howdy.

My Sam's undercarriage...

Yum, Mom, I love your garden!

 My camera has died, so I only have old photos from this blog to post, and whatever I can scan if it fits on the printer plate. Thankfully, most of my art is small, so I will be able to scan it. Have to save up for a camera-but I can wait on that. Above is some knitting that I started a few (gulp) years ago-the shawl is much longer now. I don't have this beautiful plant now-it got too big for being inside, and didn't come up again after I transplanted it outside. I do have to buy another one-I LOVE this color-especially with the color of the shawl.

I think my health issues have gotten better. I must say I have never seen so many doctors in my life. And I have never been quite so discouraged about my health or getting real help for it.

Why do doctors argue with you when you tell them how a medicine affects you? Like you don't know your body-but they do??

Anyway-I finally feel good enough to do some artwork, and I am able to sleep fairly well-even though it's broken up into segments of hours-not an all night sleep. 

For some reason, having hives and red swelling arms depressed me more than not feeling well...and right now I have no itching and no hives. I am very thankful. And yes-it seems like a small thing compared to lots of things-but it took over my life-mostly because it came from nowhere. Was it stress?

Something I was eating? A reaction to the infections I also had? No one can tell me. And I refuse to take another steroid. They made me feel terrible-they did the job of getting rid of my hives and itching-oh yes-but I felt like I was extremely sick as well. 

So what am I doing? For one thing-taking probiotics. Back to eating yoghurt, which I thought I might be allergic to. I'm not. But the pill form of probiotics is something I needed along with yoghurt.

I so admire Nicole and I'll try to make a link to her blog here. (it's beadwright.blogspot.com) She figured out what to take to help her with some serious health problems. I think that is amazing.

And I admire people who have life-long issues and can smile and make the very best of it. 

I want to be like that.

Some more birds...

Pencil

Pencil and gold acrylic paint

 M. Graham gouache

This is Corneilius, Sam's sister. She is in heaven. This goose adored me and was jealous of Titus and Sam. Corneilius would peck at them if they tried to get near me. 

This goose also would sleep on my lap (so did Titus). I have that effect on geese (maybe people too!)

'Neilius was a character and always made us laugh.

***

Large dragonfly ink drawing

I did a pen and ink drawing of my dragonfly. I found him last summer as I was walking down our road. He was dead, and missing most of one wing. I like bugs, so I took him to my studio. He's been in my little desk till I decided to draw him. The mark on the bottom left of the drawing is the edge of the paper, which I couldn't get out by editing. Blogger is not letting me add a caption. Oh well...

This is the ink I used. I used sepia. I love this ink.

I used this book to find a font style I wanted to learn.

 And this is the paper and ink pen. I was going to use watercolor to color parts of the drawing, but decided against it. So this paper is not a good match for pen and ink because of the rough surface, but with the pen nib I used, it wasn't too much of a problem.

Don't for one second think that I got all the tiny parts of his wings drawn correctly. I tried-but I did get the general idea of the amazing structure of his wings.

This was good 'medicine' for me-I enjoyed it.

I hope you like it too...

Hare

 Done with water soluble Derwent Sketching pencils.

The only thing I have trouble with when using these lovely pencils is that they can be very hard to sharpen.

Otherwise, it's fun to have a watercolor-like pencil. They come in different wash strengths (light, medium, dark).

I used  a photo from the Web to paint from-source unknown.