Black-throated Green Warbler...A Painting from Tom's Photo

I have been doing a lot of pencil drawings lately...our grandson, John...

from this photo...

and our granddaughter, Samantha...

from this photo...

The sketch of John turned out looking the age he was when the photo was taken but the sketch of Samantha came out looking older than she is in the photo.  The proportions of faces change as we age.  In this case, her eyes should have been drawn lower on her face. Changing the position of her eyes would then affect the positioning of all her other facial features. I decided it would be best to leave this drawing as it is. It will remind me to measure more carefully next time. 

The trick is to think in terms of comparative relationships.

I painted the Black-throated Green Warbler from a photo Tom took at Magee Marsh on May 15.

I did not draw the bird before I painted it.  Instead, I measured with my eyes as I painted it, noting the proportion of the width of the green back to the width of the wing to the width of the breast.  Length proportions are measured against one another in the same way. The following progression from the second session to the final are below.

At this point I sent a copy of the painting to an artist friend who often critiques my work for me.  She reminded me that the eye needed a spot of life.  A dot of white carefully placed adds life.  She also suggested that I define the leaves a bit more.  I didn't want them to become as important as the bird but they should be more important than what I had them at this point.

Here I have made the leaves more important but I still wasn't satisfied with them.

This is the original photo again.  I didn't like the arrangement of the leaves so I am using my imagination, my "artistic license" and that takes a bit of thinking.

This is the final painting.  I played around with the faint hint of leaves in the upper left portion.  I also made some tiny touch up on the foreground leaves.

Friday, June 1, 2018 at Cedar Bog

Tom, our friend, Pat, and I wanted to see the Showy Lady's Slippers. (Cypripedium reginae)  Since Tom and I have come to the bog,( which is really a fen,) quite a few times, we knew where they would be.

Tom headed off ahead of Pat and me.  We took time to look at other things along the way.
The large plant to the left of the boardwalk is a Great Angelica.(Angelica atropurpurea)

There is a closer look.

Pat liked these masses of tiny white flowers.  We meant to ask what they were when we returned to the Education Center but we forgot. I think someone told me a long time ago that they were Flowering Spurge.  Sometimes I remember correctly. 😀

Here is a closer look at them.

Pat and I both like to look at all kinds of wild things.  We saw quite a few of these dragonflies.  This morning I checked in my copy of Dragonflies through Binoculars and learned that this is a Common Whitetail female.  (Libellula lydia)  We saw the males, too but I didn't get a photo of one.

The white line is the boardwalk.  When we came to the fork we went right because I knew we were close to the Lady Slippers.  Tom was out of sight.  I really wanted to find him because I was beginning to be bothered by insects.  The  insect repellent was in the back pocket of his power chair.  I didn't find him but I found the Lady Slippers.

Pat loved them.  I knew she would.

About then Tom found us.  He came up behind us.  He had taken the fork to the left and turned back when we didn't catch up with him.

We all used the insect repellent, then headed back to the van.  thunderstorms were predicted.

This is how the sky looked above the parking lot.  There were a few drops of rain by the time we were settled in the van.

Surprisingly, those raindrops were the end of the rain until hours later.  But how were we to know?