Saturday, January 30, 2010
Birdy calligraphics
I'm trying to develop a lightning quick drawing hand and eye---it's one of my art goals for 2010. To that end, I've been (loosely) following the precepts in David Rankin's Fast Sketching Techniques, and have applied them in these sketches of birds outside my windows. I was so taken with Kate's recent squirrel sketches that I wanted to add some of our local crew, haranguers at the bird feeder, to my own repertoire. Ahem. When you WANT squirrels to come to the bird feeder, do they come? No, they do not. Don't want them and they'll be there like wicked fairies at a christening.
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I'm still having problems posting images here! The standard sizes I use to post on Urban Sketchers and Watermarks, two other group blogs I belong to, don't fit here. A good portion of the right side of each of my sketches is cut off ;(.
ReplyDeleteI LOVE these...I'd like to see more quick field sketches here, so I'm smiling like crazy! (Particularly love your red calligraphic cardinal, what a wonderful, lively fellow!) Unfortunately both those other blogs use a non-blogger but blogger friendly template--I'm not really savvy enough to tweak, and was told I'd have to rebuild the site, more or less, if I switched. EEEP.
ReplyDeleteWhat you CAN do is once you put them here, go into html mode and resize the width to 420, then delete the height or it will be distorted. PITA, I know, but till I can figure out how to widen this thing without losing all the sidebars and links, I'm not anxious to jump into it.<:-)
So, I went in and tweaked a bit myself--still running over a bit, but it's better...
ReplyDeleteOne of these days in my copious spare time, I'll figure out a wider template!*G*
Yay, much better!!! Thanks, sweetie! And I just assumed that anything we posted here WOULD be a field sketch, by definition rather quickly done---it's Sketching IN Nature! ;D
ReplyDeleteSort of what I planned originally, but we do have some folks who do quite complete paintings or journal entries, and some who work from their own photos, which, when dealing with birds, I can absolutely understand!
ReplyDeleteI've been rereading Rankin's book too, lately! Fun...
I love these bird sketches! They really capture the gestures and movement beautifully! Very inspiring. Regarding the images getting cut off--blogger has changed the html for some inexplicable reason.
ReplyDeleteHere's how to post at your usual size and still get the whole picture in:
Under "edit html" look for this code:
style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;
change it to:
style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;
It tells the browser to center the image in the space allotted. Blogger's code puts a rather large margin on the left, which pushes the right side of the image right out of view.
Don't you still have to make sure the size fits the column width?
ReplyDeleteLove these sketches ... nice and loose, very inspirational in terms of process. Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteKate, I edit my images in Photoshop before uploading them to Blogger. I generally aim for around 1MB and when I go look in Picasa, where Blogger stores all of my images, they're the large size. So, Blogger is automatically sizing the images for the blog. You've probably noticed in "Compose" that clicking on the image will bring up a bunch of choices of size and position. So, no you don't have to size your images anymore.
ReplyDeleteWonderful!! You've captured the hustle and bustle at the feeder! Love David Rankin's book :)
ReplyDeleteThanks, everyone---and thanks for the tips on sizing. I'm going to post a couple more birdy sketches today and I'll try out your method, Debbie!
ReplyDeleteWonderful sketches. This gesture sketches are so alive and full of motion as birds really are. I feel inspired to try this myself.
ReplyDelete