Saturday, February 19, 2011

Winter Sketching


My winter field sketching is often a tad cramped and frequently interrupted; most of it is done from inside a small car. At least I get the passenger seat while my husband, Dale, does the driving. Not only does the car shelter us from the weather, but a car is a terrific ‘blind.’ If we stay put inside, the wildlife often comes to us.

Given a choice I’d rather sketch while Dale photographs. But all too often I still have a camera on my lap and am ready to switch cameras with Dale on a moment’s notice (different lenses). My sketchbook is propped on top the camera. It may sound less than ideal ; but I feel extremely fortunate that I have someone who shares my love of the outdoors …. And I do enjoy getting a few good shots myself.

Adding paint to the mix gets too complicated so most of my spur of the moment sketching is black and white. One of my favorite mediums is a fountain pen with ink that bleeds and a waterbrush to smear it.


These sketches come from one of our ‘spur of the moment’ outings, if you can call being parked in the same spot for two hours a moment; and all in this post are done with the fountain pen. For more about the two hours be sure and go to my blog:
www.elvafieldnotes.blogspot.com

2 comments:

  1. Beautiful "spur of the moment" sketches. I especially like the last image of the beak in the ruffled feathers. I hope that you have a good heating system inthe car if you are there for two hours !

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you Alissa. We didn't run the heater at all .... just kept the windows down. I suppose it was close to 40 degrees outside. Quite a bit of snow melted while we sat there.

    ReplyDelete

We'd love to hear from you, your questions, comments, observations! Please feel free to comment, feedback is important to us.