The greatest pleasure of all the bird work is learning to field sketch, be out in the world of the birds watching them either with bare eyes if they are close enough, or with aids like binoculars or a scope. Each kind of view brings you into a different relationship to your subjects. Every trip has some new thing, they don't call it the present moment for nothing, each trip is really a gift to be opened by your fresh encounter with the birds, the time of day, the weather and just being present.

Here are some recent sketches from Bodega Bay and Bodega head, and one watercolor study for an oil portrait of a beautiful captive osprey that cannot be returned to the wild. As a young bird she had a broken shoulder, it never healed but she had a very patient and loving caretaker raptor expert who taught her to eat dead fish, which normally an osprey will and do and so they cannot be kept captive, this one eats trout,




Since I tend to go tight with oil and pastel I made a conscious effort with watercolor to stay loose. I'm greatly indebted to a wonderful group of bird artists, mostly British, who hang out at Birdforum.net on the wildlife thread. From them I learned a lot about how to use watercolor in the tradition of the English watercolorists, and also could not have managed to field sketch without the top notch sketchers there. I'll do a special post sometime on one of my favorites Tim Wooten, he is my major mentor for watercolor and field sketching, I learned most of what I know by studying his thread at Birdforum http://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=77927&page=3 sorry the link process is not working on my posts so you can copy and paste.









love these little plovers, my first sighting of them.



















My favorite cormorant place is Bodega Head, and this freely done work was the first in a challenge I set for myself of 100 watercolors in 30 days. I was looking to get over my fear of watercolor, and to learn how to use it in the field or on my field sketches when I got home. It is the only major media I didn't know much about. The challenge was tough, but it did the trick at the end, I was pretty easy with it, and no longer intimidated.