For the Birds

Literally though.

I don’t mean “for the birds” in the derogatory, self-deprecating way that you’ll find it to be defined on the interwebs or in your old paper-format dictionaries gathering dust in the closet.

A recent acquisition of a batch of handmade birdhouses have indeed gone to the birds around here, unexpectedly. There is a bush right next to where four of the first birdhouses are mounted, and surprisingly the birds took to the birdhouses right away (same day as they were installed, actually). Not sure why it should be so surprising to me that birds are drawn to birdhouses, but, admittedly, it was a surprise considering the time of year. They didn’t find these birdhouses to be worthless at all!

Watching Birdhouse TV™ daily in recent weeks has been fun, and my surprise lingers - wait, the birds are still around? Yes, yes they are. The birdhouses are mounted on a good sunny spot that will really be great as the temps eventually start to go down (if ever? In November maybe? I’m riding this warm wave as long as possible.  Winter is coming.  Side note: am I the only one who didn’t get obsessed with GOT except for the theme song?)

I love interacting with wildlife from afar. Like, hey here are these random boxes put up that maybe you’ll take interest in… and then they actually do take interest! Cooperation between species ftw *fist bump* or, rather… *feather bump*.

Fast forward to a weekend when my creative brain reawakens after a work week of legalese and dealing with government agencies. Weekends = art time. By the time I sit down to draw/paint/create I don’t usually have a game plan (you could say, for the purposes of this post, that I usually “wing” it, ha). This time around, I had a few thoughts in my head about what I wanted to create.

The thoughts consisted of, you guessed it: the birdhouses! I also knew I wanted to blind contour draw the birds and the birdhouses, and then put words repeating as the background once the drawing part was finished. I’ve been adding text to the background of a lot of my artwork for a long time. For this round it is cursive - because, over time, when you keep writing words, especially in cursive, they have the propensity to start looking more abstract the longer you go without a break.  It helps that my penmanship is really not awesome, so slightly indecipherable background word pattern works fine for this project. It’s the perfect combo for my likely-to-be-a-little-abstract birds in this whole plan. It all made sense in my head.

Turns out it all made sense once it was put onto paper, too. Love it when that happens! Documenting my process is not my favorite - I prefer to just stay in art zone and do the grand reveal at the end, but I’ll make the exception for these pieces because the stages were kinda cool to see.

First up - drawing the birds with the birdhouses looked a little something like this:

Phase one complete.

The actual birds who were at the actual birdhouses were all the same colors, but I didn’t want to just have a bunch of brown/tan birds in these four pieces, so I took some creative liberties with the colors of the birds - I mean no disrespect, birds, just felt like changing it up a little!

Next: add color to the birds:

The birds are all slightly different from each other, but so far so good on the sort of “going” with each other, am I right? I’m right. As a side note, I love how each of the birdhouses has a different perch fixture, the guy who made them must have had a lot of odds and ends to use up. Well played, maker-guy.

Now I had to wait for the birds to dry. Waiting for paint to dry is one of the joys of using watercolor on paper that isn’t technically watercolor paper (she says, sarcastically). Although technically any paper that you put watercolor onto by default becomes watercolor paper, amIright? Right again. I digress. Here is the next step in the process to make these colorful images - choosing the birdhouse color:

There we have it - all the colors! I need to take better photos, but I really wasn’t expecting to write this up and share it, so the grey-looking paper wasn’t atop my priority list, oops. Not oops… it adds character! “In foggy Birdhouseland, where we lay our paint”… isn’t that how the quote goes?

Next up, getting there.

Wait a bit longer to make sure all the paint is dry - I’ve smudged my fair share of almost-finished pieces before when I start the next phase sooner than the paint is dry. Good thing I’m patient (I’m not patient at all), or at least good thing hair dryers exist; helpful to move along the paint-drying process.

Now comes the part where all of these images need writing to be added to the background. Unlike Bart Simpson, I never had to write anything on the blackboard on repeat a million times, but I think I managed just fine with these. As I said earlier, a little illegible penmanship is a great compliment to these images. A little illegible penmanship has never merited me a compliment before, so I’ll take this one! Thank you, self.

Ready for the big reveal? Voici!

Here they are, complete with words. The words I repeated are: “Bird” and "Birdhouse”. You’ll see that there is also “Finch” on two, and “Sparrow” written on the other two. In real life, all the birds are actually the same, but again, just me over here taking a couple more creative liberties. The finishing touch was just some paint splatter on each one to create a little cohesiveness between background and foreground in each image.

Throughout my life there have been times I’ve tried to draw something exactly as I see it in my head. A lot of times this has lead to me getting frustrated because I haven’t been able to make the two match up. In walks blind contour in 2019(ish?) and it was a game changer for how I feel about my artwork. Now my drawings, while not “perfect” or “real” come out perfectly, and their essence perfectly matches what I see of them in my head. It’s also helped that I very rarely sit down to draw with a preconceived idea of what I am going to draw/paint.

In short, winging it is my preferred m.o. - it’s not just for the birds!