Spring is coming… I am so excited. It is my best season. I love seeing all the flowers emerging from the soil, so green, so fresh, and so full of life. In Texas, some of the flowers already bloomed because of the confusing hot and cold weather, but this year will be crazy for wild flowers because precipitation rate was high and it seems it always rained on the right time.
Today I will share one of my quick paintings. I was so lazy that I didn’t even clean my palette while mixing the colors on it. I added on top of each other. You can see in the painting how dirty the colors looked instead of being bright.
Bearded reedling, Panurus biarmicus, male Watercolor, 2010 Tulay Yilmaz
Hello everyone,
Say hello to my birdie. It is bearded reedling (Panurus biarmicus), adult male. I truly don’t remember what was the exact date that I painted this but what I know for sure is, this was my first bird painting. I assume I did it in 2010 and on those days I had an idea that I can paint for bird guides (yeah, a biologist in dreams). It never happened though!
What I learned from this painting was painting fur is not easy, especially where the fur is white. There should be some techniques to make it easier but I am not aware of it. Second thing I learned was it is important to date your work, then you can see your progress. Third thing is don’t leave your artwork in the mess of your table or you end up having dust and stains on them. They don’t need to be a masterpiece to deserve the respect. File them properly!
My bearded reedling has some funny wings, shading is not that great but still I like it. It looks promising, isn’t it?
After I explained my own style for line drawing, I wanted to give some time for the people who wanted to try my method before I set the second assignment. Hopefully you found it useful. I know it is boring to line draw compared to water coloring but it is a very crucial process for nice final products. Therefore, try to be patient. After a while it will get easier to sketch the flowers because you’ll get more familiar with the symmetry of the petals or the structure of the different plants.
I really thought over this second assignment if it had to be a shading assignment. However, I didn’t want to start shade and light games on our subjects right away because I wanted to make sure we all feel confident about our sketches first. If we can’t draw our plant properly and accurately, it won’t help to know how to shade it. I found this exercise on a book named as ‘The Elements of Drawing in Three Letters to Beginners’ by John Ruskin M.A. I didn’t read the whole book yet but it is easy to read and makes sense. If you are interested in it, you can find it online and download it free.
On this assignment, we will draw plants by only looking at pre-painted flowers. We’ll use this link as a source:
Clicking on one of the images we like and enlarging it.
Copying the picture and pasting it to a word document.
Enlarging it up to a point that we won’t ruin the quality of the picture or the details.
Printing that picture.
Putting the picture in front of us and starting to draw the same exact flower to our own paper without using any ruler or protractor.
We’ll examine the keenness of our sight and how accurate we are drawing without using any scales. It will also help us to extract our final product from a mess of lines. When we are done with our drawing, we’ll copy the picture we drew with a trace paper and put it above our print to see how good the lines are aligned. If there are lines that don’t match, we’ll correct them on the paper we were working on.
The exercise on the book takes it even further and wants you to go over your outline with a quill pen. I’m not planning to do this but if you want, just leave a comment then I can share the details for this part of the exercise.
For this assignment we will work on 5 different plants from the link I shared above. If you find another source with better paintings, go ahead and use them. I didn’t want to change the instructions in the book, that’s why I shared that link.
Time table. Assignment should be completed in 14 days.
We will have 14 days for this assignment to complete. It is plenty of time, so if you want you can draw more than 5 plants. Please keep your final products safe and clean, we may use them for another assignment later.
I am waiting for your drawings, ideas, suggestions and questions… Have fun and stay in touch!
Art in Nature 