Pen and Rethink...

Slow week at the Urban Trailhead...

"Common Merganser?  I hardly knew her!"

This looks decent as an experiment with colored pencils (on loan from the Explore Tahoe Collection)

Lest you think I've made progress though, let me present:

"The Western Bluebird of Crappiness"

"The Western Bluebird of Sappiness"

"Western Bluebird Sad to See How I Must Think He Looks"

Super Bonus Sketch:

 

"Cedar "Sweet Berry" Waxwing"

 Looks a little yokel somehow.  I guess I just unconsciously like to make fun of birds.

The 9th of May in the mountains

The sound of rain on the roof has no pattern that the mind can follow but surely one is there.  A series of droplets fallen from a similar height hitting, splashing, and running down the definite shapes of trees, power-lines and houses, all shifted by the same wind.  Simply because it is so infinitely complex as to defy our understanding, we call it random.  But there is a music there even if it expresses nothing more complicated than the free and beautiful movement of the earth under its clouds and around its sun.  And down here the mind can look out the window as it listens for these repetitions and it can maybe only try to follow the threads out into the wet forest evening, up through the myriad dripping needles, and on into the grey mist from where this wonder has come.

Scribble-de-bop!

Some progress:

Top is- "Evolution of a Pied-Billed Dweeb Grebe"

Bottom is- "Prairie Falcon Enttäuschung"

I think he's bummed because someone drew his wing like a fried egg which was itself badly drawn.

Irony alert: I think it was the wing that dragged this one down.

On Apical Dominance

The main biological determinant of the shape of a pine tree or fir is the presence of a lead or apical bud which directs the upward growth and sends hormones down to the lower buds which keep them subordinate and prevent them from growing longer.  This helps the tree to quickly shoot up to where it can catch the maximum amount of light.  When the apical bud dies, is broken off, or is otherwise damaged, the other buds around it go into a kind of race to replace it as the new lead.  This is what causes the split crowns, double tips and other marks of individual character in these trees.


In the same way we can speak of times in our lives when the driving force, whatever our own sort of apical bud is to each of us, has left us or been irrevocably damaged.  All of us have felt how the wind shook us and snow buried us in our younger years, damage to our weaker branches in a storm, the old growth falling off as we no longer need it.  But when we no longer have that bud leading us forward, the mind goes a little haywire with worry, confusion, doubt and everything else.  Recently it has been good for me to think that maybe there are other things inside us, other strengths and loves ready to help us lead ourselves forward into light and health.  The change might always be detectable and we may always be able to see just where the crisis point was-- our trunks growing a little crooked, our symmetry a little off.  But I have always found far more interesting and endearing the trees that have grown a little out of the ordinary, that have suffered damage, been bent by the weather, struck by lightning, singed by fire and still kept growing.

Clowns of the Forest

Acorn Woodpecker; Meladerpes formicidorkus

Acorn Woodpecker; Melanerpes formicivorus

So I'm playing around with planning a kids Nature Club, ideally to be offered at the Library.  It's something that I am actually pretty excited about and it's been fairly motivating for me.  A loose outline of the idea would be to get the kids each a nature journal, talk to them about different ways that they can experience the wilderness and all the different media and modes that they can use to express what they've encountered and how they've felt with subsequent meetings allowing them to share what they've seen and made while giving interpretive guidance on narrower subjects such as birds, geology, trees and forests, etc..  The idea would be to encourage them towards a creative interest in the wilderness and to subtly instill a deep wonder in and care for the natural world and the desire to become better stewards of such an integral part of our community.

In this spirit, I thought it might be a good idea to teach myself to draw in a more realistic mode than my usual cartoon mess so that I could talk at least somewhat convincingly about the ways in which one can improve one's skills from even abysmal beginnings.  Above you will have seen my first attempt, knocked out in a few minutes between extemporizing to visitors at E.T. about the beauty of the Lake.  I picked an Acorn Woodpecker for its impeccably well-defined lines, thinking this would make it simpler.  It did, and at least I was able to put forth something that was at least identifiable as  the species it was intended to depict.  I thought I'd put it out here as kind of a marker of my first attempt and as I practice and hopefully improve, I can loosely document my progress and have some tips I can share with kids.  So check back in... 7 years... maybe... and you should see some fairly passable bird sketches going on.

That little Woodpecker I drew just looked a little sad and uncomfortable though, so I figured I would research a bit of its Life History in order to practice evoking a little of the bird's natural personality in my "art".  Combining this with my own personal observations when I took the above picture I came up with something that I think makes rudimentary steps, at least, towards portraying the Acorn Woodpecker's relationship to the world around it including it's unfailing sense of style and personal struggles with a social drinking habit slowly creeping into early stage alcoholism.  Nature really can be unforgiving at times.

Acorn Woodpecker; Smoothanerpas formicivelourus