A surprising range of colors comes into play for this little Black-and-White Warbler.
It’s Not All Black and White
Author: chubbstr
Colored Pencil on Drafting Film
When I’m asked about my artistic process, I usually start with the unique substrate I use. I learned to illustrate on drafting film from artist Susan Rubin in her classes at the Denver Botanic Gardens. Susan creates beautiful botanical paintings on this surface. I’ve been using it for almost 10 years to illustrate birds and botanicals.
Similar to vellum but inexpensive and manmade, drafting film can be frosted on one or both sides and has enough “tooth” to hold the colored pencil pigment. The film is translucent, which makes it ideal for layering over mixed media. I can also layer elements on top of it. I purchase double sided matte Mylar from Meininger’s, one of my favorite art supply stores in Denver.
An important step in this process is to mask the reverse side of my illustration to make it opaque. I use Jacquard Neopaque white fabric paint applied with a variety of standard acrylic paint brushes. Because the paint is flexible when dry, it won’t crack if I bend the drafting film during finishing, mounting and framing.
Fine-tuning
Working with a lens helps me fine tune the details. This piece is almost ready for cleaning, masking and layering.
Wrapping up November
It’s time to put fall to bed and prepare for winter. We’ve stored the lawn furniture and emptied the flower pots. The hoses are unhooked, the taps insulated. The garden is tidy, and the flower beds weeded. We’re ready to slow down, tuck in, and open ourselves to quieter, shorter days.
The leaves changed unevenly this year. Black walnut turned first, soft yellow sifting thinly to carpet the grass. The sugar maples added a brief, showy red, while silver maples clung to their green until the last moment. We spent the peak time for leaves in Brown County, Indiana, poking through shops and hiking at the state park. We came home to find a few scattered oranges among somber oaks.
After two decades in Colorado, enjoying fall Aspen, the color that startles me is the fluorescent peach of sassafras leaves. Even in the gloom of a winter afternoon, with the sun setting before 5 pm, the sassafras somehow gleam in the shadows. Above them, the setting sun casts pinks and lavenders against ragged clouds.
Much more somber, the oak leaves are raining down even as they persist in the canopy. As kids, we raked those heavy leaves every fall, making giant piles for jumping into or piling over each other. The scratchy bits, and a few insects, would find their way down the backs of shirts and pants. Looking up through a blanket of brown leaves, I would watch the contrails of airplanes spreading out, white against blue. Those memories are carried back to me on the scent of warm leaves and acorns crunching underfoot.
There’s a wonderful space available in the weeks before Thanksgiving. In that space we can take a breath, take a walk, and watch the scattering leaves fall like snow.
Painting Red Grapes
Today I’m posting a short video for my colored pencil class. We’ve been having fun with small botanicals and geeking out over pencil sharpeners. I love to see people in the zone with their artwork, so rather than interrupt them with a two-hour demo, I compressed the process into a three-minute time-lapse. Whew!
For my grapes, I chose seven colors that often show up in 12-pencil sets: white, yellow, purple, brown, red, light blue, and light green. (For my fellow pencil geeks, I’m using Faber Castell Polychromos White 101, Cad Yellow 107, Magenta 133, Walnut Brown 177, Light Cad Red 115, Light Ultramarine 140, and Light Green 171.)
Grapes are easy to draw and fun to paint. This is your invitation to head over to the fruit bowl, bring some grapes to your sketchbook, and paint along. Oh – and sharpen those pencils to a long point!
A Great Time to Sign Up
If you’re following my blog, you may not know that I’ve begun publishing a monthly newsletter to showcase new art and events. You can only get the good stuff by signing up. The September newsletter contains a coupon for $10 off any 2 items in my Etsy shop, so don’t miss out!
New prints, plus close-out prices on my original prints and tea towels.
Way back in the days before many of you were born, newsletters were mimeographed and sent out by snail mail. The mimeograph machine was really fun to use. It printed duplicates with purple-blue ink, the paper slightly damp with an addictive smell. You could zip out endless copies. They were popular in schools – cheap to buy and operate.
If you had access to a mimeograph machine (perhaps in your church office), you could publish your personal news (hello, Christmas letter!). Fax machines were the next level of broadcasting. All you needed was a string of phone numbers to send spam and jokes over the phone lines to your friends at other businesses. Office managers loved it.
As the internet grew, email emerged as the perfect vehicle for dad jokes, long chains of confusing conversations, and personal news. That was roughly 30 years ago. And despite the dizzying pace of new communication channels, we still rely on email to communicate our ideas to friends, customers, and coworkers. And we’re still using HTML, which I’ve learned and forgotten more times than I can count.
Luckily, since I started using Mailchimp’s email builder, I’ve been able to produce nice-looking html emails for my ChubbellArt friends. Sign up for this once-a-month e-blast, and I’ll try to stick in some fun things, like coupons and coloring pages. So much better than a fax!
Cicada Summer
The sound seems to drift down from the heights of the tall trees. It’s a dreamy, lazy buzzing, rising and falling in volume, and tapering off to be picked up again in a slightly different place. Growing up in Indiana, it was the background sound to the “dog days” of summer. I can’t separate my memories of freezer pops and visits to the Lake from the thrumming sound of the annual cicadas.
Our yard (3 acres of weedy grass, silver maple and black walnut) is revealing its wealth of insects this year (and other critters). Along the tree lines, I’m delighted by flying bugs, bees, spiders, and dragonflies. I discovered a tree frog sheltering from the sun, and rescued a handful of hungry monarch caterpillars that would have starved where they hatched. I moved them to bigger fare.
Gratitude seems like a small word to exchange for this bounty of wonders. I get to play out of doors as part of my job, and then generate something lovely from that play. The hours I spend outside observing, recording, watching, and listening are as important as the hours I spend in the studio creating, drawing, composing and rendering.
A new project is emerging from my summer’s work, as I process a deep dive into nature and local history. It combines my fine art paintings with genealogy and environmental education. You can follow along as I develop the project in upcoming posts.
In the mean time, the first two pieces are almost complete. The first is called “Place of Beginning,” and reflects our move back to Indiana. The text is a partial legal description from our mortgage documents. This bird is emerging from chaos (have you ever moved across country?). It’s song is a clear bell coming from the storm of activity brought on by change.
Each piece in this new project will incorporate historic documents about a geographic location, feature, or region (such as the Kankakee River or the Indiana Dunes). The documents record changes in Northwest Indiana between the years of settlement (roughly 1830) to the first successes of the conservation movement in the early twentieth century (roughly 1925). I’m eagerly searching out diary entries, land survey notes, stories, poems and articles.
“Enter a Wet Prairie” explores the historic loss of habitat for grassland birds like the Dickcissel. The background photo is the restored prairie at Reynolds Creek Game Bird Area, and the historical document is the land survey note matching that location. Restoration efforts in Porter County are reclaiming land for tallgrass prairie, and there is hope that we can continue to enjoy grassland plants and animals into the future.
Thanks for making it to the end!. As a reward, please claim your free downloadable prairie kaleidoscope coloring page!
Drama in the Dunes
Recently, my friend Kristina and I met at the Great Marsh Trail in the Indiana Dunes National Park for nature journaling. I expected sunshine, mosquitos, lots of birds, and overgrown trails. I didn’t expect small dramas to unfold as we worked. Nature is teaching me to pay more attention.
It can be hard to settle down to observing and sketching. It turns out you can’t bird, and photograph, and sketch all the same time! And then you want a better look at a swallow, or are distracted by sandhill cranes honking in the distance. Somehow we managed to settle in. A cooperative Common Yellowthroat returned several times to sing from a favorite perch. Kristina captured his confident posture and made a beautiful sketch of his surroundings (see her wonderful avifauna paintings at KristinaKnowski.com)
I had a long look at Canada Geese through my binoculars and enjoyed sketching them. They were rolling their heads at one another, and I wondered what they were communicating.
Clouds moved in and the wind picked up. We headed east, hoping to find a viewpoint into the next marsh and maybe a peek at the cranes. We passed a turtle and a frog on the trail. What did they think of each other?
On our way out Kristina noticed a noisy confrontation unfolding just off the road. A variety of bird species were agitated, but it was the Oriole making the most racket. He was harassing a pair of red-shouldered hawks. I saw the female come in once, and we spotted a feisty robin approach, but otherwise the Oriole was on his own. We didn’t stay to see who won, but I left with loads of questions.
Observation opens our curiosity in ways that can only be satisfied with more observation. Were the frog and turtle “together” on the trail? Or were they coincidentally moving from the wet marsh to drier land? Maybe we happened on a favored crossing zone. Had the hawks eaten recently? (They seemed disinterested in the kerfuffle they were creating.) How often do the hawks visit that spot?
Unanswered questions, excellent company, and a beautiful day are now woven into the pages of my journal, and I’m grateful for the ability to be aware and present in nature. I’m sure I’ll enjoy this rich set of memories during the darker and quieter days of winter.
Sand in My Shoes and a Song in My Heart
Memories surface like waves. The roar of the water on a windy day. The cool air juxtaposed against the heat of the sun on my skin. Sand pouring into the back of my shoes as I slide down a steep dune. I’ve been playing at the beaches along Lake Michigan’s shores since before I could walk. Many decades later, my joints are a bit stiff, and my skin is a little loose, but when I’m perched on a dune looking at the water, I feel young.
“Find a comfortable seat” is a basic guideline of nature journaling. This includes finding a comfortable place to sit or stand for the duration of sketching, and also taking good care of myself outdoors. No matter how long I plan to be out, I assume I’m doing a pack in/pack out day camp, complete with water, snacks, safety, and other comfort items. Sunscreen, bug spray, and for me, poison ivy wipes, are essential.
After that, I let the rules drop away and enjoy myself. I have no idea what I’ll find to look at, and that’s part of the fun. Sometimes nothing grabs my interest, and I stare over the top of my sketchbook. It’s okay to be in the moment.
I’ve taken the advice of a number of journal enthusiasts to start my page with a location map or landscape. On this trip, I loved the way the dune bluffs scalloped away from the water into the distance. I didn’t quite capture it, so I’m looking forward to going back. The nice thing about a landscape is that you can usually return more than once.
Another technique I’ve learned is to let my attention be drawn back from a distance to my immediate surroundings. That’s how I noticed one beetle chasing a much smaller beetle across the sand. Lunch!
Dunbar Beach in Beverly Shores is now part of the Indiana Dunes National Park. But when I was growing up, the Century of Progress homes, the narrow sunlit beach, and the bend in the road at Kemil Beach were the nameless landmarks of our endless childhood summers. I love being back.
The Creative Season
For me, March is the opening of the creative season. As the studio fills with new ideas, the world pivots from darkness to light, from the quiet waiting of Winter to full-throated Spring. It’s a good time for reflection. My artwork continues to evolve, but with familiar components—a love of beauty, a prayer for conservation, a hope of connection.
My recent colored pencil paintings capture imaginary wildlife encounters in human spaces, blending storytelling with natural science illustration. They place birds in human-made settings, echoing the role we play in shaping and controlling wildlife habitat. I’m never sure where the whimsy comes from, but I need that playfulness to round out my compositions.
I created “Folly” in response to seeing nesting Cerulean Warblers at a birding festival. Through the scope, we watched the male and female tending their nest, tucked in the crook of a branch about 20 feet directly above a busy trail. It reminded me that birds have a precarious life, often struggling to succeed in challenging conditions.
I illustrated the nest as a glass cup filled with the news of the day, a fragile and potentially disastrous choice. I surrounded them with Poison Ivy, which has a dual nature. It’s terrible for us, but beneficial for birds. I titled this piece “Folly” because foolishness is a good place to begin any journey. In foolishness we find the confidence to trust we’ll find what we need along the way.
I don’t know where my muse is taking me this year, but if it’s a Fool’s Journey, it’s bound to be interesting.
Christine Hubbell 