David O'Hara

A few more birds to finish out the day. Gullor 616 Iridium on Strathmore toned tan paper.

I started carrying the spiral bound Strathmore paper a few months ago, and really like the texture and depth it lends to my sketches. Watercolors become more muted, and certain pencil colors like purple and white really pop.

As with so many of my recent sketches, my goals are:

• to sketch all the birds that frequent my campus
• to better understand the birds by paying attention to how they are structured
• to get just a little better at sketching each day through continuous practice
• to expand my skills with different tools and media.

Sketched more birds today, mostly trying to learn to recognize the differences between Sharp-shinned and Cooper’s hawks. They look so alike!

After some poor sketches, I switched to a new inexpensive fountain pen I got as a sketching tool: a Gullor 616 Iridium. It’s similar to the old Parker pens my grandparents kept in their writing desk. I filled it with some new Pelikan 4001 Brillant-Schwarz ink I got at Zandbroz (a local Sioux Falls gem, IYKYK) and tried a quick sketch of a belted kingfisher I photographed two weeks ago down by the river. Quite happy with how the ink flows, so this could be one of my new sketching tools.

Last night’s idle paintings of barn swallows. Trying to capture their movement and to get a sense of muscle and bone deep beneath their sleek plumage.

Several swallow families spend the warm months living in holes in the side of a brick building right where I park each day. They catch insects over the campus ponds.

Painted with just two colors of Daniel Smith watercolor paint, Aquash water brush.

As I am preparing the MS for my next book, a friend reminded me of when she interviewed me a few years ago about my writing process:

writinggym.libsyn.com/ep-144-re…

Sunrise with plum tree. -6°F this morning, with clear skies.

This morning’s bird. Quick sketch from a photo I took last summer, with Winsor & Newton watercolors and an Aquash water brush.

Getting proportions right is still a challenge, so this morning I was working on lines and angles that help me to see where parts of the bird’s body lie in relation to one another.

Wound up getting a little sloppy with the ink and paint along the way, but my wife looked over my shoulder and said “Pretty!” Don’t can’t be all that bad. (It might help that she likes Toronto baseball.)

Today I returned to the same photo of a house wren that I have sketched before. One sketch I did with a Tombow N65 brush marker only, focusing on value. The other I did first with a non-photo blue pencil, followed by a Pigma Micron 005 marker and finally Winsor & Newton watercolors using a Pentel Aquash water brush.

With each iteration more of the bird becomes clear to my mind, and with each attempt I feel slightly better at some small part of the technique: value, color, volume, line, brush, etc.

As someone who is not really a trained artist, I find myself wishing I had learned all this long ago. And I am glad to be learning it now.

The art, as I keep saying, helps me to see what is there before me. And what a gift that is.

So much of the software we use at my uni seems worse than it was just a few years ago: slower, harder to log into, much less functionality, hard to edit the UI. This is true of the “learning management system” as well as the software we use for registration etc. Makes me wonder how long it will be before A.I. can help us replace our dependency on shoddy software that locks us in to subscriptions.

Same question about higher ed consultants and A.I.

One more morning sparrow, also with the new Daniel Smith watercolors my daughter gave me.

As I paint I am thinking of a few old words in a parable about sparrows and other passerines. (Passerines are birds like sparrows, those little birds you might see at a bird feeder. (Latin, passer = sparrow.)

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.”

Words like those tell us something about the abundance of small birds in the place where those words were written. They probably tell us about religious rituals like sacrifices, and about food systems and poverty and wealth. Who could afford to keep birds all the time? Only those who had land enough to feed them. But “the birds of the air” are fed by another, and the poor can often find a small bird for a meal even if they cannot afford the large birds or bigger animals the wealthy can consume.

At times of famine countries have depended on passerines to feed people.

In many times and places people consider passerines pests, and blame them for fouling gardens or residences.

Sometimes we don’t even notice them. We might hear a thump when one hits the car or the office window and not notice that one has fallen to the ground, stunned or dead.

What might it mean if their creator does notice? And what if their creator notices but we do not notice, or do not care?

We would be like people wandering through a workshop or a museum unaware of the masterpieces around us.

I’d rather not be that way.

In the Garden one of the jobs of the first of our ancestors was to speak the names of the other creatures. And the Creator listened.

I don’t know most of their names, I admit.

But I want to learn them, and speak them.

Names matter to those who love.

Consider the sparrows. The market might not place a high value on them but their Creator does.

And you are loved even more than they are.

And so is everyone else. In the parable, no one is left out.

This morning’s bird. My daughter bought me a set of Daniel Smith watercolors for Christmas — a far nicer paint set than I’d have bought for myself — and today is my first time using it. Such vivid colors!

Chipping sparrow (Spizzella passerina). One of the many birds I have photographed in my garden.

Side note about the garden: it’s a place where I’ve been intentional about creating habitat and growing native perennial plants. So much urban and suburban landscaping is a food desert for birds. It doesn’t need to be that way.

Killdeer. Finishing my day with another bird from our campus. Two different sketches from the same photo.

Last weekend I took a group of high school students for a nature walk through one of our state parks. I pointed out birds as we walked along, and shared my binoculars for the ones in the distance. Several times I took out my sketchbook to allow the students to see some of the birds I had sketched in that park “up close.”

One of the students said she was no good at drawing, that she had tried and failed. I let her know I did not learn how to draw birds until I was 55.

“You’re over fifty?” She asked, with astonishment. Yes, and I’m still learning, I replied. Don’t give up.

“How do you learn to draw birds?”

It helps to have a good teacher, of course, but it also helps if you allow yourself to mess up and keep trying.

In other words, the way you learn to draw the birds is one bird at a time.

Here is this morning’s bird, a Cooper’s hawk (a juvenile, I think) that landed on a trellis in my garden seven years ago.

It’s not a perfect bird sketch, but it is good practice for the next one, and it’s the best Cooper’s hawk I’ve drawn.

Pencil sketch with violet pencil on toned paper; pigma ink 005 marker for outline; watercolor paint.

If you want to buy some cool, easy to carry watercolor supplies, check out arttoolkit.com. They’re a business I am happy to buy from.

Long-billed curlew.

This one was from a grainy photo taken at long distance in poor light.

It was still fun to see the bird, wading in tall grass growing in a bison wallow.

Wilson’s Phalarope - one of my morning sketches.

One day in 2020 a friend who had spoken in my classes a few times was showing me around his bison ranch. He’s an avid birder and within twenty minutes he introduced me to three “lifers,” birds I had never seen in the wild before.

And he pointed out that the bison create habitat for other animals, including wetlands that allow birds like the phalarope to live in an otherwise semi arid part of our state.

As Robin Wall Kimmerer and Kathleen Dean Moore have both written, “All flourishing is mutual.”

Bicycles.

This is another aspect of the wild life of my state.

Pringle, South Dakota.

Slowly working through the fauna of my state, and as I sketch each one I am trying to look more closely.

This is from a photo I took six years ago in the Paha Sapa or Black Hills of South Dakota. Every time I am there I love to wander around and see the bison, elk, mule deer, pronghorns, goats, sheep, and other residents of that beautiful part of our state.

I keep looking for mountain lions but have yet to see one in this state other than on camera traps. But I walk around looking, camera at the ready.

A few more bird sketches to round out the day. Spent part of my morning at Good Earth State Park near Sioux Falls, taking photos of birds and stopping to sketch them as well. Tonight I worked through these sketches of several downy woodpeckers I saw today. The challenge for me is to draw enough but not too much detail. I’m always happy when I sketch it and then take a photo and the AI recognizes the species from my sketch.

Each sketch is practice for the next one. None of them are perfect, each of them is a small improvement.

Not always an improvement in art. I am not an artist, at least not professionally.

But each sketch is an improvement in observation, in seeing what is there, in beholding the chickadee.

I keep trying to practice what my colleague and friend Scott Parsons taught me years ago:

“Sketch what you see, not what you think you see.”

The difference between those two is often far greater than we allow ourselves to admit.

Sketching birds is one way to expose ourselves to our tendency to give more credence to what we think we see or to what we want to see than to what actually presents itself to us in the world.