Bantam Spangled Cornish

Without a doubt the hardest color I had to draw.



Bantam Spangled Cornish
8x10 inches each
colored pencil, graphite, ink
on tan paper
for the American Standard of Perfection

Bantam Mottled Cornish

This was a pair of drawings that made me painfully aware of the discrepancies between the APA Standard and the ABA Standard. Simply because of the smaller size of the ABA book, that's the one I had on my desk for reference, and I realized nearly upon completion of the female that the description was oh so slightly different. @#$%!!! So I got to draw that female twice. I think I'll frame the first one and stick it on my wall. Boy it would be nice if somebody would fix all the discrepancies eh??



Bantam Mottled Cornish
8x10 inches each
colored pencil, graphite, ink
on gray paper
for the American Standard of Perfection

Large Black Tailed Red Leghorns

And thus began the "bird standing on paper" minimal background, used from this point onward on all non-white birds. I should add that although it looks a bit plain in comparison to the others, when the image is shrunken down to a few inches tall for the book, it hardly matters, and these look SHARP framed!! That really makes them pop!



Large Black Tailed Red Leghorns
8x10 inches each
colored pencil, graphite, ink
on tan paper
for the American Standard of Perfection

In other news we got a Christmas tree yesterday and decorated it today. And I baked more cookies. I call them "chicken sandwich cookies" because they are sandwich cookies with a chocolate filling, cut out in the shape of chickens. The name sometimes throws people though. Chicken sandwich...cookie? Better than it sounds!

I finished drawing the tail on the male silver Phoenix, whew! That's tough! Still need to do his legs and background and the whole female, and the golden pair... I'd wanted to be done by Christmas but I think that's impossible. Maybe just the silver pair. It's going to be a very busy weekend and next week is pretty nuts too!

Large Rose Comb Rhode Island Whites

This was sort of the grand background that make me decide "hey, I'm putting too much time into backgrounds!" This one was gobs of work. So after that I made some changes...



Large Rose Comb Rhode Island Whites
8x10 inches each
colored pencil, ink
on white paper
for the American Standard of Perfection

Bantam Columbian Cochins

Bantam Columbian Cochins
8x10 inches each
colored pencil, graphite, ink
on white paper
for the American Standard of Perfection

the evolution of a style, and a major undertaking

Okay, so I've been working on some paintings for a while now, which will be posted after Christmas. I hadn't painted for a year, and before that hadn't painted for probably more than a year, and never really learned how to paint anyway. Yes folks, an art major who never learned how to paint, how sad is that? It was like everyone assumed that art students knew how to paint, and most of them did. When I see detailed realistic paintings I am just blown away, because I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do that. How do you DO that with paint?? Paint is this wild and crazy goopy uncontrollable thing to me. Colored pencils seem to be the natural extension of my hand and brain, and paint has always been a struggle and something I avoided and was never all that fond of anyway. But over the years people really liked the occasional painting that I did, and they certainly are much faster than the uber-meticulous pencil works, and of course when people express interest in buying them that sorta perks me up and makes me think I need to paint.

So I've been painting. These are not works for sales but they will be followed by many that are. And what started out as a struggle, trying to figure out how to get paint onto the huge canvases, has turned into something, and slowly, somewhat painfully, turned into my style. I have a painting style. What a relief! The funny thing is it involves a lot of drawing. I get the form and colors down in acrylic, let that dry, and work back into it with pens. It turned out really interesting, and I'm not entirely sure where this style came from.. I can explain it better when I can post the pics, but it's definitely influenced by the way I draw (outlining) and the work I've done in printmaking (using lines to create form and roundness). How fun. It was like once I started into it with pens it just clicked and became beautiful, whereas just the paint felt clunky and unfinished.

I'm also doing a very hugely major website revision. Haven't done that for a while so it's time, and I need to rearrange it in order to get the Standard images on there. I'm going to be removing some of the old or non-relevant work, and adding a TON of new stuff. I'll be changing the way the pages are set up too, and I hope that goes over well. I'll be putting thumbnails of images on a main page, and you can click on that to go to a page with a larger images and more info. Meaning each image will have it's own page. (ugh, what am I getting myself into?). I just think it's a way to showcase each image a little more and be able to write a better description of each one. It'll be a heck of a lot of work and it has to be done by early January, so between that and 47 million other things I have my work cut out for me. Anyway I've been sitting here staring at the computer for a while so I think it's time to call it quits for a while.

Bantam Blue Cochins

There is absolutely nothing exciting to write about right now, I'm just insanely busy.



8x10 inches each
colored pencil, graphite, ink
on tan paper

Large Brown Red Old English Games

In the early stages of the job there was as much time put into the background of the images as into the birds themselves. Shortly after this pair (and one more I think) that started to change, at least on the non-white birds. I just couldn't put that much time into each piece.

Large Brown Red Old English Games:


8x10 inches each
colored pencil, graphite, ink
on tan paper

Large Blue Sumatras

Large Blue Sumatras. This is all I'll post today, gotta go draw Phoenix!



8x10 inches each
colored pencil, graphite, ink
on tan paper

Bantam Rose Comb White Leghorns

Okey dokey, time to start posting Standard art. I'm going to put these up in the order that I did them. So here's the first pair, Bantam Rose Comb White Leghorns.



8x10 inches each
colored pencil, graphite, ink
on white paper