Horsey Overload

I spent the day today at Horse Expo with J.C. Horse Expo takes place all weekend at Cal Expo in Sacramento. I think I'm overloaded with horse things for the weekend! It was fun, but my feet are sore! I didn't even spend much money (primarily because I'd forgotten to measure Shylah's blanket size so I couldn't get her a fly sheet, and they were more expensive than ordering from a catalog anyway!). I did take 187 photographs (good thing I've converted to digital!). 46 went straight to the trash can because they were blurry or not within the frame. I take photos to use as references for artwork, I don't generally take photos to stand on their own (unless I'm hired to do so!), but every now and then one turns out pretty good. Most are mediocre but a few stand out. This is the best one:

Batch 7 chicks

Sometimes, I just have to roll my eyes and say "oh well" (you'll see...)

T: Brassy male & Blue Brassy male X Brassy, Blue Brassy, BBB Splash hens= 3 Brassy, 1 Blue Brassy, 1 BBB Splash
T4: F1 Cuckoo male X F1 Cuckoo females= 1 Black, 6 Cuckoo, 2 Single Combed Cuckoo (arg, the best colored ones of course!)
T5: F1 Cuckoo male X F1 Cuckoo females= 5 Black, 2 Cuckoo, 1 Single Combed Crele-ish (huh?)
T6: Silver Duckwing OE X Black females= 1 Brassy Back, 2 Black (maybe will end up Birchen??)
N3: Black X Black= 2 Black
N4: Black X Black= 6 Black
N5: Black X Black= 6 Black

no more!

I put the last batch of eggs in the incubator today. That's it! No more! I have way too many! I just needed a few more from the Silver Duckwing experiment, so that's all I set today.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about the Cuckoos and Creles, and decided... I don't know what to do. The Cuckoos really aren't the right color. Of the ~34 Cuckoo colored chicks I hatched, there are 2 pullets (I expected this low number) and all but maybe one are two (of cockerels and pullets) are WAY too dark or WAY too washed out (or both!) So I'm looking at narrowing this down to one or two cockerels, maybe the pullets if they turn out good (doubt it) and one of last year's hens. I don't have particularly high expectations. Then there's the question of whether to use the Black offspring from the Cuckoo breedings (as in, breed those to Cuckoo birds). They should be carrying the genes for Cuckoo, I think.. dang, I get so mixed up.

I don't think the Creles are going to work out. Some of the pullets may have half decent body color but nothing out there has wing or tail barring. I think I would need to have really well marked barred/cuckoo Rosecombs before working on them, because now with them being only partbred, I'm dealing with poor type AND poor color all in one package. I never had high hopes for that, I'd only started it because the BBRed hens were laying and the Black hens weren't. :-)

I think the Silver Duckwings have potential though, especially with two pullets already being the right color. Hmm, what to do next year...

Anybody want some pet chickens? OMG I so need to go to auction! They may not be big enough for the next one though so I might have to wait til mid July. Ugh!

Pictures today

I took some pics of the oldest chicks today.

One of the very few "Cuckoo" pullets, she's from the F1 Cuckoo male X Black RC female. She was sort of brassy back colored when she hatched, and now she's this...strange somewhat barred color. Not a keeper, but interesting.

Most of the oldest batch, these are 7 weeks old now.

One of the "Crele" cockerels. I think they are all going to be too dark and poorly marked, though I'm not sure if these aren't what's considered an "intermediate" color and they may need to be bred Crele X Crele to get it right, I just don't know. It's hard to know at this point whether any of the new colors will work out or not.

A couple of the Cuckoo cockerels, most of which are REALLY poorly marked, either too dark or too washed out. This will be a challenge...

An afternoon siesta. These guys are about 6 weeks old (they are grouped more by size rather than age, some varieties are larger than others).

The pullet in the front is one of the Silver Duckwing X Black offspring. I had expected birchen colored chicks, so I'm quite surprised to see she's actually Silver Duckwing (close, anyway). There are two of them. One hatched out of an egg I'd marked as brassy back but I must have mismarked it.

They are so curious at this age. It's not a particularly pretty age, they are sort of gangly and awkward, but it's a great age to work with them.

One of the Crele pullets. The pullets seem to have more potential than the cockerels. This one isn't as well marked as one of the older ones but this was the only one I could get a pic of today.

Another view of a Silver Duckwing, they are really cute birds!

GREEN LEGS?!?!?! This is the new thing-that-will-drive-me-insane. Maybe even more so than the inverted spikes. I don't know where on earth the genes for green legs came from, but I'm getting a hoard of green-legged Brassies and Blue Brassies, and it seems to get worse every year. I thought green legs needed a yellow-legged bird in the ancestry, and there isn't anything like that in this strain. So... I don't know. I seem to recall years ago that a lot of them went through this phase of having slightly greenish legs, but matured to the proper slate color. I think just using those birds in the breeding pens has increased the incidence of green legs. I guess I'm going to really have to crack down on culling this out.

At first glance the Silver Duckwings and the Blue Brassy pullets look almost identical. The pink legs really set the Silvers apart though!

This is what Patrick does for most of the day. "GULP!"

Today is Shylah's 3rd birthday. My how time flies!

Interesting Things

Keywords from the month of May:

video of chicken wrangling (I haven't seen it, sounds cool)
silver phoenix horse (Interesting combination, "silver phoenix" is a chicken!)
how long does chicken stay preserved in the fridge (Depends how often you feed it. Oh, just kidding...)
how to make a chicken wire purse (Aren't you afraid your lipstick will fall out?)
wire fetish purse (What?!)
females call me (Um, congratulations?)
olin yeow (Ha ha, what? Olin is my cat, but sometimes he says that when the other cat plays too rough!)
homeade chicken coupe (I recommend Spelling 101, yowza)
what are white ducks called ("Fred") ;-)

It is tree frog season for sure, I've been finding them in the house. I just caught one crawling up the living room wall (Olin thought this was quite fascinating) and last week I found one hopping down the hallway while I was brushing my teeth.

nothing in particular

I guess I just figure as long as I'm still up and in the room I ought to write something more interesting than just a bunch of chick numbers.

I was asked the other day if I think my drawing style has improved with all the time I've been spending on the chicken illustrations. I would say yes, I think it has improved, and it has certainly changed. It's not so much that I'm doing things better (well, sometimes!) but I'm doing things differently. I have certain color combinations pretty well memorized now, so there's no hesitancy of "how do I make this particular color." I'm finding that even if it's not exactly the same as something I've already done I've gotten a lot more comfortable with colors in general and I can pretty well figure out what to layer (and in what order) to achieve a particular result.

I would bore you to tears if I had a web cam of me doing art. It's not like watching a real energetic painter make grand sweeping motions across a spacious canvas... it's little itty bitty teeny movements, mostly my fingers, sometimes my wrist, rarely my elbow, layers and layers of color over the same area of the drawing. I like to draw when I am at art shows (like Draft Horse Classic). It used to be kind of creep me out to have people watching but I've gotten used to it. I always think I must be about as exciting as watching the grass grow, but I've been told it's almost sort of hypnotic. Weird.

Speaking of weird, how about the horses... Gwen has mellowed out a little, but she still won't let Shylah and Patrick in close proximity. If they are all out in the pasture she'll be a reasonable distance away and not seem concerned, but if they get too close Gwen goes into attack mode. Patrick, however, has lost his pasture privileges and is now confined to the corrals again. He cribs (google this if you need more info, basically they grab hold of the fence or anything else with their teeth, pull back, flex their neck, and suck in air. I guess they get sort of a "high" from it...weird). Anyway, he's a real cribbing junkie. E.H. told me that he was, so I knew this when he came here. He did it in the corrals, but then for a couple days he stopped when I put him out on pasture. Well, that didn't last too long, so now while the girl horses go off and do normal horsey things like graze, eat mulberries under the tree, snooze in the shade, roll in the dirt, etc), Patrick spends probably 75% of his day cribbing. That's rough on the wood fence, he pulls hard and those boards can't take that sort of abuse, and it also just irritates the crap out of me to hear him out there going "GULP!" all day. So, no more pasture for him. If he's going to stand around and suck on the fence all day he's going to have to be in the pipe-fenced area where he can't do any damage. I do put Shylah in with him at night, partly because she's morphed into an enormous lard-bucket, but also because they get along and her being there shuts him up, because otherwise he neighs ALL NIGHT. I'm now referring to him as the neurotic freakazoid horse. He absolutely can't be alone. He will spend the whole day in the corral alone, pacing the fenceline the whole time, and work himself into quite a sweat. He's just not my kind of horse, and will definitely be going home by the end of his two months here. He's not a bad horse, he just has "issues." His owner gets just as irritated with him as I do!

The chicks are hatching..got a couple Cuckoos out so far.

Bed time.

Batch 6 chicks

T: Brassy male & Blue Brassy male X Brassy, Blue Brassy, BBB Splash females= 5 Brassy Back, 4 Blue Brassy Back, 3 Blue Brassy Splash
01: BBRed X BBRed= 3 BBRed
02: BBRed X BBRed= 5 BBRed
B: BBRed male X Brown Red females= 1 Brown Red
T7: Brown Red male X BBRed females= 1 BBRed, 1 Brown Red
N4: Black X Black= 1 Black
N5: Black X Black= 1 Brassy Back, 10 Black (wow!)

I have one batch due out tomorrow, one more HUGE batch (what was I thinking?!) due June 19, and I may set one more batch of Silvers depending what hatches tomorrow. TOO MANY DANG CHICKS!!! :-)

Batch 5 chicks

T: Brassy male & Blue Brassy male X Brassy, Blue Brassy, BBB Splash females= 2 Brassy Back, 5 Blue Brassy Back
01: BBRed X BBRed= 3 BBRed
02: BBRed X BBRed= 4 BBRed
T7: Brown Red male X BBRed females= 3 BBRed, 3 Brown Red
N4: Black X Black= 1 Brassy Back
N5: Black X Black= 4 Black

Batch 4 chicks

I didn't keep this updated while the computer was down, so now I'll catch up.

T: Brassy male & Blue Brassy male X Brassy, Blue Brassy, BBB Splash females= 4 Brassy Back, 4 Blue Brassy Back
01: BBRed X BBRed= 2 BBRed
02: BBRed X BBRed= 3 BBRed
B: BBRed male X Brown Red females= 4 BBRed, 1 Brown Red
T1: BBRed male X F1 Crele female= 3 BBRed, 1 Crele
T2: F1 Crele male X BBRed females= 2 BBRed, 2 Crele
T3: F2 Cuckoo male X Black female= 1 Black, 2 Cuckoo
T4: Black male X F1 Cuckoo females= 3 Black, 4 Cuckoo
T5: Black male X F1 Cuckoo females= 6 Black, 6 Cuckoo
T7: Brown Red male X BBRed females= 3 BBRed
N4: Black X Black= 3 Black
N5: Black X Black= 2 Black

new image

Finished today, this is other entry for Draft Horse Classic (Sept 06).


"The First of Spring"
colored pencil and graphite on gray stonehenge paper
10.5" x 13.5"
May 2006
will be for sale at DHC if it's accepted


Just for interest sake, here's an extreme closeup of part of the mare. This is way more detail than you'd see just looking at the original drawing. Color and form are created by laying the colored pencils. That can mean layering one color to create a gradation of light-dark, or layering many colors, going from light to dark--building up to create a form that appears to have depth. There are 10 colors used in the body of the mare (not including hooves, muzzle, eyes): white, cream, beige, sand, goldenrod, terra cotta, tuscan red, black cherry, burnt umber, indigo.