Tags
Alabama, art, birds, colored pencil, drawing, fairies, illustration, Val Webb
Heron Fisherman, drawn in Prismacolor pencil
I live on a hill, and the street that runs past my front door ends abruptly at the edge of the bay, four blocks down. It’s an easy walk, early in the morning, to watch pelicans dive for their breakfast and hear gulls laughing as they sail past overhead. And in the shallows, when the water is calm, the great blue heron stands motionless. I suppose he is waiting for the gleam of careless minnows in the water at his feet, but he might as well be posing for my sketchbook. A beautiful bird, bold enough to ignore a small woman nearby with a fistful of colored pencils, he makes a great model.
I’m honored to be the featured artist in the upcoming June issue of Colored Pencil Artists magazine — an issue that will focus on birds in colored pencil. I drew this heron, and his fisherman friend, with that event in mind.
The heron is drawn in Prismacolor Premiere, the soft-core colored pencils I like to use. After making a foundation drawing in Dark Umber — including all the major shadows and textures — I used just five other colors, layered on over the Umber, to finish the bird. His beak is Yellow Ochre, shaded gently with Terra Cotta (the same combination is used for his fierce eye). I don’t like to use pre-formulated grays, which seem a little flat, but prefer to blend a warm and vital gray by mixing Light Peach and Cloud Blue. All the gray areas on this fellow are created with those two colors. Then I used black, of course, for his dark mask and (very sparingly) to deepen the richest shadows.
The fisherman’s wings are based on the lovely (and enormous) polyphemus moth, a silkworm moth that is common where I live. The richly pigmented, slightly dusty feel of colored pencil is perfect for drawing lepidopterans, from monarch to cabbage moth.
I live in a place where it’s not unusual to hear the ”who-cooks-for-you?” call of barred owls, especially just before dawn. Eerily beautiful with their pale faces and dark eyes (they are the only brown-eyed owl in the eastern US) they thrive in neighborhoods. Despite the fears of my neighbors who are convinced that the owl roosting in their oak tree wants to make a meal of their chihuahua, barred owls are usually after rodents… and older neighborhoods, like the one where I live, provide a steady supply. They are large creatures, with wings spanning three feet. Twice, while walking at night, I have seen barred owls soar past just a few feet above my head like silent ghosts, gliding fast, suddenly materializing out of the dark. It is a sight that will stop you in your tracks.
