May is one of the best months of all, especially in Japan. In fact, it is in the running with October for my favorite month of all. Nearly every day has been sunny and warm, with a cool breeze, cool nights, and a pleasant breeze blowing all day long. The wind carries the smell of flowers and timber from the nearby mills, and the songs of frogs and birds carry on all day long.
Yesterday I took my art class to the Hino River in the center of town for sketching — it’s one of my favorite places to sketch here. We sat under the bridge in the shade, surrounding by darting swallows, catching bugs and feeding them to their chicks. The sound of the water and the sweet breeze made it a wonderful day for sketching outside. In between monitoring class I was able to jot down this little pencil sketch in my moleskine:
After sketching the mountain, we spent the rest of the class watching the birds dart about. Swallows have the most amazing movement which was hard to capture, but I was about to do a couple of 10-second gesture drawings of them. These short, tiny bird sketches are refreshing in comparison to the relatively longer landscapes. If you don’t finish them in under 10 to 15 seconds you lose all of the energy and the end result looks lifeless, so you are forced to just take a snapshot with your eyes and then transfer all of that energy onto the paper in just a few strokes. You can see the result below.
By the river, tons of other birds stop by for drinks and baths — crows, kites, herons, storks, pheasants, sparrows, and more. There is this one black and white bird that I see around here a lot. I have no idea what it is, but it is very beautiful and its tail bobs up and down in the most amusing manner whenever it stops running. It reminds me of the plovers of the Atlantic coast, but it’s a bit smaller and I don’t think it’s a shore bird.
Thank you for sharing! I love the idea of how you must quickly capture a bird’s image.
love the bird sketches! the tail movement sounds like the way our mockingbird flash it up and down…… I saw what looked like a commercial for your art classes….was that what it was
The look a little like mockingbirds, but they have different coloring. They are also better at aerial tricks than mockingbirds. But they don’t sing as well.