Illustration Friday: Lonely

It's impossible to be lonely when you have a good book—and a chicken or two.

This is May, my Buff Orpington hen, atop one of my latest yard sale finds. My husband spotted these beautiful Adirondack chairs when we stopped at a yard sale on our Saturday morning walk home from the coffee shop.

Both chairs and both footstools for $22—such a steal! I may refinish them down the road, but I kind of like their weathered look. But best of all, they're really comfortable for reading on a summer afternoon; May and Charlotte think so too. 

Are you reading anything wonderful this summer? (I keep my current picks on my sidebar over to the right, if you're interested.)

Marshmallow Peeps

Illustration Friday: Shades

Prismacolor colored pencil on pastel paper, 5" x 7"

Charlotte and May love how the mandarin orange tree shades them 

on a sunny afternoon.

This drawing could use a little tweaking, but since I'm working the rest of the week, I wanted to get it posted. I almost always work from actual objects, but since chickens don't sit still for very long, I worked from some photographs this time. May (the golden one) is actually the bigger of the two girls, but she was letting Charlotte upstage her when I was taking pictures.

Speaking of shades and chickens, I was watching one of my guilty-pleasure shows, "Storage Wars", this weekend, and learned that chicken sunglasses actually exist! So, I went online to try and find some photos to share with you, and found a great blog with a wonderful post about that very episode. The photos are hysterical.

Owning chickens provides a pretty constant source of entertainment. The other day, I heard them chattering loudly in their "upset" voices. My husband went out to check on them, and saw nothing unusual. He decided to check their nesting box for eggs while he was outside, and when he opened the little door, the neighbor's cat was sitting on the eggs!

Illustration Friday: Scattered

I panicked when I saw Charlotte's feathers scattered around the yard. Had the raccoon, that had savagely attacked my neighbor's cat, attacked one of my "girls"?  Fortunately, Charlotte soon scurried out from under the tangerine tree where she likes to dust bathe, and it all started to make sense—it's molting time.  

A molting chicken is not a pretty sight. My hens were too young to molt when fall arrived last year, so this is their maiden voyage. While May seems to be replacing her feathers a few at a time, poor bedraggled Charlotte has been looking like something the cat dragged in. But I noticed yesterday that her pin feathers are coming in, so she's looking more normal. Actually, she looks a bit like a hedgehog—something I've always wanted! (If you'd like to see the girls in all of their pre-molt splendor, click here to go their page.)

Feathers are amazing structures; I could use some practice drawing them. Also, the sheen of graphite complicates the scanning process, so I had to play around with the scanner settings. (I've really got to take a day and get the hang of using a camera and my copy stand...especially for graphite drawings.)

The scan above is in color, and the one below is in greyscale...which do you prefer?

Illustration Friday: Beginner

I've done a lot of drawing, but when it comes to drawing my chickens,
I'm a beginner. 

Since we got them a year ago, I've spent many hours observing "the girls", but the few sketches I've done look scattered and hodgepodge-y.  I'm not fond of drawing from photos, and chickens are constantly moving.  Sure, it's easy enough to quickly get the basic shape down on paper (basically a big fluffy triangle) but it'll inevitably end up headless or footless.  So, today, I decided to just go for it. I tossed an ear of fresh corn out onto the grass, and even though the three of them were constantly jockeying for position, I settled on just drawing May.

May deserves the honor of being Chicken Model #1.  Last week, around "May Day" appropriately enough, she decided to commemorate her first birthday by taking a celebratory toddle into our pool.  Fortunately. the other two hens squawked up a storm and I ran out to find her soggy and freezing, but afloat.  (Unlike their waterfowl cousins, chickens aren't particularly buoyant.)  She was incredibly stressed (as was I) but she's a hardy gal and, by evening, looked no worse for the wear...and quite clean.

So, hopefully, this is the first sketch in a long line of chicken drawings.  It'll be a good while before I master them, but we all have to be willing to be beginners now and then. 

If you have nothing more pressing to do, and want to read more about my chickens, I have a separate little page on them here.

Illustration Friday: Chicken!

I've been wanting to participate in Illustration Friday for a while now.  For those of you who unfamiliar with it, Illustration Friday is a website that chooses a topic every Friday, then throughout the following week, artists and illustrators of all skills levels can post a link to their interpretation of the topic.  Even though I've been checking it out for weeks, I hadn't participated.  Sometimes the topic didn't appeal to me, but to be honest, there was a little stage-fright involved.  What finally got me to take the plunge?  This week's topic is chicken.

Since my chickens are my latest obsession, (I've even added a page to my blog for those of you interested in seeing them.) I figured it's now or never!  So, thanks to my three hens...here's my first contribution to Illustration Friday.

(Big thanks to Jannie Ho at Chickengirl Design for the topic. Check out her blog here; she's incredibly talented. And she likes chickens.)