Feeding the birds continued..

I've been trying to improve on my attempts to photograph the birds in my garden but I don't seem to be making much, if any, progress! It seems as if the birds know immediately I go anywhere near the window and take flight!

This was the nearest I came to catching the blackbird in the act of eating the apple when our first snow had thawed and the second lot hadn't yet arrived -

 

But I did get a better shot of him sitting on the wall in the sunshine, wondering where to fly off to next -

You can just make out his one light grey feather but I'm sure the one that ate my apples last year had his white feather on the other side! Maybe a lot of  blackbirds have a white feather? I don't know - I'm no bird expert!

I haven't seen much of the blue tits lately and when they do visit my garden, they seem to stay very high up in the fruit trees, in spite of my net of seeds that I've hung from the lower branches. They seem to be more interested in pecking at the branches than my specially bought birdseed!

As you can see, the snow is back with us and causing its usual havoc on the roads.

It's even managed to turn Zeus's hair white overnight!

Maybe he's worrying about how everyone is going to manage at Christmas if our roads, railways and airports are still affected by the white stuff! I'm really lucky in that I spend Christmas at home and the shops are close enough to walk to, even in pretty awful weather conditions. 

But if you do have to travel in this unusually inclement weather, I wish you all a safe and comfortable journey!

Canadian Artist, Carole Barkett, writes about some very challenging Bluebirds!

When asked by Judy to do a guest artist article for this blog, I was thrilled, then I wondered what to write about. For a while, I tried to find new images that would inspire me to paint but that's hard when you're working and running a household and family, as many artists do, and of course the more you want to paint something, the harder it is to settle down and actually do it.

My last painting was the Magpie family but it all came together so quickly, there was nothing to talk about, then....I decided to paint Bluebirds.

I quickly realised that my past paintings were based on my knowledge of a particular animal or bird. Although we have Bluebirds here, and I've seen their nestboxes on almost every fencepost, I've had no luck seeing one and because I haven't, a few problems developed in the painting process.

I searched my stockpile of reference pictures until I found ones that looked great. After hours of sketching and rearranging, I finally had what I was looking for and was satisfied. I painted the picture and scanned it. The painting still looked pretty good at this point; then I uploaded it to Zazzle and.....my bluebird had a moustache. He doesn't in my picture but he does in my uploaded one, as you can see below:

 

I don't know where this moustache comes from except that I lose a lot of the lighter colours in the process of uploading, so that area looks white when it isn't.

Back to the drawing board I went, but it can be impossible to fix watercolour. The more you work on it, the muddier the colours get and soon it's ruined. Well, that's exactly what happened to this one. I tried playing around with photo editing but that only made it worse as you can see.

I think most of my problems come from never having seen a Bluebird so I was never sure if what I was painting was quite right and I kept having to check my reference pictures which rules out any creative thought.

I guess I'll go out birding this summer and wait for a real one to study, unless....I can find one on Youtube.

If I'm successful, you'll see it on www.zazzle.com/countrymousestudio and if you want more background stories on my other paintings, you can check out my blog.