Watercolor pencils: Some more NZ birds

Some more New Zealand bids: the Little Owl and the Kereru.
Same materials as in the last post.

Watercolor pencils: NZ bird drawings

Some drawing of birds from photos I've taken over the years. I'm going to use these on the calligraphy website I'm developing currently. The space around them will be filled with text eventually.
Faber-Castel watercolour pencils and Staedler waterproof pigment liner 0.1mm on recycled paper.

Mail art: More NZ birds

I'm trying to get into the habit of doing one envelope a day (if possible!). I was going for a more ¨cartoon-y¨ kind of look, put perhaps that will come with practice.

Front: A Miromiro bird. I'm pretty sure I've seen these while out tramping. Not sure if I've seen them around our house though.

Back: A Piwakawaka (Fantail) bird. We see heaps of these around our house.

Another envelope. Front: An Australiasian Crested Grebe. What great a hairdo this guy has.

 Back: Seabirds flying around.

Mail art: Gannet and California Quail

Back and front of some mail art envelopes I made. A couple of birds we see alot of in New Zealand: the Californian quail and the gannet. These are watercolour on 120 gsm paper. I didn't notice the envelope was a bit creased in the photo until I'd already posted off the original.

Owl mail art

I've been drawing birds alot lately, but would like to paint them. I really like Matt Sewwell's style of painting birds in his books. Its all a bit daunting, so I thought to start out I'd practice some owls from his owl book on some handmade envelopes to send to friends. He is so talented. Next step is to do my own birds from my own designs with New Zealand birds. Some of the envelopes hadn't been fully glued together when I took these photos.

 

A New Zealand Little Owl

A New Zealand Little Owl (Athene Noctua).
India Ink, Schaeffer calligraphy pen.

A gratuitous photo of a Dolphin, somewhere near Foster, NSW, Australia.

Some watercolor portraits

Some watercolor portrait sketches on Arches A4 paper.

 Above: sketched with pencil first

 

Above: No preliminary pencil sketch - just painted straight on.

Above: Just painted - no preliminary pencil sketch. For a just a quick, straight watercolour sketch, I'm pretty happy with it.