Nature Journal, Figure and Art Festival

Above is a Nature Journal spread from my visit last week to Ellisville Harbor, a MA State Park that is on the Ocean in Plymouth with a view of Cape Cod. The park has several ecosystems, shore, estuary, fresh water marsh, some pine woods, oak woods and even a meadow. It is wonderful birding habitat and I saw more varieties of birds on this one outing than I usually see. They have large areas of the beach fronting sand dunes screened off from the public as nesting habitat for endangered shore birds. They also have an occupied Osprey nest stand.

My top drawing shows one of those endangered birds walking along the shore looking for a meal. This is a Piping Plover in breeding plumage. I hope it and its mate successfully raise a brood of young this year. I didn't see any young birds just two adults.

The lower drawing is of a Pitch Pine with some of last years pine cones still clinging to the tree. These trees are fairly common in the sandy soil of southern MA heading down toward the Cape. They are also common trees on the Cape. This one was also putting out the flower heads for this falls pine cones.

Some of the other birds I saw on my visit were nesting Osprey, Laughing Gulls (they have black heads this time of year), a Heron, I think another Little Blue but it was a bit too far for me to get a good look, a Baltimore Oriole, Yellow Warbler, Catbird, Robin, Canada Geese, Common Yellow Throat, and a Hummingbird.

Above is my Monday night figure drawing, We had quite a crowd, and a model who held her pose wonderfully, so it was a good evening, The model was wearing a robe which always is a bit tricky for me to handle as the fabric never flows the same way twice after the first session, so I  have to  make decisions about how to treat it fairly early on. Hands per usual can get tricky also.

This next section is devoted to photographs I made at the Massasoit Community College's Fourth Art Festival which took place on Sunday May 20th. The top photo above shows the tent where the juried Professional show was held. They had a College Student show in the Art Gallery, and upstairs in the classrooms they had juried exhibits of works created by students from several local High Schools.  All the student exhibits showed work by some promising artists. I had two pieces accepted into the Juried show, but didn't win an award this year.

The rest of the photographs show the annual printing of a large linoleum block print. This year the theme was mythical animals. The combined blocks are printed with the use of the small "steam" roller, 2 prints on paper and 2 prints on fabric. This year they also used 2 colors for the print and I think it is really effective.

Above is one of the Fabric prints which they hung from a balcony so the ink could dry.

Below are a couple of photographs I made at Ellisville Harbor:

The little bird above is a Piping Plover. They are rather small birds, and can be easily disturbed off their nests which is why the protection is set up for them. The black ring around the neck is part of their breeding plumage.

Look to the lower right corner of the above photo and you will see the Hummingbird I saw. Since it was back lit I can't tell you if it was a male or a female. It actually sat on the branch for a fairly long time before it flew off to wherever.

That is it for today. I didn't have a lot of art for today, I have been working on another project, and the weather yesterday wasn't good (pouring rain) for my getting a photograph of my figure drawing, hence the delay in the blog update. Per usual comments are welcome. Hope all my visitors here in the States have a wonderful Memorial Day weekend planned.