Catpaw – diary of an angry cat

Every once in a while I find I have nothing to say. It’s not that there is nothing to comment on, it’s simply that I feel exhausted by the over-all silliness in the world and I need to take a brief sabbatical. I’m not sure if this past year has been exceptional, but it feels like the lunatics are in charge of the asylum. But… I’m actually starting to make some money from this modest little memorial to my rants – I made @$100 last month, so now I feel obliged to write more, or more precisely, be more consistent in keeping the diary updated. So rats! I can no longer afford to be irresponsible and just vanish for awhile, I have to grow up and treat this more responsibly. If advertisers are willing to contribute towards what I desperately hope will be (in the near future) a dissolute lifestyle, than I will write.

During this past break from reading up on worldly shenanigans, I took up sketching again. I haven’t done this for decades (literally). During the winter I began to dabble a bit in drawing, but couldn’t settle on anything that took my fancy. About 3 weeks ago I started to try and draw birds. Well that was a disaster! I won’t show you the first attempts. Needless to say, I rediscovered the joys of shredding. I pissed around and piddled about and then read up on the subject through a variety of helpful websites. It was illuminating. I was (as normal with me) doing things ass backwards. So I started small by drawing single feathers. My first couple were mediocre, but after I got the feel for the way they flowed, I was off and running. Here are a couple of feathers I’m rather pleased with:

From Catpaw’s Art work

Individual feathers are easy to do. When I get frustrated, I just draw a feather:

From Catpaw’s Art work

But building up to the entire bird is a different matter – a shredding matter. It’s nice to be able to hide the evidence of my first attempts. My wings are an embarrassment to the bird world. They resemble a badly done illustration on the legend of Daedalus and Icarus. No self respecting bird would be caught dead with my wings. I’ve set aside drawing them for awhile. Onto other parts of the bird…. I am drawing their heads. Basically because I have no problem drawing eyes. They are easy. I drew a puffin head – I’m a bit potty about puffins. It wasn’t bad, but not entirely proportioned. I switched to smaller birds with more defined feathering on the head because puffins are a bit difficult to see details in the feathering and no you can’t see my puffin head. But you can see my other bird heads. Beaks are very hard to get right. Each bird has such a defined and different type of beak shape. Sitting in the cafe with my bird book and sketch pad valiantly attempting to draw bird beaks made me feel a bit Darwinesque. I marvelled and cursed the diversity in the beaks. Too bad they weren’t all standardised for simplicity of sketching. Hurray they aren’t all standardised for the excitement of finally getting the beaks to resemble the photos. Here are my first, ready for public viewing, bird heads:

From Catpaw’s Art work

The little titmouse (top right sketch) has a a startled hedgehog effect going, but I was having a few problems with his beak. It is shockingly hard to get. So it ended up contributing to his rather amazed look. I have a book coming from the library on how to sketch birds. Hopefully it will help me get the feathers correct and help with the **shudder** claws. I’m having difficulties with wings, just imagine the problems I’ll encounter with the feet. Maybe I’ll just have all my birds hide their claws behind foliage.

Stumble it!