Robin Arnold Art

I finished my second pencil drawing of this male Lesser Scaup over Memorial Day weekend. There are areas that could be improved upon but I'm amazed it turned out as well as it did. These drawings mean more to me than words can express, not only because I just love to draw but for several years my right thumb hurt so badly that it made that hand essentially unusable. Everything I loved to do, including my wood carving, came to a grinding halt. I couldn't even hold a pencil or paintbrush without extreme pain. After a few years my thumb finally got better but then it started to hurt because of arthritis. After almost ten years of being side-lined the pain has lessened and I'm finally able to do some carving and a little drawing. I have to be very careful though, because if I overdo it my thumb starts to hurt.  I think painting with watercolors would be less stressful on my hands so I bought a set along with a couple books and I'm trying to paint something that looks r...

Several wood ducks and hooded mergansers have been flying in and out of the new nesting boxes we put up this spring but one female wood duck has finally claimed one of the boxes as her own and is now incubating the eggs. This is the box on the edge of our pond and the one that we are able to keep a closer eye on. Female wood duck perched on a nest box Now that the female is incubating the eggs the male wood duck isn't hanging as much around but a week ago, when the following photos were taken,  he was still with the female. While she was checking out the box or laying eggs he would swim around in front of the box, keeping a watchful eye on the surroundings. Male wood duck swimming in front of the nest box I was  very fortunate to get a photo of the two of them together before she entered the nest box. I won't get another chance for a photo like this until next spring! Pair of wood ducks in our pond near the nest box

 We finally had a family of Canada geese show up yesterday! The adults, unlike most, seem to be ok with me standing close enough to get some nice photos. What really struck me about the 8 goslings was the amount of fighting going on between them. The fighting was not playful bantering and I had an awful feeling one or two could be killed. This morning when they showed up there were only 7 goslings. There is no way to know for sure what happened to one of the goslings but I do wonder if one of its siblings killed it. We've had a lot of geese on our property and I have never seen goslings fight this viciously.

 I'm fairly certain this is the pair who have claimed the pond box as their own. Yesterday afternoon the female went into the box and the male took a five hour nap on top of it. I hurried home from work so I could get a photo but Gena said they both flew away about five minutes before I got home. I took this photo last week of the duck eggs in the pond nest box. I checked for two successive  mornings after I took this photo and it went from four eggs to six and from six to nine which indicated more than one duck is laying in this box. After the female is done laying eggs she pulls out her own downy breast feathers and mixes  them in with the wood  chips for extra warmth. This photo was taken two days ago on 5/5/15.  Let the incubation begin!

I've decided to scale down my photography and later this year I plan on selling my 500mm lens I use for bird photography. I'm 59 and every year it gets harder and harder to drag that heavy gear around. What I want to do is spend more time drawing and eventually try some watercolors. This is something I've wanted to do my entire life but for one reason or another I've never seriously pursued it. I also didn't think I could draw but I now believe anyone can if one has the desire and  puts the effort into it. Most of us won't turn out to be great artists but we will be able to turn out an acceptable piece of art that we can be proud of. This is my first serious pencil drawing and I'm ecstatic it  actually looks like a chickadee! To get a better idea of the different gradations of tones I printed this photo in black and white. I sketched in the chickadee with an HB pencil and then used progressively softer leads for the darker areas of the bird, with a 4B...

On April 24, just over a week ago, I wrote about the two wood duck nest boxes we put up on our property. The box we put on the back edge of the pond is visible from our house and with our binoculars we've been able to watch ducks, sparrows and swallows checking it out. Nest box on the edge of the pond We're not experts on monitoring nest boxes of any kind so after doing a little research we discovered that the boxes should be checked in the morning to help keep raccoons away. I assume this is because the scent we leave behind will have a chance to dissipate before the racoons come out in the early evening. So every morning I have checked on our two boxes. The one on the edge of the marsh hasn't seen much activity yet but I'm pulling a huge wad of twigs, feathers, etc. out of the "pond box" that the house sparrows are trying to take over. Thursday morning I mistakenly thought the box was empty and when I started to open it a female wood duck flew out...