Robin Arnold Art

It's been a long time since I've posted anything but I'm going to try and breathe some life back into my blog. I've had problems with a pinched nerve over the last year that was so debilitating I had to resign from my job and for a few months it was hard to lift my arm to paint. This was no great loss to the art world but it left a big void in my life. Although it hasn't gone away it has gotten better. I still have a hard time taking photos, lifting binoculars and sometimes drawing/painting but I am getting the strength back in my arm and the pain is much more manageable than a year ago. Despite my physical limitations and my utter lack of confidence in my abilities I do think I reached a new plateau in my watercolor painting. After a ton of bad paintings ending up in the wastebasket something finally clicked. The painting below of a Cedar Waxwing was a breakthrough and although I still have many failures they are not as frequent as they were a few months ago. ...

September has been quite a month on our 12 acres. Within less than two weeks I had rescued a budgie(parakeet) and a rogue rooster. I first spotted the budgie one evening as we were shutting up the chickens. He was sitting on a bush in  our backyard. My first reaction was "rare bird" but I soon calmed down after looking at the yellow blob with binoculars. Definitely a budgie. I tried to capture him that evening but he flew off to the top of a very large willow tree. Over the next couple of days we spotted him off and on under the bird feeder but he always flew off with the wild birds every time we walked out the back door. About 3 days later, on our wedding anniversary, I saw him sitting on our chainlink fence all by himself...no other birds around. I grabbed some bird seed and slowly walked over to him, fully expecting him to fly away. He didn't. He let me put my seed-filled hand in front of him and he started to eat the food. While he was eating, I carefully brought up...

Gena and I decided to walk  a few laps around our marsh yesterday afternoon but we didn't get very far before we were waylaid by several chickadees looking for a hand-out. It was a cold day with a bitter northeast wind but it was well worth the frozen and numb fingers to bond with these adorable little birds. The chickadees will eat of Gena's or my hand but in this video Gena is feeding them while I documented it with my new point and shoot camera. This is a great little camera to take on walks because it's nice and light...a lot easier than carrying heavy DSLR equipment. Not long ago it was a big deal to have 1-2 chickadees feed from our hand but the population is slowly growing and yesterday there must have been 3-5 birds flying in for a treat. When we first started feeding them a year ago they would fly in close to investigate but they wouldn't perch on our hand. We solved that problem by placing our hand under a small branch where the chickadees could safe...

 Gena and I have had a problem with this ever since we've had chickens. We also have tons of rabbits and every year a few of them go the Easter Bunny route. We have actually caught them in the coop, yanking eggs out of the next boxes. This particular hen has obviously made a deal with one of the bunnies in return for a pile of dew worms. This was a very fast sketch using Micron pens and watercolor. I had a fever while I did this so that might explain a lot :)

I  finished this carving! This hunk of bark sat on my bench for a few months before I ever touched it with a carving knife. I kept waiting for it to speak to me but apparently this piece  was mute. I thought it looked like some kind of bird but I was hesitant to start. Eventually, I decided to carve  an owl. I was happy with the results but then I was afraid to paint it for fear I would ruin my carving so it sat for several more months. With Christmas looming I decided I had to finish this piece so I could put it in my Etsy shop. Since great-horned owls have a lot of brown on them I thought  leaving most of the owl unpainted would be a good idea but I still needed to  accent the feathers or the carving would look pretty blah. Enter the wood burner. I bought this a year ago as a birthday gift to my spouse but I think I've used it more than she has. It made the owl pop without mucking it up with paint. For more details check it out in my Etsy shop at: http...

I'm still plugging away with my watercolors and I have a couple to share that are at least recognizable. On September 8th we went to Meyer's Hatchery in Polk, OH. to pick up six tiny chicks. They are the cutest things ever and Gena and I have been spending as much time as possible with them so they will not only be good egg layers but also good friends.  The new additions to our family are Maggie, Debi(both named after high school classmates), Amelia, Susy(named after my junior high German teacher), Harriet and Cuddles. This painting was my third attempt and although it has a lot of flaws I'm happy with it. I painted this from one of my photos....no way I can sketch constantly moving chicks! Amelia, as in Amelia Earhart,  is the yellow chick and was so named because she was trying to fly since she was a day old. Amelia is a Blue Ameracana, which is considered a rare breed. Susie is a Barred Rock and although she was named after my German teacher, her name also pays tri...

Shortly after I wrote my last blog entry, Keetie, my little guinea fowl buddy, and all but one of our chickens were killed. Here is a link to our August Lifestyles 2000 article which is a tribute to this very special bird. Scroll down to page 5 to view the article. http://lifestyles2000.net/pages/aug15/aug15.pdf We still only have the one remaining hen. Her name is Leica and she is currently sitting on an egg that the black silkie laid. I doubt that it hatches but it's worth a try.

It's never too early to think about Christmas, especially if you carve Santas! I recently completed one with a teddy bear, one with a chickadee and lastly, a Santa carved from cottonwood bark. Santa with Chickadee  I'm big on birds and one of my favorites is the chickadee so I couldn't wait to incorporate one into a Santa carving. This Santa is carved from basswood, with acrylic paints and finished with two coats of satin varnish and one coat of wax.  https://www.etsy.com/listing/235841817/hand-carved-santa-with-staff-and?ref=shop_home_active_3 Cottonwood Bark Santa My cottonwood bark Santa is carved from a piece of bark I found lying along the shoreline of Lake Erie. To give it an extra special rustic look I left some of the bark on the carving. This carving is painted with acrylic paints and finished with two coats of satin varnish and one coat of wax.  https://www.etsy.com/listing/236475497/hand-carved-rustic-santa-robin-arnold?ref=shop_home_active_1 ...

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...

 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'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...

After talking about it for the last couple of years, we finally decided to order two wood duck nest boxes. Why didn't we do it sooner? These large nest boxes are no small feat to put up for anyone at any age but for two women, aged 59 and 65, it's a monumental task!  UPS delivered two wood duck nest boxes UPS delivered the nest boxes on April 17th, and that morning we got out the post hole digger, an 8 foot 4x4 post and went to work. This one was erected on the edge of our pond.Thank goodness our property is usually a soggy mess in the spring as it made the job of digging a hole much easier. Gena and Keetie digging the hole for a nest box We put the second box up the following morning on the edge of the marsh and I've spent the last week lathering myself with arthritis cream and popping Tylenol and Aleve for sore hands, neck, back, etc. Was it worth it? Well, a certain male house sparrow is ecstatic we went to all this work just for hi...

Male Ringed-necked Duck  The ring-necked ducks are gone now but earlier this month we had a few hanging around on our pond. This year the weather  and the ducks cooperated and I was able to get nice pics of the male and female. The ring around the neck is very hard to see so I always ID this duck by the ring around it's bill.   Female Ring-necked Duck Ring-necks are diving ducks and every year a few stop by our pond to fuel up before completing their trip north to breed. The following photo shows a male ring-necked duck in the foreground beginning to dive. The duck behind him is a female bufflehead who stayed with the ring-necks for several days. Male ring-necked duck(in the foreground) diving for food

While Gena and I were drinking our morning coffee a phoebe flew up to the window, looked in, and then perched on a feeder post. Phoebes, one of the earliest spring migrants , are in the flycatcher family. We also have Willow Flycatchers that nest on our property and I have a feeling I've been getting the similar vocalizations of these two birds mixed up. I'm now starting to wonder if phoebes have also been nesting close by. Their nests have a mud foundation and anyone who has ever visited our property knows this is the "land of mud". We also have protected spots on our barn and a couple of smaller  buildings that would be a good location for a phoebe nest. We'll be keeping on eye out for nesting phoebes and keep you updated. Eastern Phoebe I'm not only watching birds but carving them. Below is a rustic cottonwood bark Bald Eagle I just finished.  I still have to paint it but so far I'm happy with this carving. I've done a few of these in the pas...

From time to time we will be posting one of our articles that we wrote  for a small local magazine.  This one was written in the summer of 2009. 12 ACRES IN OHIO Remembering Betsy             Two years ago this month we lost a dear friend. She was a one-legged Barred Rock hen, and she was a big part of our daily lives for 3 years. She left a big empty space when she died…. Betsy looking for bugs. You can see her crippled leg in this photo.   She came to us along with twenty other day-old Barred Rock chicks five years ago. At first, she looked like all the other chicks, but a couple of weeks after their arrival, we noticed the leg of one of the chicks was angled out and she walked on her hock. Our first concern was that she might have some horrible disease that could be passed on to the other chicks. But everything we read said that probably was not the case. Then we were worried that the others...