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...

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...