our backyard friend’s silhouettes

our backyard friend’s silhouettes, originally uploaded by young@art.

A warmup set, and part of my new silhouette obsession: Winsor & Newton Black Indian Ink atop delta ceramcoat atop gesso atop the pages of a Moleskine (heavy stock) sketchbook.

We have no more critters in our backyard than anyone else, but I wage that ours are the cutest, because of the quail. There’s a family, about 20 of them, that run the perimeter at dusk. The California Thrasher couple have a nest somewhere in the hedge; when we lay in the sun by the bird bath, one of them will watch us from the grapefruit tree, sometimes with a red worm in his mouth, for a half-hour or more. Hummingbirds are always fighting, and the woodpeckers have assaulted the old olive tree on their continual hunt for boring insects.