The first of my experiments with psuedo-encaustic…this one turned out too glossy and too obviously acrylic for my taste, but the results are still kinda interesting…
And some little ACEO-sized sketches of rabbits I was fooling around with last night…
I used to draw a lot of rabbits as a kid. (I loved loved Watership Down.*) It was one of my things, along with horses. (Come to think of it, the heads on the horses and the rabbits were pretty similar…) They were innocent of skill or anatomical knowledge–I was eight–and my mother was encouraging, which meant that she got handed dozens of drawings of rabbits, always sitting up, facing right, clutching carrots. She put one on her studio door. Mom was good about that sort of thing. I’ve found myself doodling rabbits for the last couple of days, which are also largely innocent of anatomy, but at least in somewhat more novel ways.
Meanwhile, we have a hawk. A red-tailed hawk, I b’lieve, who has an astonishingly fluffy crotch (he looks like he’s wearing a feather boa around his hips–I’d think he was a juvenile still, but it’s not exactly baby bird season. Might just be cold, or maybe he’s a first year who hung onto his baby fluff for awhile. ) I saw him for the first time Wednesday, when he landed under the birdfeeder, missing a strike, and then lurked in one of the little trees until everybody forgot he was there (it was incredible, you could actually see the juncos getting bolder and bolder…) whereupon he launched himself at something small and grey in the leaf litter. Since he opened his mouth and swallowed it down whole, I couldn’t tell you if it was a mouse or a vole or an unfortunate Carolina chickadee, just that it went down very quickly.
Yesterday I saw him briefly through the trees. Today he’s hanging out on one of the old deadfalls in the woods, watching for unwary birds. Apparently this has become his buffet of choice for the moment.
I am dreadfully pleased by this–I love the little birds that come to the feeder, but there are a lot of them, and he’s so magnificently sullen, the way birds of prey are.
I am less pleased by the glossy liver-colored doe that now comes and eats out of my bird feeder every morning. She wanders off when I open the window and yell, but only grudgingly.
*My first fanfiction was a Watership Down/Star Trek crossover. I was in fourth grade and showed it to no one.
