Tag Archives: coloring

Squirrelly

All over the map this last week or two… this must be what squirrels feel like when they’re about to cross the street.  If there has been any theme it has been small fluffy animals – kittens, chicks, and most recently puppies.  I’ll just blame that on my friends and their adorable little critters.  But there have also been landscapes, lettering, botanicals, and urban areas that caught my eye, so here they all are.

A word about small fluffy animals – I’m learning that it only takes a few lines to age them drastically.  The puppy for example – I really struggled to keep him a baby, all soft and round.  The result is a very pastel, low contrast piece, which might make a nice greeting card at some point, but it won’t knock anyone’s socks off.

And a word about the Bungalow style, which is part Art Nouveau, part Craftsman, part coloring book.  I am always really drawn to these styles, maybe that’s because I like to use line so much.  Thick, dark lines with nice solid color fills, bold negative spaces, unabashed contrasts.  I used the American Bungalow magazine from the library as inspiration for these studies – it’s a pleasing publication, partly because of the lovely high quality paper it’s printed on, and partly because of the focus on “human sized” homes, although most of the homes probably have at least three times the square footage of our tiny cottage.

 

chicken coloring page

Feeding Time

colored pencil sketch of hen

Feeding Time

 

 I’m having fun with coloring pages again!  This intense hen was sketched from a photo by Aaron Jay, he of recent duck acquisition fame.  The lines were simple enough to make a fun coloring page.  But once I got started doodling around with feather patterns, the lines got more and more complex… and the colors got a little wild.  But it was fun!  So here’s the more complicated coloring page as well:
colored hen 

coloring page hen

Color me Hungry!

 
 

Get Out Your Blue Crayon!

bird coloring page

"Honey, come see what you think of this one!"

Color me blue and orange!  I learned in my research that the eastern blue bird used to be called “Robin Redbreast”, and it’s the state bird of New York state.  We don’t see many bluebirds here in Corvallis unless we go out to Bald Hill and hike around the pastures.  The fence lines along the paths there have many bluebird nest boxes, and if we’re lucky in the spring and on hot summer days we see them swooping through the fields.  I suspect that if I was a bluebird, I’d prefer a nice hole in a tree trunk like this one.  Those nest boxes look hot in the sunshine!