 Well, hello there. I'm Sandy Olnok. Welcome to my sister's back patio. I just got back from a trip. I spent a little over a week at my sister's while she was out of the country. I was watching her cats and hung out quite a bit with my mom while I was there, too. So it's a good time off and I spent my mornings working on a project that I thought I'd share at least the start of it with you. In case you have some holiday gifts coming up that you need to figure out what to do, what to get for someone, how to give a gift as an artist to someone that you love. So let's get going. I really do love incorporating the recipient's interests in gifts that I give. And not just by, you know, giving them a sweater in their favorite color, but what are their passions and their interests? What is it that I can do that can interact with that in some way? And I'm very lucky that I have a sister who's interested in birding right now. For the last couple years she's been looking for all the birds on her property where she lives, beautiful place, full of trees and flowers and all different kinds of things. There's a path that goes all the way around the property down to the bottom where there's a rather noisy creek and it's not noisy because of the creek, it's noisy because of the traffic along the road, but up on the hillside further it's much quieter. And I took lots and lots of pictures, lots and lots of videos so that I came home with lots of references for making a sketchbook of all the birds that she has seen on her property. Because when she came to visit me earlier this year I saw her list of all the birds of Harmony Hills which she calls her place Harmony Hill. And she was so proud of this, so excited about all the these birds she's got on her list. She's got a bird app in her phone so she can identify them by sound or by their their markings. And I was originally thinking of doing one big painting with all the birds in it and try to scale them so that a tiny bird would be tiny and a big bird would be big. That did not work. I spent like a couple of days trying to scale them in Photoshop to figure out which one was a three inch bird which one was a five inch bird and when you've got a tiny brown thrasher and a giant candidate goose you're not going to see much of the little babies because you've got really big birds taking up space as well. So what I decided instead would be to make her a sketchbook of all of the birds that are on her property. And I painted some of the birds before I got there and then sat down each morning out on the patio and worked on some of the others. And then a few of them that I had the birds finished for I could just add the background to it you know whatever kind of scene that I wanted that bird to sit in. So as I walked around I kind of thought okay a bird could sit on that piece of wood a bird could climb that tree a bird could sit on this little twig and try to take pictures of those things so that when it got to those paintings I could try to match it up with a bird that looked like it might be about the right size. So there was this jumble of stuff that was off in the forest being reclaimed slowly by Mother Nature and I thought I'd put the blue jay in that with just you know a bunch of pieces of wood that it would just be sitting on top of. And then the brown creeper I picked a tree that was out there on the property to make the bark look like the bark on that tree. So I had a lot more detail to it to make it match. Some of these I would take all the way out to the tree or to the setting so that I could paint it right in front of that because you see more detail and more depth when you're looking at something real rather than a photograph of it. But I did take photographs of everything because I wasn't going to be able to do all 57 paintings while I was there. So a lot of it has to be done at home and it's going to be a ginormous bit of work. And I'm kind of looking forward to it though because it's great practice for me on gouache trying to figure out the best way to paint these birds. A lot of them I would paint an undercolor you know a medium or dark color and then just start adding different colors on top because birds are a different thing than what I've been practicing in gouache because a lot of them will have darker light markings and with gouache you kind of move from back to the front. And sometimes the dark part is in the front and not necessarily that base color. And then like this little bird had a purplish tint to the chest. It's a white chest but what I decided to do is put a lot of color down first and then go back and paint in some white feathers and build it up that way. So there's lots of different things I was practicing and learning about painting while I was doing this and that's going to continue for gosh weeks and weeks now because I don't have all that long before I have to have this done so wish me luck. But I thought this would be a fun thing for you to see just because if you are a sketcher then this is something you can do. I have so many students who took the Palswood sketches class and the Market Street sketches class and have taken lots of different kinds of classes that would apply this way. If you want to give a gift to somebody and they're really into their rose garden, they love their roses in their rose garden, sketch all the different kind of roses they have in their rose garden and just put it in a sketchbook and give it to them or you can make one painting with you know one of each rose in a bouquet or something but it's a little easier to do a sketchbook because it's less intimidating so especially if you're a new sketcher this might be something that might feel a little bit easier to do and you can incorporate different things specifically to the person like you know whatever they're into. If they're into baseball then you know paint pictures of all the baseball caps from all the teams that they follow or something. I mean there's just use your creativity and their interests to see what is it that you can sketch what you're capable of doing at your level whatever that level is. You know I'm finding out I'm not as good at painting birds as I thought. It's a lot harder and I was glad I did them in gouache because I could paint over my mistakes and that's a good thing about gouache but figure out what it is that you're capable of doing and then how can you incorporate that into a gift to give to that person. The other thing that I was thinking as I was doing this even though I liked the idea of being able to paint over things because I you know would screw up a wing or the shape of something and have to paint over it but it would have been a lot faster if I had just done pen and ink with a watercolor wash. That could have been much much simpler than all this that I'm doing and customizing it quite this much but this is forcing me to learn and I love learning so that's a good thing. So there's there's that but nonetheless you can choose to do whatever medium it is that you like to do. You can pick a sketchbook that has fewer pages in it if you don't want to have to do a lot of stuff. This one has 60 pages in it if you count the fronts and backs of everything and since there are 57 of the birds I figured that would be a good size for this one but there are other sketchbooks that have smaller numbers of pages especially if you're doing watercolor there's sketchbooks that have smaller quantities of pages just because it gets expensive and you know they can't sell a sketchbook that has a ton of pages in it in watercolor because they you know end up getting very very pricey. A side benefit to a project this large is that if I just kind of try to make myself mentally commit that every day I'm going to paint one of these birds so that I can get it done then I have my daily sketching decided. I don't have to sit there and think okay what am I going to sketch today what am I going to paint what am I going to draw it's going to be a bird it's going to be another bird in the sketchbook and I know which bird is next on the next page so I won't have to think and if you want to follow along with that I have a substack which is kind of like a blog and you can subscribe to that and have an email sent to you every day with one of these birds in it whenever it is that I post a bird and if you want to become a paid substack member it's something ridiculous like four dollars and seventeen cents a month it's very small amount and you will get additionally a long form essay on Mondays I've been having a blast doing some long form writing which I just haven't done in so long and since I haven't been in Toastmasters since my club closed it's my one place that I get to pontificate about something instead of writing a speech for it I just put it in written form so they've been generating some interesting conversation they're usually on art topics of one kind or another and yeah I'd sign up for a paid subscription to get that in addition to the daily sketches but the daily sketches are free so this is about all that I filmed because I didn't film everything while I was working on vacation and I may end up making a video of one of one or two of these birds over the next couple months as well the first 14 paintings are done some are going to have a rather mushy background and just you know kind of a smush of colors others might have a full on scene others are going to have a branch they're going to have all different sorts of things so I get to practice a lot of different stuff because I can sort of assess what my style is going to be the more I paint the more practice I get the more my own style starts to develop and I'm trying to do that and this many paintings is going to be that many more under my belt that many more miles with my brush that I have practiced so I hope this video gives you some ideas on how you can use your mad skills to show someone else in your life how loved they are and how special they are because when someone puts this much time and effort into something that you love boy do you feel appreciated and special so don't make someone else feel special this holiday season and get busy now giving you this warning now in September because you don't have that much time to get busy on a big project just don't bite off as much as I did like bite off something you can chew before the holidays get here all right thanks for watching I will see you again in my next video take care and go create something every day bye bye