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Birch Hill - September 11, 2013

9/12/2013

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Maybe the last really warm day of summer.  I had to go to Winchendon and I hadn’t ridden my bike in a while, so I took it up to the Birch Hill Wildlife Management Area and went exploring.  Just off the west side of the area I found this beautiful old barn, so I parked my bike on the side of the road and started a watercolor sketch.  I was out of sight from the house, but I could hear people talking over there and I was a bit nervous that they might object to me being there.  When the owner eventually came out on the road and saw me he gave me a nice greeting, though, and asked to see the picture.  He liked it so much he asked me to send him a copy and then we had a nice chat.  If he hadn’t come out I might have worked more on the piece, but after he left I decided it was fine as it was (other than where my pinky smudged the window) and left it at that.

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On the way back I stopped at the bridge over the Priest Brook and did a quick sketch of a pine snag on the side of the river.  I sometimes screw up sketches by starting them in the wrong spot on the page, causing me to run out of room.  On this one I started the top of the tree too low on the page and had to truncate the stem so I could squeeze in the roots and a little bit of the water right at the very bottom of the page.  While I was drawing a beautiful kingfisher came by squawking loudly and sat for a moment on the top of the tree, but he was gone before I could get a picture of him.

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    Picture
    Some of the best work I've done isn't hanging on a wall; it's sitting in a box in my closet that's full of my old sketch books.  I fill up one or two books each year.  Some of the sketches end up as a basis of a more formal work, but most don't.  They’re more important to me as a pictorial diary and also as on-going training; learning to really see and to understand shape, light and color.

    This blog is to share my sketches as well as my sketching experiences. 

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