Art inspired by biology, created by a biologist
This drawing is based on a photograph of a family of hummingbirds my aunt captured in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas.
This piece fits nicely is in an 8×10” frame.
This is a drawing of an Eastern Screech Owl (Megascops asio) of the “rufous morph” variety. The photo on which it is based was taken by a very nice man named Andy M¢ on Flickr who kindly gave me permission to use it in this artwork (here is the original photo).
Thanks to advice from the talented artist Glendon Mellow, I switched to using mechanical pencil for this drawing instead of traditional wood-encased lead pencils. The level of detail I can get is significantly better with the more-or-less constant diameter mechanical drafting pencil, and will be even greater once I buy a smaller diameter (I used 0.5mm for this one, but kept wishing I had a smaller one).
Side note: in high school, my zoology teacher Mr. Bob Ross once took our class out to the woods around Beaver Lake in Arkansas. There he taught us to actually call screech owls (as well as barred owls). I can’t call the screech owl very well any more, but I can still do a good barred owl. Mr. Ross was also one of my primary inspirations to eventually get my Ph.D. in biology.
This is a quick sketch (a few hours) of a baby mourning dove I saw chilling on a window ledge in Pittsburgh, PA.
My latest pencil drawing is of a “Bateleur,” an African eagle, that I saw at the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro. This drawing took me a lot longer than any of my previous recent drawings – I spent almost two weeks on it (2-3 hours a day here and there) just trying to get all the feather details as close to accurate as I could.
Just a snail I saw on a piece of quartz in Chapel Hill, NC.
