Windeater Studios

Art, photography, wire jewelry, and art education.

[windeaterstudios]

Self portraits are supposed to be a fun way to practic , especially with odd expressions or angles. Timed practice always helps too, so I gave myself about an hour to do this sketch, and I enjoyed it more than I expected- staring at myself isn't usually my idea of a good time. Yellow crowned night heron included because plain portraits are boring.

Also my first time using Fabriano Artistico cotton paper. It's... fine. I wouldn't have paid Arches money for it, but it was on clearance, and I don't feel like I got a bad deal. The texture's a little too mechanical/repetitive, and it doesn't feel as thick or heavy as Arches sold at the same GSM does. Otherwise, works just fine.

[windeaterstudios]

coloring page/lineart version of Hunter's Poise. added a frame for shits and grins.

[windeaterstudios]

gesture drawings off of some photos I got from my last birding session. pretty productive- there was a great white egret and a great blue heron hunting together for a while. also had a brief visit from a yellow crowned night heron! not pictured are various ducks and geese.

also saw a wasp capturing a cicada. felt like a great example of nature's wild variance between great beauty and great horrors.

[windeaterstudios]

Finch & Flower, acrylic on canvas, 16"x20". I think I'm finally starting to figure out acrylics.

[windeaterstudios]

Kiln pets!

[windeaterstudios]

Hunter's Poise, 10"x16", watercolor on Arches 100% cotton paper.

This was a thank you present for my uncle, who's a hunter and former sniper. It wasn't actually intended to be him, but the hunter in the painting ended up looking a LOT like he did when he was younger.

[soracities]

think it's a deep consolation to know that spiders dream, that monkeys tease predators, that dolphins have accents, that lions can be scared silly by a lone mongoose, that otters hold hands, and ants bury their dead. that there isn't their life and our life. nor your life and my life. that it's just one teetering and endless thread and all of us, all of us, are entangled w it as deep as entanglement goes. v neat i think.

[windeaterstudios]

Zine with some quick tips on drawing for nature journaling beginners! I've been prepping for some classes on this I'm hoping to do this fall. Planning on doing a few versions with specifics, like for gesture drawing in the field, drawing birds, drawing trees, using watercolor in the field, maybe some focusing on different layouts and diagrams you can use...

These are inspired by the wonderful zines available for free from the Wild Wonder Foundation, the group John Muir Laws works with to teach and spread nature journaling. 100% recommend looking those up!

[windeaterstudios]

Productive nature journaling session the other day! I appear to have accidentally deleted my photos of the green heron. :( I've been trying to collect photos of all of our local herons for an art piece I have in mind and they were one of the last to go. I'm hoping they just ended up in the wrong folder and I'll find them again. If I can, I just have black crowned night herons left to go...

[windeaterstudios]

Page of Flowers, watercolor and ink on Arches 100% cotton cold press watercolor paper.

I am extremely pleased with the results of this process. I got a lightbox so I can easily transfer linework done digitally onto watercolor paper, which allows me to keep my paper in good shape for painting easily. No sketchy indents, no erasing, no roughing up the paper.

I don't talk about this much, but an old shoulder injury makes keeping my linework clean difficult and painful. LOTS of practice, some home-done "physical therapy," and the ability to hit "undo" go a LONG way for me. Also vectors are magical and if you hate linework you should learn how to use them.

[windeaterstudios]

Page of Flowers, part of a rough draft for an idea I've been tossing around of doing a tarot deck (or coloring book?) based on paired birds and flowers. This is a house finch and a white star magnolia tree.

Did this in watercolor too- will post that shortly.

[windeaterstudios]

i don't think we fit here anymore

digital art. experimenting with "coloring book" styles.

[anscathmarcach]

All this discourse over who does "painting with light"

Hiroshi Nagai's paintings need sunglasses to look at.

They look like how it feels to walk across a parking lot on a 98° summer day without a speck of shade in sight.

They look like heaven but also like you'd burn your bare feet on the ground.

Even when you can see shade you know it's not enough and the minute you step out you'll be burnt to a crisp like a vampire.

And it's BEAUTIFUL

[dbarenzu626]

I'll throw in the wonderful Eizin Suzuki into this ring too, a man whose work just breathes light without actually using dynamic lighting in the usual way. It's no surprise both Nagai and Suzuki are both considered prolific in art pertaining to the city pop genre because they're able to paint these kinds of scenes with a delicate touch.

This feels like I could trip on that radio and fall right into that water, feeling the crystal waves as I drop in.

And this, a nice stroll down a resort strip, where my sunscreened skin could literally feel cooked if I leaned too close to the tiling.

And then a nice stretch of summer street, wherein you could see your face in the flushed red of that car provided it didn't blind you from its sunny reflections.

I don't think I even need to say anything more, Suzuki's a massive influence in how he even places colours so warmly in such unorthodox manner. It's a naturally sunkissed talent~ 🌊

[jenroses]

Looking at these I had the sudden full body memory of swim team at the outdoor college pool on summer vacation, blistering heat, launching off a starting block into water just that color, the sun on my back and the water everywhere. I can smell the chlorine.

[captain-price-returns]

It turns out the great egg price increase that helped topple Joe Biden's regime was (checks notes) due to an alleged conspiracy among egg producers to artificially increase prices and the coverage of that fact is a blink-and-you-miss-it story on the NYT website

[windeaterstudios]

The consequences of their actions, by the way, are $3.3 million in fines and roughly a day's worth of egg production donated to food banks, btw. That's not even a slap on the wrist; it's a kiss on the cheek.

[great-and-small]

Saddest thing ever is reading an academic paper about a threatened or declining species where you can tell the author is really trying to come up with ways the animal could hypothetically be useful to humans in a desperate attempt to get someone to care. Nobody gives a shit about the animals that “don’t affect” us and it seriously breaks my heart

[great-and-small]

“No I can’t come out tonight I’m sobbing about this entomologist’s heartfelt plea for someone to care about an endangered moth”

[bogleech]

This is how I learn there's a moth whose tiny caterpillars live exclusively off the old shells of dead tortoises.

[thepastisaroadmap]

[Image description: text from a section titled On Being Endangered: An Afterthought that says:

Realizing that a species is imperiled has broad connotations, given that it tells us something about the plight of nature itself. It reminds us of the need to implement conservation measures and to protect the region of which the species is a part. But aside form the broader picture, species have intrinsic worth and are deserving of preservation. Surely an oddity such as C. vicinella cannot simply be allowed to vanish.

We should speak up on behalf of this little moth, not only because by so doing we would bolster conservation efforts now underway in Florida, [highlighting begins] but because we would be calling attention to the existence of a species that is so infinitely worth knowing. [end highlighting]

But is quaintness all that can be said on behalf of this moth? Does this insect not have hidden value beyond its overt appeal? Does not its silk and glue add, potentially, to its worth? Could these products not be unique in ways that could ultimately prove applicable?

End image description]

[headspace-hotel]

because we would be calling attention to the existence of a species that is so infinitely worth knowing

[rackiera]

I was so inspired by this I made it into a piece of art for a final in one of my courses for storytelling in conservation

[a-book-of-creatures]

[dizzyghoast]

hello im noticing you seem to dress very femininely and have a variety of feminine interests but your pronouns are still he/him? could you kindly let me know your exact gender identity so i can know if youre one of the good genders (mine) or one of the evil bad genders that dont deserve respect. no pressure of course ☺️

[windeaterstudios]

pijins