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owl and a frigatebird Friday, January 8 2016
At around 3:00pm, I happened to look out the laboratory window and see a Barred Owl perched on the big fat telephone wire running along Dug Hill Road. He (and, because he was a little on the small side, I'm assuming he was a he) was clearly hunting for small mammals in the long grass and bushes of the area near the road that we've been allowing to succeed back to forest. Raptors such as hawks and owls will remain on such perches for long stretches of time, so I ran to get Gretchen so she'd see him. I also fetched the one camera I have with a telephoto lens, though its settings were messed up, and it kept either over or under exposing pictures. Fortunately, I was able to fix one of the underexposed pictures in Photoshop.
Later, I elected to buy myself the right to drink the beer and booze with which, on Fridays, I hate-watch Gold Rush. So I painted a tiny (1.5 inch by 1.5 inch) painting of a frigatebird flying against a psychedelic pointillist sky. To get the frigatebird's shape perfect, I actually printed out a tiny silhouette of one and then used a razor blade to cut it out of its background, which I then used as a stencil. Unfortunately, acrylic paint doesn't play well with stencils, so I had to fix both the bird and the sky around it afterwards.
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