Serendipity Trade - Nature's Energy Drink

Natures Energy Drink

The fall Serendipity Group trade was sent last month and this is my piece that was sent to Mia Bloom. Our theme was "Energy Pathways". I struggled with this theme for a while, but I love to incorporate birds in my pieces, and decided to find a way to link birds to energy.

Here we have a hummingbird getting energy by sipping nectar from a flower that got its energy from the sun. That seems like a pathway to me.

I drew the bird and flowers/leaves from some photos and sketches I had. I these flowers grow alongside the North Umpqua River and I have done several sketches of them over the years. My sketch book came in handy here as a reference.






Detail of head and flower

I had a piece of hand dyed fabric that was striated and looked very "watercolory (new word). I decided to leave this fabric showing through the light value areas of the shapes and paint the medium and dark values. I used Tsukeniko inks for this.

I added eyelash yarn to the bottom and a couple of edges to ground it and give it an interesting frame.

Then I had to name the piece to link it back to the Energy Pathway theme, and "Nature's Energy Drink" seemed like a good way to do that.

That's about it for now. I will show a couple more details in an upcoming post, but in the meantime, thanks for stopping by my blog!