Karla

I was at the zoo the other day.

I have two cats -  a large gray striped cat and a fat black cat.  Odin, the striped cat, realized I was drawing him and left.  Data, stayed put longer.

I love how you caught little details like curve/layers of its feathers as well as the light variants on the branch, legs and body of the warbler.

I am a 5th grade teacher and often get a lot of parents screaming "STEM" as loudly as they can and pushing of arts education as I find myself saying, "STEAM" in response.  Trying to make students understand that they need to accurately describe what they see through a microscope or through observation using drawing and words often are lost in the screaming.  I refer my science kids to Audubon's work and then lead them to James Gurney's "Dinotopia" and Tony DiTerlizzi's "Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide" to show them how science journaling works.  My classroom has several Ed Emberly drawing books, some of Chris Hart's manga books, etc because my boys tend to be more comfortable in that cartoon realm and then moving into the science realm.  I now have some books on architecture after a Frank Lloyd Wright unit which has some of my students thinking about the marriage of art and engineering. As a person who has never been brave about her art, I have been meeting up with a local Urban Sketchers group and learning.  I am now ready to leap beyond what I do and learn more to inspire my students and start doing more storytelling with my own art/observations. My big question as I watched the others was: how do you capture moving creatures. The birds helped a lot (capturing shapes, etc.) but when you look at the frog, it's not like it's going to sit there and let you draw it, color and refine your thoughts and work.  Do you snap a quick photo and then work, using the photo as a reference?