Beginnings are such delicate times...

It started with a long thought idea and a quick sketch:
 

Yeah, it doesn't look like much, and it really isn't. But I had the sketchbook with me for a change, and they were singing, and the pines did smell springy and warm, so...

(No worries if it's not immediately obvious what exactly it is a sketch OF, for the moment. The image was fresh in my mind, and I think I got the gesture with a couple of quick lines. At this point that's enough to worry about.)

Then there came a trip to Staples, a little quality time spent with a photocopier, and an increase in this very same image of 120%.  Sorry, I forgot to bring a camera to Staples. For now it's best if you consider it just as you would the interval between the mixed up batter and the perfect souffle emerging from the range on a cable cookery show. (The Holmes's among you may have deduced from this trip to a photocopier that my scanner is in the can, as it were. Clever readers.)

Next was a series of tracing paper overlays to make a drawing out of the field sketch:

Then, a very detailed drawing of an appropriate perch was made, and added to the layers of overlays.

 The transfer to a nice gray-toned italian pastel paper is accomplished. And then with a switch of the poles from plus to minus and minus to plus, a dramatic flick of the big, nasty looking switch, and a couple of hours with some very sharp Verithin colored pencils, and the little sketch made on a sunny road in Belleplain State Forest begins to take on a little shape:

All of the color got done today. There is a lot more yet to do, and ample time to screw the finished product up...or start over from the sketch, as the sketch is the hard part, or hard copy actually being a better way to look at it.

On the other hand, I know it's not hat, but- Look I made a Yellow-throated Warbler. Where there never was a Yellow-throated Warbler!

And that is a little something, after all.