Summer Painting #3

Today’s painting is of a subject near and dear to my heart….sandpipers.  Sandpipers are comical little birds and I could sit and watch them over and over without ever getting tired of them.  They have their own personalities and there always seems to be a bully that wants to control the entire beach. 

Disney Pixar has an absolute charming animated short of a baby sandpiper coping with life on the beach.  It’s one of my favorites.

This little painting is a compilation of sketches and photos that I have taken of sandpipers and the beach scene itself is based on a separate photo that I took to study waves. I have so many reference photos that I need to label them or I won’t be able to find the subjects that I took photos of to ensure that I had the reference. It can be a dizzying circle.

In this little painting, I wanted to capture the vignette of glancing up and seeing the squad dash by on their way to their next tasty morsel.  That moment when you look up from the book you are reading on the beach and something catches your attention, which turns out to be a squabbling bunch of sandpipers. 

You can’t help but watch as they run down to the water to pick at the sand, and they run for their lives when a wave comes crashing back.  It’s so dramatic, LOL.  And I love how they always stay ahead of the humans on the beach and don’t like to get too close to us.  If they feel we are getting to close, the flock synchronizes their departure together and glide further up the beach. They’ll keep doing this if you are walking the beach and they keep flying up the beach until they get so far and circle round back to where they started. There is a method to their movements.

Enjoy this little painting!  

I am also toying with Substack and Patreon for alternatives to Meta products such as Facebook and Instagram.   There is a lot of art piracy these days especially with AI and I have read many discussions from artists finding other ways to show their art on line.  Art takes a lot of time to do and there is nothing worse than putting in hours of work only to have a huge corporation poach your ideas. I am glad that I never did video posts so that there is no online presence of my process.