Wednesday, August 27, 2014

The Coracle and Grooming Turkeys

This first page is all I got done on Tuesday by way of drawing.  On the left is a rather ordinaryy plant in a plastic pot sitting in a beautiful basket on the table that stands underneath the coracle (drawing 3071) that hangs upside down from the ceiling.  Jacob and I made that coracle over a couple of summers when he was around 10 and 11.  We wove the basket part out of willow branches that we cut from the bank of a neighbor of a friend's pond.  We fashioned a seat out of ash with engineering help from P, who showed us how to make a thin board remain straight and not swoop down in the middle.  We covered the coracle with canvas and then waterproofed the canvas with black roofing tar.
We took it out for a trial ride one sunny afternoon a couple of summers ago and it floated!  We played in it and took turns trying to paddle it all afternoon.  We decided it was too wide for us to paddle effectively.  Should we ever make another, which we know we could do in a few hours , having done the job once,  we will make it smaller and more easily maneuverable.
This morning I glanced outside around 10:00 and got to see all nine of the turkey adolescents grooming themselves madly on the fence right outside one of our living room windows.  How great they look when they're grooming and moving about.  They're really as good to draw as Jesse IF you can get up as close as I was AND if they stay relatively still for a while, as they did this morning.   The mother was so close I actually drew her portrait (3077).  I think I could pick her out of a crowd now. 
At the end of about half an hour the whole pack abruptly moved into the sunny spot in the nearby back yard and a few closed their eyes and took a little nap, while other continues grooming.

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