Behind the Scenes: Snowy Owl
Inspiration, process, and insecurity
Winter is a season for owls around here. The year round residents, the Great Horned Owl and Eastern Screech Owl, are easier to find without leafy canopies to hide within. The migratory owls, the Long-eared and Short-eared, the Northern Saw-Whet, the Barn, and the Snowy, stop by for a visit on their way to somewhere else.
Winter is also a season for owls to show up in my art—since they’re on my brain so much they’re bound to leak out through my brush or pencil. Sometimes I draw owls in an effort to manifest them into being—“maybe if I draw a Saw-Whet I’ll finally find one snoozing in a spruce.” Sometimes I draw owls because I want to study them, figuring out how the shapes of their wings change in flight or how light and shadow play in their eyes. And sometimes I draw owls because I actually did see one and want to savor the experience a little longer.
The Snowy Owl ticks all of these boxes for me. I started drawing them early on in my adult creative journey, well before I encountered one in the wild. Here’s one of my first Snowys, painted digitally in Procreate.
Then came my second Snowy Owl, again made in Procreate, in the winter of 2020 when I was trying to manifest a sighting.
This one was supposed to be a template for an embroidery project that never came into being.
And here’s one of my most recent Snowy Owls, which is one of my 30 minute paintings done on a week when Snowy Owls first returned to Chicago this season.
I think one of the reasons I love drawing and painting Snowy Owls so much is you can find so many beautiful colors in their white plumage. I started playing with that concept a bit in the embroidery template above, and in the mini watercolor painting. It’s continued in this month’s digital illustration, and I’ll likely return to playing with it again in a future watercolor.
Inspiration:
I knew I wanted to feature a Snowy Owl at rest, and perched on the breakwater near my favorite park. My skills aren’t quite up to capturing them mid-battle with a Peregrine Falcon, as I saw a couple of weeks ago, but I can handle an owl perched amongst some big rocks.
I also wanted to capture them at dawn, when the sky contains so many lovely colors that will then get reflected off the Snowy’s white feathers. You can see that in this beautiful image, taken by Zdenek Machacek:
And while I have seen many colorful sunrises along Lake Michigan, the colors from this particular sunrise along Maine’s central coast have stuck with me since the summer.
