The Spotted Nothura

The very talented Charlie O’ Shields over at Doodlewash (which you can find his blog here), recently gave me his permission to use an abstract watercolor painting he created on his blog.

After looking at his abstract for several days, I was able to “spot” a bird in it:

A Spotted Nothura to be exact!  Yes, this is a REAL bird and not one of my imaginary ones!  LOL!

With the help of one of my favorite bird books:

This bird seemed to FLY off the page at me!  🙂

For one thing, this bird had spots.  And Charlie’s abstract had spots (or splatter):

Now, I DO realize that the actual bird does not have the same color of spots as my bird…  this is where artistic freedom comes into play!

I learned from my book, “Extreme Birds” that this bird is considered the “worst flier.”  This bird is from the tinamous species which only fly when under extreme pressure, (ground predators).  “They are heavy, muscular birds with big feet, but their wings and tail – aerodynamic essentials – are decidedly small for the size of the bird which is approximately 24 to 25.5 cm (9.4–10.0 in) in length.  Often when this bird makes an emergency takeoff their control lets them down, and they find themselves crashing into objects, such as trees or rocks, often killing themselves.”

I decided to “ground” my bird to keep him safe:

Using the remainder of Charlie’s art paper, I created the background and added a little color with Inktense pencils.  It is an abstract after all!

Thanks Charlie for the challenge!  🙂

Happy Flying!