corvi

This extremely striking bird is a Harlequin Duck, Histrionicus histrionicus. (Photo by Andy Reago and Chrissy MacClaren)

They are small ducks with a daredevil love of rough water - they spend their winters along the roughest parts of the coast, where surf beats against rocky shores, and spring and summer raising their young inland in streams with whitewater rapids and waterfalls. They feed by diving below the turbulence, and walking along on the bottom looking for crustaceans.

Studies have found that most adult Harlequin ducks have multiple healed bone fractures from being tossed into rocks. They live there anyway. There's an admirable fierceness to them. Harlequin ducks are a word written on the sea, and that word means perseverance.

As far as I can tell, they only show up when

juli is around. She has seen them in the places where the waves break several times; I've seen them once, maybe, from enough of a distance that it was more about deciding I'd seen them than actually seeing them.

Juli said she really wanted to see a Harlequin duck woodcut. I am ... not a woodcut artist, but that sounded like fun.

Spent a while planning this one, thinking about how to make it resemble a woodcut. Woodcuts typically indicate different parts of the image by different textures, stipples or cross-hatching or lines at contrasting angles. I usually work in outlines and contrasting sections, and often imply the shapes of things by situating them against contrasting backgrounds. To be woodcuttish, I was going to need to texture something. The ducks themselves were unhelpful as far as suggesting textured areas; it was made of solid colour blocks, no stripey or spotty bits.

I eventually decided I could do an outlined feather texture on the slate-grey parts of the duck: breast and back and primaries, and a swirly texture on the water, like the baku's mane. And maybe that would look like a woodcut? Usually I spend about half my time planning and half my time cutting; this was more like 2/3rds planning. I also wanted to figure out a pose that wasn't just "duck chilling on water like a loaf of bread sitting on a plate," which appears to be most of what ducks do, judging from internet photos.

The beginning of the feather-texture looked like a bunch of cartoon eyes, which was neat, but not what I was going for.

More feathers improved it.

Swirly ocean bits. I stuck some rocks in because a Harlequin duck is a word written on the sea.

This is my favourite of the in-progress pictures. I like its mystery. (My fingers are in the in-process pictures because I'm flattening the black paper with the holes in it against a background sheet of white paper. This makes the images clearer; if there's gaps between them, the black paper casts blurry shadows on the white paper, which make it harder to see the different between them.)

All the holes cut here, all that's left is removing the extra border. I won't really know how the weights turn out until all the extra black is gone.

Turned out okay! But is it woodcut-ish? Uhhh. I'm not sure.

I think I want to frame this one over some sort of blurry watercolour, maybe spilling outside the lines a little. Indigo under the feather texture, hopefully indigo and black will average out to the slate grey. Reddish brown for the flank. Leave the ocean black and white.