Hawks, ospreys and dragons

 The main event of the past several years has been that I have found some amazing birdwatching spots near where I live in Houston—not well-known public spots, these are more "I found a spot" spots. I've seen more species than you can imagine in a couple of small areas, and I have seen the visiting birds through several migratory seasons. One perpetual resident—two actually—are an osprey and some red-shouldered hawks. I've seen multiple osprey too actually. The osprey sails in every day around lunchtime and the hawks are always present. On this one occasion the osprey got into the hawk's territory, and the smaller bird chased him away. I was completely busy doing something else when it happened but managed to snap a couple of pictures anyway.

Seeing these birds is the best thing that can happen in any given day.

With that in mind, I seem to be doing a lot more dragon paintings lately than usual which is really just a return to being 14-16 years old. Something about winged things. Watching the birds of prey sail past me at eye level constantly is an incredible experience (I found a vantage point that's about level with the tops of trees in a basin) and I can only hope that I can get some better binoculars or cameras some day. 

"The Mistress of Dragon Tower," 12 x 16 acrylic on stretched canvas

This is my most-looked-at painting from the past week since I started listing things on Etsy again regularly.

"Pink Crystal Cloud Dragon" 8 x 10 acrylic painting on stretched canvas

This one came to me in one of those half-asleep visions of things I'd like to see very '80s imagery of crystals and clouds and heart balloons.

"Candy Coloured Cloud Dragon on Sugar Mountain" is a 12 x 16 acrylic painting on stretched canvas

As a painting title, this is an amalgam of Cocteau Twins and Neil Young song titles or lyrics and actually was more inspired by "In Dreams" by Roy Orbison for the title and then we can start talking about Blue Velvet and David Lynch none of which have anything to do with dragons and candy and ice cream and medieval dragon treasure. But here you have it, the inside contents of my brain.

Return from the long slumber, new art and efforts

 I didn't think that Blogger/Blogspot was still a going concern with most people but I see that there's actually a ton of people (or bots—hello, bots) viewing this so I'm going to bring it back tentatively. For one thing, you don't know about me and BIRDWATCHING, which I've documented at length on Instagram and other sites. More on that in a bit though. I've only done one of these so far but I've taken enough pictures to keep me busy for a while working them into paintings. 

My goal right now is to get a good pair of binoculars, and to replace my wide-angle lens that seems to have stopped working. I mostly use the 300 mm though. Anyway, I'm not a photographer by any means but it's been a huge source of calm and comfort to find all of the amazing birds that live in my neighborhood in Texas.

Above is my greatest recent victory, grabbing a picture of a scissor-tailed flycatcher while I was on the phone with my mom for Mother's Day, and one appeared right in front of me. 

Since I stopped posting here, we moved, some things changed at work, Covid happened, I went to grad school and got a master's degree in English, and now I'm back pretty much back to my old routine and painting and wondering where all the time went.

For now here are some new paintings, and we'll figure everything else out later.

My first love is 1st edition Dungeons & Dragons-inspired art so that's been most of my time in recent years, going back to what I loved to do when I was 13-17.

And more recently, a love of vintage Halloween postcards is still a thing. 

Here are some new places where I have social media accounts:

Threads: ArtBySarada

Bluesky: Xelucha

Here are some old places that I've resurrected recently: 

Tumblr: ArtBySarada

Pinterest: ArtBySarada

Bird adventures, gothic exploration and classic D&D are all going concerns for the time being, more about those soon.