Thumb birds by Clancy

Please pretend you're a kid

Welcome to all of my new subscribers!! Thank you for joining this party in progress! I'm delighted so many of you enjoyed my Figures Of Speech fine art exhibit which I shared in my recent newsletters! Your comments made me smile!

One of the regular things I do, besides fine art, is create artist books by hand and then make ebook versions of them for kids all over the world at Storyberries.com. Here on my newsletter I share my creative process as well as some of those finished books. Sometimes, like in today's newsletter, I ask for your input… more on that in a sec... and here's a hint. 👇

First some housekeeping for the new folks: Typically I post once a week, usually on Friday, about what Ive done in my sketchbook during the weeklike this page… (yes, I'm still playing with the doodlebugs from my art exhibit.)

…and perhaps my Friday newsletter contains my current project like today's Thumb Birds. Sometimes I send an extra newsletter on another day during a week or I share things on Substack Notes. 😁

One of the things my subscribers get is “early releases” or advance reading copies as they're called in publishing circles. Paying subscribers get special peeks and downloads of my sketchbooks and artist books - even when my newsletter is free your support helps me do this! There, the housekeeping is done and you're family now. 😊

Anyhoo, today you're seeing an early-early project in progress called Thumb Birds … below is a short video and a step by step tutorial that may eventually end up on Storyberries for how to draw my thumb birds. (It's about this that I'd appreciate your thoughts…) Thumb Birds are imaginary bird characters, using a human thumb as a starting place to draw the whimsical birds using markers. I'm intending it as a fun way for kids and grownups to share playful imaginations and being as silly as you like while drawing! (And yes, you can just play with your inner-kid!) Especially after successfully completing a professional art exhibit I really like to play this way! Oh well okay, I just like to play this way. 😉

Here's a photo of one of my sketchbook pages with my thumb birds on it.

In the above photo and in the video below I am using markers from a 36 piece coloring set from NIL-TECH http://shop.nil-tech.com/?ref=DmLN4hDZ (this is an affiliate link)

I hope you'll have fun with my thumb birds and will please let me know if this art project makes sense to your inner-child.

Here's the video.

Below is a short series of steps for drawing my thumb birds (using the same marker set). I plan to rework these steps into a different format to better fit with the Storyberries system but I gotta make sure it works first … know what I mean? Thus my questions for you…

Somehow in the finished book for Storyberries I want to playfully say “Thumb birds can appear in their natural habitat of sketchbooks, postcards, envelopes or anywhere else paper and pen are located.

Thank you for helping to preserve and advance the diversity of thumb birds!”

My questions: Did the steps in my tutorial make sense? Was it fun? Did any how-do-I-do-this questions pop up for you as you drew? Any suggestions for tweaking it for use by kids before I redo the step by step description for sending to Storyberries?

I ask because I plan to do a series of “Thumb Bodies” and I want to set up a system so to speak.

Thanks again for being here! I look forward to your comments and I thank you heartily for them!