The latest issue of Bird Watcher’s Digest will be hitting mailboxes in the next week or so, and our subscribers might notice something different about the cover… something bright, something bold, something more expressionistic than our readers are used to.
We would like to introduce our newest cover artist, Christina Baal, and her cover of our November/December 2020 issue, a piece titled Hidden Colors: Yellow-billed Magpie. Christina is a bird artist, writer, and naturalist whose dream is to meet and paint 10,000 species of birds. After graduating from Bard College in 2014, she started her art business, Drawing 10,000 Birds, and has since traveled nonstop looking for birds. Most recently she lived in a small Alaskan village where she got to watch brown bears in her backyard!
Christina loves going to bird festivals to show her artwork, lead trips, teach art, and spend time with the birding community. She has designed artwork for the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival, the Biggest Week in American Birding, the New River Birding and Nature Festival, and New Jersey Audubon’s World Series of Birding. During the rest of the year, she works as an environmental educator, and has recently started illustrating books, including Lucy’s Life List and her hot-off-the-press Once Upon a Feather, a field guide where ornithology meets mythology—both of which have been reviewed and recommended in BWD‘s Book Notes. Christina lives with her partner and adorable golden retriever.
More About Christina
The BWD staff began crossing paths with Christina a few years ago at various birding festivals, and it is impossible to walk by her booth and not be pulled in and absorbed by her unique style—and her!
You should also check out her website, Drawing 10,000 Birds. Here she shares her quest to meet and paint the world’s 10,000 bird species, and also where you’ll find her blog, where she keeps folks up to date on her latest adventures—which currently involves counting hawks at the Greenwich Audubon Center in Connecticut. Her website has a free resources section, consisting of a wealth of printables, including coloring pages, a young birder’s field guide, flash cards, bookmarks, posters, playing cards, and more.
We hope you enjoy the November/December 2020 issue of BWD—starting with the gorgeous cover and every page that follows! If you are not yet a subscriber, join our growing readership and subscribe today!
Here’s what Christina had to say about Hidden Colors—Yellow-billed Magpie:
“What really strikes me about magpies is the amazing amount of color in their feathers. When I took my first painting class in college, one of our assignments was to look for ‘hidden colors’ in shadows, and I think that members of the Corvidae family are a wonderful way to practice this exercise. I love how, when the California sun hits magpies just right, their entire bodies seem to glimmer with iridescent hidden blues, greens, and purples. My favorite experience with magpies occurred in the fall, so I created a setting for this painting that captured a western field with the golds and yellows of that time of year.”
