Setting goals for yourself is helpful at the best of times. During a quarantine lockdown, those goals can become a whole way of life. When Fredericton-based wildlife illustrator Kaitlin Hoyt had her plans cancelled for a series of shows, including an artist’s residency at KIRA – all thanks to COVID-19 – she found herself a way to keep focused and feel productive while waiting for life to be unpaused. In April she challenged herself to paint a series of birds, one a day, for 100 consecutive days, creating a body of work delightful reminiscent of flipping through an Audubon Nature Encyclopedia.
Hoyt describes her artistic career as “short but sweet.” She began painting in 2019, after making a decisive shift from working strictly in a digital format to bold colourful strokes that lend themselves to creating the three-dimensional feel of her wildlife portraits.
“I started painting in May of 2019 after years of being too afraid to seriously try,” explains Hoyt. “I worked through that mental barrier with the guidance of my mentor, Jennifer Pazienza, and eventually taught myself to paint.”
Hoyt says that she began her exercise of painting 100 birds in 100 days as both a way of further improving her painting abilities and to cultivate a daily habit of creating. As a self-proclaimed “serial starter” Hoyt found herself all too often subject to the appeal of an infinite number of insurmountable projects. While she admits that she may have skipped over a few of the 100 days, the accountability of posting to her social media each day kept her largely on track and learned to structure her days in a way that made painting as convenient as possible.
“It definitely took me a little while to find a rhythm with my materials and techniques,” says Hoyt. “When I started, the birds were supposed to be painted on 4×6 pieces of watercolour paper, but I came to feel too restricted by that. I fell in love with the punchy colours of cardstock and within a week I had committed to painting all of my birds on it.
“Gradually the paintings seemed to get bigger and more complicated, but on the days I wasn’t feeling it, I let myself keep it small and simple. I’ve definitely learned how to tackle intricate details (like wings) that would have overwhelmed me before.”
As for choosing her subject matter, the birds provided an obvious choice. A source of near-endless variety, colour and size, the ornithological world offered Hoyt a wealth of examples to choose from.
“I chose to focus on birds because I wanted to learn more about the many different species,” says Hoyt. “My love of birds developed alongside my introduction to painting in the Spring. There is something so magical about their rich diversity in shape, colour, and adaptive features. I found myself gravitating towards them as a subject more and more. I have seen other artists online undertaking 100-day challenges, and since I had so much time on my hands after my events were cancelled, I thought ‘what better time than now?’.
“I’m a sucker for variety, and birds offer no shortage of that. Although I came to understand their similarities, for the most part, each new bird had something challenging or surprising about it. Although a lot of the birds I painted weren’t local, towards the end of the challenge I came to really enjoy painting birds that I had experienced myself. Almost like collecting my memories of them on paper.
While Hoyt says she has a soft spot for ospreys and other raptors, it was the hummingbirds she enjoyed painting most for their interesting shapes for poses, along with their eye-catching iridescent feathers and the excuse to paint some flowers alongside them. To further embellish each painting, she will often seek out odd-shaped wood panels or paper trimmings to paint on that might complement each bird.
“I often like to incorporate an element of quirkiness into the painting, be it through the pose, personality, or a behaviour unique to that particular species,” says Hoyt.
The series of 100 birds isn’t the first time Hoyt has attempted one of these challenges; she’s participated in shorter challenges that have lasted from a week to a month, and incorporated themes like spooky botanicals for Halloween and open-ended challenges designed simply to encourage creativity.
“I like challenges like this because committing to painting frequently over a defined number of days gives me the freedom to quickly explore concepts and techniques in a low-risk environment,” says Hoyt. “If I paint something I dislike today, there’s always tomorrow to try again!”
Now that Hoyt has completed all 100 birds of her most recent project, she says she will be spending time strengthening her drawing abilities while preparing for a group show and filling the new commissions featuring birds and flowers that have come up as a result of the last 100 days.
To see the complete series of Kaitlin Hoyt’s 100 birds visit www.kaitlinhoyt.com.