Greg Poole – Artist / Illustrator based in Bristol, UK

goldfinches on yellow horned poppy

golden plover & black-headed gulls

After the the intensive web construction work I am now back on illustration. Need to keep chipping away at the website though and here uploading a couple of the woodcuts from earlier in the year to keep the hand in. These are now on show at the Birdscapes gallery as part of their printmakers exhibition (see the their website for location and opening details).

Might as well resign myself to posting only nerdy website development updates. I’ve cleaned up a lot of the captioning of images… And started to combine that with the other ‘gallery’ approach as on the ‘relief-birds‘ page or the ‘life drawing‘ page.
Find it amazing how this stuff works and although it is eye sore making at the moment I think it will make life so much easier from here on in… that is if I ever make it back to real artwork.

Taking the slideshow from this post… seems like it is somehow wasting energy revolving around there…. it was the slideshow that is on the ‘paintings – birds’ page, if you would like to see those images.
I’m still working on the reconstruction of the site. Gradually making headway. Main areas that I’m trying to improve are the ways of displaying images and that all images are easily found via search.

Image details still need to be checked through, so apologies for errors. The slideshow (that hopefully sits here) needs flashviewer….
Placing this here partly to check the way it works and partly just to get some imagery onto the homepage

Manically working these last ten days or so on revamping the SWLA website http://swla.co.uk/ a big learning curve in wordpress usage. Really pleased with progress and so far few glitches with the software. I changed the webhosts from easily.co.uk  who weren’t good on support and something in their setup was stopping me from using various plugins. That had been frustrating me for ages. I moved to godaddy and so far have found their service excellent.
Now it will be on to my own site which has been languishing. I’ll start to rebuild it from within the old shell and when I’ve got the old pages in wordpress form I’ll shuck off the old carapace.

Much of last week figuring out an approach to a mural.  Slightly mind bending going from a species list in Adobe Illustrator to getting the illustrations to scale on a model of the space in google sketchup. Nerdy but mind expanding to get more fluent handling of 2D images in a virtual 3D space. For the time being it was as much as I could do to get representatives of the list of species required sprinkled onto the wall. The brief requires them to be ‘spot’ paintings rather than a scene… so next will be making some kind of composition within the space.

I’d been meaning to sketch this proliferation of primroses for a while, violets & cuckoo flowers, the leaves of cow parsley and arums. First blackthorn flowers in the cut hedge along with the leaves…usually the flowers come before the leaves.
I also had a look up in the woods where there were many more bluebells in flowers along with wood anemones, the garlic still tightly budded (though flowering in our garden). Another tawny owl sighting, much alarming of blackbirds in a little ravine, as I approached the owl took flight across open field and into a large oak.

brimstone feeding on bluebell, c. A2, wax crayon

Back to the same bit of the reservoir… at first focussing on the grebes and their surroundings and feeling like I was entering into that more fully. So hot that it was beginning to get uncomfortable, crayons melting in the hand (good in some ways as they slip over the paper more easily).  In the scrubby bit of woodland nearby woodpeckers being quite secretive or at least elusive. Song of chiffchaff, blackcap and wren almost ever present. Chaffinches fly catching and furtively visiting their nests.  A Tawny owl high in a Scots pine looking down at me but too sleepy to bother moving.

Not a sketching day, more nature walk as a half day out. The little gulls butterfly flapping, seeming almost in slow motion alongside black-headed gulls. Only 2 with completely smoked dark underwings, the other 2 younger birds. The garganey was in evening light right in front of the hide…looking quite different from the chocolate brown and grey model I had in my mind. The foreparts looking more of a raw umber with fine dark striping on the neck and face, changing to spotting lower down. Seeming quite exotic.
Both species seem like markers in the ornithological calendar… little-ringed plover would have completed the set for me.

ink pen, c.A6 sketchbook

Sketching wildfowl being fed at local reservoir. Don’t know why I haven’t done it before. All the effort of locating the subject , done away with and free to concentrate on looking for drawing. Something odd about the birds being so close to their ‘wild’ setting, but here approachable as in the zoo.
When I left to go back to the more optics based drawing something had changed,  more of a sense of 3D. A bit like when I used to ring birds, the bird in the hand was like a different creature than the one that I’d seen through binoculars. In that case you really were feeling the anatomy in a different way.
Good to just try different things… felt like I was breaking some stereotypes … probably just making new ones though.
Numbers of primroses seem more than I’ve ever seen before. Sand Martins skimming the lake, first ones I’ve seen. Swallows too, flying higher.