trying to build speed with the depiction of garden birds with the aim of  getting better at handling acrylics better and including a number of the disparate characters in the same frame. The pigeon and the jay have to resort to jabbing at the feeders with their bills… like a boxer hitting a punch bag with their head.

All studio work at the moment. Bird table watching and drawing in spare moments. The wood pigeons are a pest on the allotment but on the bird table they are providing something with a bit more heft to draw. Along with the jays they are the big beasts of this environment. Male & ‘brownhead’ blackcaps, robins, great, blue & coal tits are the main visitors. Finches and thrushes just don’t seem interested despite the freezing conditions. Maybe they get better feed elsewhere?

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I’m still beavering away at my archiving of past work which has had the sense at times of being a complete folly. Now that I’ve done the major spadework it has the feeling of having cleared the channels to let the water (in this case creativity I guess) flow through more readily.
Felt like that today when as I pecked at the keyboard I could watch jays coming onto the bird table to gobble the peanuts I’d spilt yesterday. I didn’t count precisely how many would fit in their throat pouch but I’d guess a maximum of 8, certainly 6 went down.
Amazing how they animate the scene, vibrant colour and their size compared to the normal bird table visitors, making them seem the big beast.

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The ‘lightbox’ gallery below shows the same images as above but is compatible with internet explorer & includes reference numbers.

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Trying to follow through on the use of memory drawing in the life room…. making pretty ugly scattered notes. Sense of having nothing left to cling on to after looking… information seeming far too complex to recall. And yet I know that what is retained goes far deeper into the memory banks and is learning of a different calibre.
The drawing whilst looking is making more subtle sets of observations and the drawing of them is satisfying to the hand, more’ish curves and sweeps.
The memory drawing seems more blocky, like something carved into the mind that will retain its form for longer.

 

Same approach after half term break. Sense of wanting to change but think that the spareness may yet allow me to make more detailed notes… Feels hard to pull out of the more’ish tracing of contours but would be good to somehow change gear to describe some of the confusion areas….with diagrams & written notes?
Now that I’m working so minimally it would also be possible to move around the room and not stay so locked into one perspective.

Images moved to ‘life drawing’ gallery and I broke the links

Determined to make more of an effort on at least making one drawing/painting a day. My time swallowed in self imposed archiving/cataloguing which in due course should feed through to website clarity.
More birds gradually returning to the feeders after absence during what is presumably autumn plenty elsewhere. A band of house sparrows jostles in the dry leaves of shrubby cinquefoil before one braves the table and then they take turns, warily gulping beakfuls before diving for cover. I guess the wariness is for the sparrowhawk. At other times they have seemed much less careful.

3 days in South Devon. This was the last day and the only time I got to any sketching.. low tide and seaweed smells. Feeling very pure to sit and study the birds… gradually being able to expand focus to the sea and rocks.  The sea which had been fairly lively with a strong westerly on the first two days was now tamed to a low hiss and swash. Want to study those water movements more.
It was so calm that any activity on the sea was visible for miles, fishing gannets over distant dolphins, 3 divers, probably great northerns and a few common scoter were the notables.
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Not finding it such a bad thing to have this limited time of intensive drawing each week. In between it is all web re-organisation/cataloguing, which inevitably means reviewing my previous work.
Limiting my means to just the ink pen following last weeks enjoyment of the clutch pencil. I like the very decisive ‘scribed’ line.  Even though the figures aren’t accurate in terms of scale I’m feeling like I’m getting down more of the information that I want on these sheets.

I’m steadily working my way through the ‘archives’ and updating images and captions to try to get everything up to date. After the foray into butterfly paintings I’ve been concentrating on monoprints with birds as key subject. This is helping me to work out a labelling system that should be easy to maintain.

Minimising my approach…taking only graphite, mostly in clutch pencil form and ended by most enjoying the absolute thinnest of these… very more’ish sense of tracing round the form.  Came away wanting to do a lot more of that… getting rid of a lot of the clutter that I had been getting and freeing myself to the point where I could make more precise notes….
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