Not long back from the John Busby seabird drawing course. Tutoring along with John B., John Threlfall & Darren Woodhead and I think a great time had by all.  Very much about just getting out there and doing it every day.  My own work seemed scrappy but I felt like I learnt a lot and through the tutoring I was reminded of aspects of working that I had lost.
Lots of material for studio work if/when the opportunity arises.

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Using a different approach to woodcutting… drawing/painting the image using stencils and little foam rollers.. so a bit like printmaking on the block before doing any cutting. This is the first ‘pull’ from a 2 block print.

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Briefly getting the paintbox out . Back of an envelope sketch of one of the 3 bullfinches that have been attending the feeders for a couple of months. Seems to be a pair and another single male. The pair always travelling together. All messy eaters, usually a mush of sunflower around their bills.
The other highlight of this largely homebound spring summer has been the appearance of common spotted orchids on the little square of grass on our allotment. They are now flowering. So when the weather is kinder I’ll get the gouache out again for those.

On the way back home from Norfolk picking up a woodblock that I’d left in King’s Cliffe that I needed to reprint. Strange to work with something from another time. It was a very deep block (not the one on the print bed), nearly an inch, so it needed tracks of the same depth for the roller to run on… should have taken the photo when those were in place.
Seemed like taking a print from some kind of fossil of a creative burst gone by.  Because they are single block prints it allows me to really focus on the quality of the printing… too heavy and it fills in the woodgrain marks… too light and it hasn’t got that certainty of the bold shapes that seems important.
All this an aside to the resumption of illustration and over mulling over of studio imagery from the Norfolk experience.

A week away after the intensive studio work on illustration and web related activities. Revitalising sea air and intensive observation of nature feeling like a tonic.
Highlights of the trip were the number of baby birds. Lots of baby avocets with their very aggressive parents seeing off any other bird that came near. Baby redshanks were a first for me, very pretty chicks. The noise of calling waders echoing in the brain just as the geese did the same after our winter visit to Norfolk.
The reed birds were really active. Reed warblers and buntings, sedge and cetti’s seen well but not for so long. The bearded tits were showing well but I didn’t feel like I really got to grips with them… needed a prolonged watching session which we never got. They seemed to be mainly collecting food down at the bases of the reeds. Some sort of black flies primarily. Then whizzing off with the beakful and plunging to their nests.

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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.