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

6427 – great crested grebes dlisplaying – wax crayon – c.A2

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.

wax crayon, c.A2

Sketching at local reservoir. Started off by sketching the flycatching black-headed gulls. Moving in little circuits, able to fly very (apparently) lazily into the cool breeze, a limpid slow moving patch of water beneath them where they would dip bills to pick up something on the surface or crane necks to snap at an air borne morsel.
Feeling that I wanted to look at the bigger space and use my pieces of paper in a more spatial way… always this battle on how to show the things seen close up through the optical equipment and the sense of place gathered with naked eye.

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.

Out in Mendip woods. Commas the only butterflies I saw. Several sunning themselves on rafts of dead vegetation and then going up in sparring spirals with passers by.
Soemthng odd in the order of flowering out there…bluebells out , just a scattering but not just one or two.. and this before the cuckoo flowers.

Half a day sketching out at local reservoir. The goldfinch was on the feeder before I left. No time for uploading other pictures at the moment. Unusual mix of sketching though, first a couple of hares which are scarce in this region (at least in my experience). Then 2 roe deer an adult buck keeping company with a young one. Finally the long-tailed tits, their nest is nearly complete. A dome of lichen being lined with feathers.

A walk in Gloucestershire woods after delivering the bees mentioned in previous post and also pictures destined for the Birdscapes gallery. These tits (blue tits as well) feeding on this flowering sallow (green rather than the silver of pussy willow)… little chestnutty bracts at the base of the flowers and they were peeling these off and then poking beaks into that base… somehow getting nectar I presume. Didn’t really get to the point where I was properly differentiating the 2 species in my drawings… Feeling that I needed the walk in fresh air rather than sedentary sketching. Usual woodland species, some strangely approachable buzzards in the rides. Not as much bird song as I would have expected. The marsh tits were singing and thrushes but otherwise rather quiet (this was with late afternoon sun breaking through after these days of flat, still cloudy weather).

An image from a few years ago… framing this and another bee picture for an exhibition at the nature in art museum (March 27th – April 29th). Very much the scene in the garden now with the pulmonarias sprouting up out of the leaf litter. I haven’t seen this species yet (anthophora plumipes) seems to be mainly white-tailed types as yet… I’m no expert but anthophoras are small and fairly distinctive… with the male and female very different. This would be a male… the female is very dark and a bit larger.

I’d got very bogged down with the long-tailed tit monoprinting (not for the first time) and glad to see the more straight forward enjoyment of crayon drawing.

I’ve been asked to write an article for the local Wildlife Trust (Avon) about drawing inspiration from their reserves. Floundering a bit as it seems such a big subject. So I’ve tied it down to one reserve, Folly Farm (about 10 miles south of Bristol) and at this season (early spring) and then started to look at my sketches made around this time of year. Having had one go at it and feeling it was a bit cheesy I thought I’d be better off captioning the pictures and just making a brief overview… then thinking that I could double up and try to do more of my website maintenance whilst I was at it.
So my subjects so far are :

• nuthatches    – whoop whistling and excited trilling.  They seem to do the first when just clambering around and you don’t really see their beaks open to emit the far carrying ‘whup’ ‘whup’ ‘whup’… When trilling it needs a bit more thinking about and they often adopt a more vertical stance as though really bringing it up from the diaphragm. Sometimes they start to rotate whilst making the loud trill, as if going into a trance, hyperventilating.  So I don’t have to be actually sketching nuthatches for them to infuse themselves into the pictures, they can be there as part of the soundscape backdrop.
• primroses   – The appearance of the primroses on the banks and woodland floor seems synonymous with the air warming. Giving warmth to the day even when there is no sun. They are harder to stylise for me, their mounded growth form and flowers going off at all angles are challenging to put down quickly.
• early purple orchids  – Early purple orchids were one of the first plants I got to know at folly farm. A showy species, if a plant can be charismatic then this is it. It’s spotted, lolling tongue leaves bring on anticipation of the big flowering to come. One of the challenges of making pictures is trying to capture something of the fleeting thrill of what is usually a fairly brief encounter. We don’t often sit and earnestly study our common flowers. To draw the simply that is what seems to be required, and then with repetition it becomes possible to make quicker drawings or paintings that have something of the corner of the eye view.
• early butterflies – On the first warm days butterflies start to appear in the rides. Orange tips & brimstones tend to be on the move most of the time and are tricky to sketch. The peacocks and commas are perched for longer periods, sunning themselves on log piles or dead vegetation. Last year the blackthorn was heavy (and heady smells) with blossom and lots of peacocks were feeding. Something exotic in an English landscape, the dense clothing of flowers like deep sleeves over the spikey blackthorn. Slow flapping of peacocks, eyed, red velvet wings probing the flowers with their long tongues.

Highlights problems I’ve got with opening up galleries of images… the wordpress features/plugins for doing this just aren’t working for me so far.
So if you do have a look at the links above you will need to click the HOME link to come back to the blog.