After a weekend on domestic DIY (roof insulation) I was loathe to go back to my printmaking without a fresh dose of reality to give it more grounding. The birds were going back and forth to their nest building but I didn’t want to disturb them, so I focussed on their collecting and feeding activities (aside from lichen picking there was a lot of fly catching… including lots of ariel sorties).
These are 3 A2’ish sheets… forcing myself to move out of the sketchbooks.

Making 2 small prints based on yesterdays sketches but the birds getting too rounded off and mimsy.  Making this larger (A2ish) print to try to improve the handling of the birds. My idea was to make a large print with the birds quite small within the space… just leaving empty space helps to see how that might work. 

That should do it for the hit counter. Trip out to local reservoir… first dedicated field sketching trip for a while. Resolving to draw whatever common species crossed my path. So much easier to see things when they are singing. Wrens, robins, chaffinches, great tits all singing away with the noise of battling coots in the background. I stuck mostly to sketching songbirds as a continuation of my garden studies with the idea of possibly making a series of monoprints directly stemming from recent observation.
Long-tailed tits have been regular visitors to the bird table and so I was primed for seeing them in a bigger setting… First time I’ve ever seen one of their nests under construction…looked like a third or so built, all of moss and lichen from what I could tell… deep in a blackthorn thicket.
It was warm or even hot in the sun and the birds were flitting up to catch small insects that seemed to be everywhere.

Staying with my ‘drawing in the horns/reins’ approach. Making several prints of blackbird… as much about watching what happened with black over yellow ink as about blackbird. Quite a sumptuous feeling carving into the blocks of flat colour.

I’ve been sketching visitors to the bird table in odd moments . We seem to have more robins than usual and it looks like they are just starting to nest. Grabbing leaves and taking them somewhere behind my studio. Making several quick monoprints to get back in the swing of it after days of domestic DIY, and wanting to get back to something of the simplicity of the sparrowhawk prints.

A bigger block. Working to find a balance in what the different layers do… here I thought I would keep the first two layers very simple and let the top layer do most of the work. Ends up being a bit thin on background… and a bit heavy on the final layer. Enjoying handling a bigger space.. just need to loosen up and play with it a bit more…

Poor photo… ink sheen and poor light at end of day… that and the slight misregistration  makes it harder to see what is what.  Trying to deal with the bigger picture. Learning something but not quite sure what yet.

With these earthier colours a sense of getting more into the realm I was after… The mossy greens predominated in reality but they can wait to come back in, if at all.
I’m including photos of studio end wall to give some kind of  overview.  I hadn’t mentioned the use of warmup  prints (the little squares below the sparrowhawks). Not sure whether they are colour sample tests or abstract compositions but enjoyable and helpful to do.