Blocking in elements with goauche to make some kind of architecture to hang the crayon drawing on. In the sun lots of butterfly activity, adding a kind of electricity to the vibrant colours in the plant life (nasturtium flowers and runner beans, poppies etc… that I’ve yet to deal with).

Female gatekeeper, forewings a sea of orange. Honeybees with troubador hindlegs (something of them expanding to a wide flattened boot) .  Sinking their small heart shaped faces into pillows of marshmallow scabious. Need more work and more exagerration to find the form and feel of the red-tails… quick moving buzz, fuzz of blackness. Finding two new…

More collection of detail. Small skippers one of the most obvious protagonists on the meadow at this time of year. Flashes of orange copper. Miniscule and tricky to get a feeling for their anatomy. One pair mating, clasped together for at least 3/4 of an hour….The orangey species are the most prominent butterflies at present……

Re-engaging with fieldwork discipline after various family related escapades. Gradually building up some fluency in how to deal with plants and insects. There were more species on the carrot… including spider hunting wasps but figured that I should try to learn to draw one creature (the soldier beetle) and then build from there. As ever…

The last day, a bit disrupted because I had to take the van into the garage. Forgot my larger monoprinting perspex and consequently limited to A5 plates. Still having the feeling that I was only touching the surface of the field monoprinting…. These guillemots are pretty much what I already knew…but little things like the…

This was a day of revelations for me. Firstly seeing how people could do the equivalent of quick life drawings as an excercise… (described here). Then lead tutor Darren Woodhead had bought clay for us to make some kind of 3D representation of what we were seeing. We convened at the top of the cliffs…

Not so easy to get out to the islands these days and this year we only managed to get on the Bass rock for about an hour. We split into 2 groups leaving from Dunbar harbour with people sketching kittiwakes whilst waiting for the boat. Last year one of the pivotal moments of the course was…

Back to St Abbs and more monoprinting on a more A2 scale. The use of scrapers leading to more arm movement and wanting to carve out to give some sense of an overarching space for the birds to occupy. The paper flapping around and ink getting all over the place go with the chaotic feeling…

The first time I’ve tried monoprinting in the field. Rolling up a perspex block with relief ink (rolled out on a separate ‘reservoir block’). Then scraping/incising into the surface with dowel for lines and metal scrapers made from mount cutter blades and bits of old visa cards. On some I started to work back positively…

We tend to start the drawing course at Dunbar harbour as a way of easing into the week. The wall of kittiwakes is challenging but the nature of the space allows us to go round the group for the first time and have a chat with everybody about how their work is going. Vehicles are…