Greg Poole – Artist / Illustrator based in Bristol, UK

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.

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

wax crayon, c.A2

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.

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).