Greg Poole – Artist / Illustrator based in Bristol, UK

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.

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.