Meadow Insects

meadow insects
Making a start on the pen drawing, watercolour to follow.

I’m going back to pen and watercolour. I was looking at the sketch that I made in 1972 for my Greenhouse Mural, which I featured in my previous post. The drawing is rather messy and the media rather mixed – dip pen, watercolour and a touch of acrylic – and is applied with more enthusiasm than skill but the sketch has a lot of life in it. Coming back to it after over forty years, I can remember the exhilaration of the challenge that I’d been presented with.

This month’s Wild Yorkshire nature diary in the Dalesman.

After a year of practicing drawing on my iPad I’ve got to the stage where I can illustrate my Dalesman magazine articles with digital versions of my regular drawings, so I think it’s good time go back to traditional media and try to apply what I’ve learnt.

meadow insects
Meadow photographed in the walled garden at Nostell, as were the hoverfly, bumble bee and vapourer moth caterpillar. The other insects were photographed on a Wakefield Naturalists’ Society meeting at the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust Thorpe Marsh reserve, near Doncaster.

But that doesn’t mean that I’m not making use of my iMac. Ideally, I’d sit in a sunlit meadow with my sketchbook and draw whatever came along but in this case I’ve got dozens of photographs taken last summer to bring together in a double-page spread. ThisĀ Photshop CC 2019 collage looks disjointed but I’m convinced that I can make it all flow together as I draw. It’s not intended to be a snapshot of life in the meadow, instead I’d like to evoke the experience of strolling through the grasses on a summer’s day.

field guides

There are some excellent new field guides around including one on hoverflies and another on bees. When I’ve completed my illustration, I’ll drop it into a page layout in InDesign to check that my text will fit in, which will hopefully run to about 600 words. Being able to identify the insects means that I can be more specific in the stories I tell about their habits.

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