Recent sketches from my pocket sketchbook, colour mostly added later. Sometimes I’ll take a photograph for colour reference but with these I’ve added the colour as I remember it.
Small Sketchbook
Month: May 2022
Kippax
Kippax: from the Old Norse ‘Cippa’s Ash Tree’.
Happy birthday (yesterday) to soon-to-be Kippaxian Olivia.
Ducks and Doves
A drake mallard stood resting by the duck pond in Thornes Park this morning. This was the only bird that didn’t move much during the whole time that I was there but I still found it difficult to draw get the correct proportion of head to body. With each drawing I started with the head but by the time I’d drawn the body I’d find myself coming back to redraw the head.
I couldn’t resist adding colour, which immediately made my sketches more mallard-like.
I drew birds in our back garden in the afternoon and, as with the mallard, added colour to each one as I went along.
The stock dove was an unusual visitor, smaller than the wood pigeon but quite capable of chasing it off, reaching out as if threatening to peck it. By the time they’d got down to the edge of the pond the wood pigeon gave up and flew away, leaving the stock dove to return to foraging beneath the bird feeders.
Ferns and Fossils
Mahonia, otherwise known as Oregon Grape; croziers of unfurling ferns with matching wrought ironwork; cross-bedding in magnesian limestone and dryad’s saddle fungus at Brodsworth this morning.