Category: Drawing

The Sand Martin Wall, RSPB Saltholme, 12.45 pm, Friday 21 April 2023

Our favourite coffee (and carrot and coriander soup) stop on our trips to Northumberland and today the view of the lagoon from the first-floor café is quite different to what it was on our autumn visits. Instead of exposed mudbanks and shallows for waders and dabbling ducks, water levels are now raised, creating what appear to be fox-proof islands for the breeding colony of black-headed gulls.

Queen Elizabeth II Country Park, Ashington

This swan breast feather is almost transparent so that you can actually read large-print text through it. I drew it on a dark background as on white it fades into the background.

The new Willow Hide, Hauxley Northumberland Wildlife Trust nature reserve, 1.20 pm, Saturday 22 April, 2023, 15℃ 59℉ in the hide. Rain had passed over, grey skies, getting brighter.

There are thousands of dancing gnats in loose gatherings, especially in the shelter alongside hedges. On the window of the café I can see there’s a mix of hump-backed females and males with feathery antennae.

Teal are dabbling and twirling, picking up insects from the water surface.

The Lookout Café, Hauxley Northumberland Wildlife Trust, 2.30 pm, Saturday 22 April, 2023.

Pea and mint soup with a cheese and beetroot scone, overlooking a corner of the lagoon with teal, gadwall, mallard and Canada goose. Oystercatchers and lesser black-backed gull go over. We see our first swallow, flying low over a field towards the reserve’s lagoon.

Saturday, 15 April, 2023: Sad news that Barbara’s brother John died peacefully in his sleep early this morning so I’m keen to finish the little grey sketchbook which started at the beginning of January when he was taken ill. His last short walk with us was at Thornes Park on Monday 9th January and he was taken into hospital the following weekend when it was expected that he had just days to live.

During the three months that he has been in Pontefract Hospice it’s been a welcome distraction for me to work on my John Carr Redbox Gallery display and I finished work on that today.

Looking forward to making a fresh start with my new sketchbooks.

Recent iPad sketches drawn in Procreate and Clip Studio Paint.

A few more pages from my current pocket sketchbook

Addingford, 10.30 am: A male reed bunting flits into a hawthorn bush by a pond between the canal and the river, flashing its white tail bars.

Wintering duck have now moved on but a single drake goosander makes its way down the river, diving occasionally as it goes. Later we see a female heading up river.

Swans often nest on the quieter side of the canal but this year a pair have built an island nest on a tennis court-sized pond by the Strands. They’ve built up the nest platform from the dried stems of reedmace, which is now bursting into fluffy masses of downy seed. Slender willows along the banks are dotted with pale catkins.

A pair of grey wagtails bob about on a flooded corner of the The Strands.

I could go on adding details (or start again and try to get nearer the actual proportions!) but there’s enough to evoke John Carr’s spire in my recycled materials model for the Redbox Gallery show.

Think of this as being more stage set – well a stage set for a stop action animation perhaps – rather than architectural model.

I’ve given my cut-out version of the Beechey portrait of Carr a bit of a Pop-Art makeover in Adobe Illustrator.

Continuing on the theme of using found materials, I’ve cut up a garden cane and a piece of left-over dowel that I’d used for stirring paint to make the pillars supporting the spire for my model of St Peter’s Church tower.