Category: Art

Operation Osprey, 1973

Osprey sketchbook

Fifty years ago today I was halfway through a 3-week stint as a volunteer warden for the RSPB’s Operation Osprey at Loch Garten.

osprey sketchbook page

A squirrel came down from the shutters into the hide and ran off with an entire Rich Abernethy biscuit.

The female osprey seemed considering an extension to the nest . . .

  1. Because the young are growing and knock her out of the nest every time they exercize
  2. the nest slipped over the other day.
sketchbook

WEDNESDAY 1st of AUGUST

Up Cairngorm with Linda & Bill . . . by chairlift to the middle station: the top section was closed because of high winds. Just beyond the Ptarmigan Restaurant a noise like a motor starting or one of the snow fences creaking in a the wind . . . a ptarmigan, no 3, no 10 . . . we walked towards them when they started moving we counted thirty but when they were still their plumage looked like granite only the white wings showed. Cairngorm had his head in the clouds. We turned back down.

Filtered Sunlight

woodland walk

At Newmillerdam this morning I’m experimenting with Art Filters on my Olympus DSLR, keeping it set to High Key, which seems appropriate for the first bright day that we’ve had for a while.

mallards on fallen birch trunk

We’re on the regular lakeside circuit and, as it’s summer holidays, it’s good to see so many children taking an interest in nature (which isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy it just as much when they’re back in the classroom and we have the walk to ourselves!)

willow

The High Key emphasises pattern in bark and rippling water but it leaves images looking pale and contrasty – I suppose that’s the whole idea – with highlights burnt out, so I’ve taken the images into Adobe Lightroom and looked through the suggested filters for something nearer to what I had in mind when I took the photograph.

Lawns Dike sign

I find myself looking at the familiar trail from an alternative point of view as ‘high key’ makes me think of the brighter side of nostalgic subjects. The texture in the sidelit Lawns Dike Trail sign with the mossy stonework and weatherworn wooden sign is just what I had in mind. It reminds me of vintage colour postcards.

ducklings

As I’m fiddling with every image in Lightroom I might as well have taken normally exposed photographs and decided for each which filter – or no filter at all – might have been appropriate.

tree roots

But I did try one more filter: the mallards in eclipse plumage dabbling around the Boathouse Cafe got the Vintage Filter, but again with a bit of tweaking in Lightroom afterwards.

mallards

The vintage effect works for me as it reminds me of colour plates in Edwardian natural history books.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

High Street

High Street

Horbury High Street drawn from Auckland Opticians this morning.

Fur Balls

Back to my animal illustration course and today we’re making our own Procreate brushes to represent animal hair. It’s the equivalent of using a fan brush or an old splayed brush in traditional watercolours.

In Search of Lost Courses

At last, it’s time to go back to my Domestika courses including Román García Mora’s Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate.

Unfortunately my courses have disappeared (apart from Mattias Adolfsson’s cartooning course) and the Domestika chat-bot can’t help me locate them.

Does anyone know how I can contact Domestika? There’s no contact form on my version of their website on Safari.

Found!

Hurrah! I’ve found them again. As the chat-bot suggested, for some reason I must have created a second Domestika account, using my Apple ID instead of my regular e-mail. I must take those chat-bots more seriously in future.

Junction 32

As part of my attempt to get to know my way around my digital camera I’m making a point of taking it with me whenever I can, even on a trip to Junction 32 shopping centre at Castleford this morning. This is the view from our table at Bakers and Baristas.

bastion

Just to get started I took a photograph of the gabion wall by the car park.

bastion edging

If I can get relaxed about using my camera in public I’ll move on to including people in my photographs.

Kestrel Preening

RSPB St Aidans, 12.30 pm, Tuesday: A kestrel lands on the track ahead of us, apparently for a brief bathe in a puddle although by the time I get my binoculars on it, it’s dust-bathing then going through its preening routine for a few minutes.

It seems very relaxed about us standing just twenty yards from it. We chat with a bird watcher as we get back to the centre:

“Was it streaky?” he asks “It’d be a juvenile, they’re more trusting of people, and like all juveniles, they’ll sometimes do silly things.”

Gatekeeper

A male gatekeeper flutters past us, heads for the long grasses alongside the track and immediately gets stuck in, to us, invisible strands of a spider’s web. I feel that I ought to give it a second chance, so I gently extricate it. Free of any strands of silk, I can’t understand why it doesn’t fly off, then I notice that, hidden beneath its left wing, a spider has it firmly in its grasp.

I replace the pair amongst the grasses, leaving the spider to finish its lunch undisturbed.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Dancing Brass

Dancing brass cartoon

Okay, so I struggled to draw the massed instruments of the Castletown Silver Band dancing at their annual rave. If AI is so clever, let’s see what it can do with the words ‘brass instruments dancing.’

Brass dance AI

I typed the words ‘brass instruments dancing’ into Adobe Express BETA version. Time taken to come up with eight finished illustrations: 45 seconds. Some do look rather odd, but this one comes pretty close to what I had in mind.

But illustration is like music isn’t it? It’s the little imperfections that bring the performance to life! That’s what I’m telling myself 🙂

Adobe Express
Adobe Express

Happy birthday to Zoe. Keep on raving.