Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Rather than re-draw the Canada goose from my sketchbook, today I went to Procreate’s ‘Action’ menu and chose ‘Take a photo’ and used the rear camera of the iPad. I scaled up the photo to get the drawing I was after to fill the canvas.
Now that I’m more familiar with the process of putting together a drawing, following Román García Mora’s suggestions for an ‘illuminated drawing’, the next stage is to get more of the natural variation of watercolour washes into the illustration.
Wet weather even for the ducks and geese this morning so I’m trying the process of drawing an animal in Procreate on an iPad Pro as suggested by Román García Mora in his Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate course on Domēstika.
His favourite style is what he calls ‘illuminated drawing’ in the tradition of 18th and 19th century natural history illustration where a line drawing of the animal was printed and the colour added by hand in watercolour, so you get the definition of an ink drawing and the luminosity of watercolour.
10.05 a.m.: I’m counting about 85 Canada geese this morning but a passing dog walker tells me that for two days last week he thought that they’d deserted, there were none on the lake.
Two passers by comment on the single drake mandarin that is looking immaculate but sadly hasn’t yet attracted a mate. I’m here for the geese but if he swims over towards me I won’t be able to resist drawing him.
11 am: All the geese leave the pond and a flock of about 50 graze on the grassy slope.
After two hours I’d almost finished this spread in my sketchbook but the last Canada goose was drawn back home from a photograph on the big screen of the iMac. I’m pleased that it looks equally as messy – let me rephrase that ‘equally as spontaneous’ – as the sketches done on location, sitting by the outlet of the Thornes Park Fish Pond, sometimes under an umbrella as fine rain fell.
When I was drawing them in action from a distance yesterday the female pheasants seemed fairly plain – light tan with streaks – but drawing in close up from a photograph I took yesterday with a telephoto lens there’s lots of complexity in the pattern of the plumage.
Five female pheasants alternated from pecking around the feeders for spilt sunflower hearts and crumbs from the fat balls to drinking at the pond (and one unwisely tried to run across the surface of the water!) then going down to the veg beds to rest for a while.
One pheasant, feeding on its own at that time, suddenly burst into a ‘mad half hour’ routine, as my mum used to describe similar behaviour in a cat; darting around and flouncing its feathers as if it was being threatened by some invisible enemy. This lasted less than a minute, not a full half hour.
Canada geese at Newmillerdam this morning.
More bird anatomy studies from photographs in the Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness Guides Bird and Skeleton.
The Canada geese are from a photograph in The Encyclopedia of Birds by Perrins and Middleton.
This is from an illustration in the 1969 AA Reader’s Digest Book of British Birds, artist unknown: eight artists worked on the project but illustrations aren’t credited individually.
I’ve drawn a sketch which is a combination of some of the poses of the Canada geese that I photographed last week.
Our next assignment in the Domestika course, Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate with Román García Mora is to roughly drawn in the underlying bones. For this I referred to a photograph of a goose skeleton that I’d found on the internet.
Next the main muscles. If goose has its wings folded the cover the top leg muscles and the body muscles such as the large breast muscles, the Pectoralis. I’ll try this exercise with a four-footed animal where all that will be more visible.
But at least if I’m called up to carve a roast goose this Christmas I’ll have a vague idea about what’s going on.
Canada goose feet, drawn on the iPad Pro in Procreate.