Tag: Starling

Roe Deer and Hoar Frost

pen and wash woodland sketch

No mud this morning, the ground is frozen solid and the leaf litter and debris on the paths crunch like gravel as we walk up through the woodland of Emroyd Common. Hoar frost crystals have formed in a few patches in sheltered spots alongside a hedgerow and there are ferny patterns on car windscreens.

roe deer and buzzard sketches

Two roe deer trot along at the edge of a pasture along the top edge of the wood.

For several days as we passed the houses at the top end of our lane, I’ve been scanning around to see if there was a buzzard or red kite circling. As we were beginning to suspect, it is actually a starling giving what to me seems like a passable impersonation of a buzzard mewing.

As we walk back through Emroyd we disturb a buzzard, which flies off down the slope through the oak woodland.

Starlings

startlingssparrowIt’s good to see starlings making a comeback. Once ubiquitous, they haven’t been much in evidence in recent years but most mornings a few of them gather on the rooftops across the road. Sparrows should have a good year too to judge by how many times I’ve seen a pair of them mating. They cup and saucerikea mugalways perch on the gutter on the corner of the house diagonally opposite us. Perhaps this is the best spot if you want to avoid a stealth attack from a sparrowhawk.

House End

WE’VE BEEN on the move today but without the car, which has taken a while to get through its MOT test, as things keep cropping up. After 12 years, it’s time to change it, so we took a test drive today in a small car that proved a little too small for me.

On the return journey from the dealers I sketched passengers on the bus. There’s something that you can’t do while you’re driving a car.

Curiously if both Barbara and I are travelling together it works out cheaper to go by taxi as we did on the outward journey. Most bus travellers buy a season ticket but for short journeys without a season ticket we’d always do better going in the car (which we feel we have to have to run our book business).

Once when we were without a car we had to take the bus to make a delivery on the other side of Wakefield and the bus fares of £16 or £17 more or less soaked up any profit we might have made on the order. Having a coffee when we arrived probably soaked up the remainder!

I’m not sure why we had to go together with the order. Guess it’s more fun with company.

Starlings love the dense foliage of the holm oaks which are neatly trimmed into fat topiary lollipops in the Cathedral Precinct in Wakefield.

Starl-ink

THIS DRAWING of a Starling was made with my ArtPen and inked in with a Sakuyo Japanese brush using Calli Jet Black India ink. It’s on Goldline layout paper, which is 50 gsm bank paper; very smooth and semi-transparent.

With no bleed the bank paper isn’t letting the ink lines run into the fibres of the paper, which was a problem with the soft cartridge I was using the other day, but because layout paper is so thin it’s just about on the limit of being able to take a dense wash of India ink. There’s some cockling but very little sign of the ink soaking its way through the thin paper.

Birds at a Glance

chaffinchThese aren’t drawings of the birds’ ‘true’, accurate appearance – it would be easier to study a bird book for an authoritative version of that – but they aren’t drawings of the birds as I saw them either; they’re drawings of the way I remembered the appearance of the bird after I’d looked at it for as long as possible, which wasn’t long enough, through binoculars.

This way of drawing varies from my normal approach where I look and look and look again, building up a drawing from dozens, probably hundreds, of little observations. blackbirdThat’s not an option with most of the birds in our garden. I took mental notes of shape and colour during my one lingering look at each bird and then tried to stick to that, rather than revert to the familiar picture of, say, a Blackbird, that I might already carry in my mind.

I gave myself license not to worry if the final drawing didn’t look all that much like the bird. As I say, I could have referred to a bird book if that had been my aim but these are the colours and the shapes, as accurately and honestly as I could transfer them from memory to paper.

The species I drew are male Chaffinch, Starling, female and male Blackbird, Great Tit and Woodpigeon. I used an ArtPen with brown Noodler’s waterproof ink and Cotman watercolours.