Scotland holiday

My first good drawings (to my eyes) in ages. Stuck on the Levellers, sat in my bedroom for a few hours today and yesterday and came up with these. They were copied from photos I took while in Scotland for half term...

Ringed Plovers, Newhaven Tide Mills, (not from scotland but I had the pics to hand so did my best!)
Personally I prefer the left-hand one.



Common Gull, Longniddry




Oystercatchers, Longniddry, a collection from all the different photos I took of these.




Waxwings, Loch of Kinnordy RSPB. My favs out of all of these!

 The four above were all done yesterday, while I did the ones below today.



Black-headed Gull, Loch Leven. More of a warm up before I sketched some of the more impressive birds today




Whooper Swans, Loch Leven. These are my second favourites after the Waxwings!




Goldeneyes, Loch Leven. You may have noticed one is circled yellow.
I hideously cocked that up, then carried on drawing it anyway, and I
thought it came out as a very, very weird, but somehow interesting drawing.
The female is turning her head away in disdain!




Female Shoveler, Loch of Kinnordy RSPB. In a way she was nicer than the
dazzling males, her subtle orangey-brown hues go well with the season. The bottom picture shows her
preening.




Cormorant, Threpmuir Reservoir. A bird i had previously overlooked
for sketching potential, but they are fun to draw and a nice challenge to
make look real.




Mute Swans, Musselburgh Lagoons. By now I was fairly knackered and realised
I wasn't doing quite so well any more!




And, finally, I did a quick, '15-minute flash' of one of the Longniddry Oystercatchers.
The same bird as the bottom right of pic. no 3, copied from that little sketch.



First drawing in ages

These Killdeer were fairly common in character, with great plumage and bounding with character.

some more stuff

My first 'comissioned' piece, my wedding present for my cousin and his fiancee. Also one of my favourite pieces I've yet done. It's great to see yourself imrpove in something so well!!

'ode to a Rye tern colony'

anf finally, a flashback to autumn 2008, a pelagic, The Bay of Biscay and a beautiful juvenile Black Tern.

all paintings done in a mixture of watercolour and pen

first autumn '10 stuff

as you can see here, I have started watching my local patch for signs of autumn migration. On the first day I visited, 26 July 2010, one of the most obvious signs of migratin were large flocks of Swifts passing west along the clifftop. s a bird I love to paint, in totally diffferent circumstances to how I usually see them, I really was powerless to resist the urge to draw these beauties, and attempt to capture some of the spirit of those ethereal beings as they zipped along Seafod Head at phenomenal speed.

while this is another bird from that day, a Green Sandpiper. this is another species I quite enjoy drawing, but I very rarely paint them in a nice typical pose feeding on a muddy bank. The reason why is very simple I never see Green Sandpipers feeding on muddy banks! I always get quick views of a dark grey bird with a white arse, but they are probably more impressionablw on my mind in these views, hence I paint them far more like this.

catch up

as per usual my camera stuff is failing miserably to upload any kind of photos. I eventually got all of them from the past two weeks (!!) onto my laptop yesterday but never got tie to upload any of the stuff I've done since then. Hope you enjoy!!

an avocet painting, based on birds seen from a seawatch at Splash Point this spring.

Tern/Gull silhouettes against sea background

I have a few more I haven't photographed yet too so look out!

all the best

Liam

terns-done in pen

this mixed tern flock is one of many I saw at Splash Point this spring seawatching. Done in pen in around 15 minutes

many pictures!!

with my ability to upload photos somewhat buggered for the last three days, I haven't been able to put any new pictures on here. However, I've done a fair few little watercolour pieces in these three days. Most of these were my own little way of 'celebrating autumn'. i.e they were painted based on what I saw last autumn at Hope Gap, my local patch. so here they are...

lemony Wagtails as they pass overhead on a clear August morning. It all looks a bit messy and badly drawn but it often takes me a few attempts to get a painting right (not an outright promise though!) done in watercolour.

and a Turtle Dove, which flew overhead as I was admiring a Garden Warbler on 5 September 2009. again I'm not overly pleases with it but they are a difficult bird to see much detail on in flight, shape is more important with this sort of bird and I feel that the shape/jizz of the bird is 'acceptable'. done in watercolour.

A Red Kite, also flying over on 5 September, which flew SE out towards the channel mobbed by Jackdaws. done in watercolour.

A Red-breasted Flycatcher, found by my dad on 7 November 2009 on the patch. Personally this is my favourite out of all the autumn on patch pictures. done in watercolour.

I did a few more pictures too over these past three days. Some were random things that caught my imaginaton, some were flashbacks into other birding moments, all are shown  below;

Swifts on a warm evening, complete with an Alpine among them. Daydreaming with paint? well yes off course, but after painting it I remembered seeing scenes like this over my grandparents house in Cyprus, so maybe I had a subconscious influence! the swifts in here are done in black acrylic and the background in watercolour

an Oystercatcher, partly influenced by the 100's I've seen at Longnriddy in Lothian when we go up north to see family in Edinburgh. Longnriddy is an inspring place for anyone who wants to sketch seaducks or waders, and for anyone who can go I would highly recommend visiting it in winter. the oystercatcher is done in pen and the rest is watercolour

a Common Tern. the background is purely fictitous, partly inspired by simple watercolours in the Jonsson tiny little paintings in Collins Birds of Britain and Europe. the Common Tern is from many observational sketches taken in Anglesey and Rye Harbour recently.

New Forest final piece

here is a finished piece from when I visited the New Forest last weekend. a pair of Black-headed Gulls, a hawking Hobby, several dragonflies, a distant Buzzard and a Sand Martin I randonly added in to fill up the page. based on sketches in post 1 on here.

it gradually evolved from this into what you see below

this piece was done in pen and acrylic

Also, here is a brief sketch of one of the Pied Wagtails I've seen around my school recently, filled in with felt-tip pen

and I also think photography can count as an art if done properly, and here are some photos I have taken recently (dedicated to Username of BF if you're out there somewhere mate :) )

a white spider tackling a hoverfly

and some macro pictures of water on the roof of the extension, which I can climb onto from my bedroom. for some reason the only word that comes into my head when I look at this is 'vortex'. it all looks mysterious, thick and treacle-like to me, and shows how, at a minute level, the world around us is full of such wonders as a few drops of water.

more viscous water

and I felt like God by creating my own mini-waterfall!

sorry about all the random photos but they make me feel arty and I feel hlep to improve the actual art!

adios

Liam

Little Terns ar Rye Harbour-two weeks ago

a day spend at Rye Harbour a few weeks ago resulted in quite a bit of birdlife to draw. Avocets were on all the pools, complete with many chicks. There were Mediterranean and Black-headed Gulls, Common and Sandwich terns and best of all a few Little Terns, successflully breeding in a more secure area than usual. The drawings/paintings I've done since then are too numerous to include them all, so here are a few of my favourites

a Little Tern on it's nest

two LT's in flight over the sea

a 'pod' of Terns in flight

and finally all these plus one extra on the cereal packet they were drawn on! all these paintings were done entirely in acrylic. with water mixed in heavily with the blue to dilute it.

Seaford Head-20 June 2010

a wonderful surprise yesterday when a Red-footed Falcon appared two miles from my house! Getting a lift with Dad, we arrived mid-afternoon, expecting distant views. We were a bit surprised when we couldn't find it flying around as we walked towards the small crowd. We checked and couldn't see anything, though they insisted it was showing really well. I looked in a scope and suddenly it was sitting on the ground in all it's glory, and I could see every single detail. Then I looked up and after a few moments, and noticed that small grey mound 10 feet away in the field! For the next half hour it showed wonderfully, sitting, catching beetles, occasionally taking to the wing and at one point flying onto a fencepost 5 feet away! It even coughed up a pellet at one point, the first time I've seen any bird do this! It was missing several tail feathers and was relucatant to fly much of the time. A shame, and I hope it manages to return to wherever it came from happily.

post 1-New Forest-18-19 June 2010

welcome to all on my first post of this brand new project. 

the most important, and often most enjoyable part of bird art is the field sketches. This involves jotting down exactly what you see while you are out, as a visual reminder for when you get back in with your paint. This weekend was one I spent in the New Forest. we were seeig family, so birding was at a minimum. but on the 18th, travelling there, I got a surprise when I saw a Common Tern over Chichester Canal, sussex. In a car drawing isn't easy, but we weren't going too bumpily so my attempts were better than I expected;

Actually in the New forest, we only got out for a walk on the 19th. At Burbush Hill, near Burley, one of the typical small forest pools held a lone Lapwing, perhaps with mates and chicks in hiding. however he looked a bit of a sad sight all by himself. a rather out-of-place pair of Black-headed Gulls kept him company though!

my final sketch is of, although you can't see it very well, an extremely pale Buzzard. it was in Hampshire. Booted Eagle mystery solved?? it was so pale it looked like a partial albino, which it may well have been. Without colours I can't  do it justice, but will work on it!

adios!!!