Birds on the brain

No matter what I get up to in my creative life I always come back to nature as my inspiration and especially to the birds, plants and flowers I see every day in my garden. As autumn arrived this year I’ve been spending quite a lot of time recording the change of season with pen drawings and paint. I have a stack of papers that I recently boiled with leaves and iron water. I think they make lovely, organic backgrounds for my drawing and painting. These are just  single sheets at the moment but Laura has promised to bind them into  two lovely books for me when she has time. They’ve been waiting for a home but I think they’ll look great when they are combined with the papers I printed in the summer. I have been posting work in progress photos of my autumnal studies on Instagram so you may have already seen some of them.

Of course I don’t just work on paper, I also love to work on deep sided, stretched canvas, box panels. They are great because they don’t need framing. Just pop a picture tack in the wall and hang the canvas on it! The redwing is my latest bird painting.  We see them regularly in the garden once the weather turns cooler. We have lots of berries that attract birds during autumn and winter and redwings love red berries.

We’ve also had a really rare visitor  in the last few weeks. We know there are kingfishers on the river nearby but we’ve never seen one in the garden until now. Twice we’ve seen the kingfisher dive into the pond and then reappear with his catch of dragonfly larvae. I can’t tell you how exciting that was! Not so nice to watch him beat it on the rocks at the side of the pond but let’s face it, everything has to eat.

The redwing and the kingfisher are painted with acrylics onto canvas but the final image today is a great tit painted onto a canvas panel that has been prepared with a special ground that makes it accept watercolour paint. This was a first for me but I am happy with how it has turned out. I’ll be adding these to my online shop very soon. If you are interested to see more photos please take the time to check them out!

Bye for now – Linda x