Teenage Woodland Sketchbooks

I love the writing of Clare Walker Leslie, who wrote the books "Nature Drawing" and  "The Art of Field Sketching". Leslie's approach to wildlife art is to use drawing as "A Tool for Learning". To do this, she suggests keeping a sketchbook journal. This is, more or less, what I had been doing as a teenager as part of my biology and art studies. 

Here are some selected pages from my own Teenage Woodland Sketchbooks... 

 

Bird Study Drawings

As a teenager studying Biology and Art, I made some anatomical studies of some dead birds, each measured onto the page exactly life size. Most are road casualties. One bird of prey had collided with a window and a pheasant head came from a shoot. A school teacher sourced both of those birds for me. I made 11 studies in all. Other were planned but never happened. Each took one or two days of solid commitment.

I got the idea from seeing a magazine article about William T. Cooper by David Attenborough in the BBC Wildlife Magazine of January 1993. In the article photographs, Cooper is using his own bird studies to aid his acrylic paintings. Lots of other bird artists do this too, sometimes in their sketchbook, sometimes like this, as seperate studies.

 Male House Sparrow Passer domesticus

 Female House Sparrow Passer domesticus

 Collard Dove Streptopelia decaocto

 Wood Pigeon Columba palumbus

 Willow Warbler Phylloscopus trochilusr

 European Robin Erithacus rubecula

 Feral Mallard Duck (head) Anas platyrhynchos

  Feral Mallard Duck (wings and feet) Anas platyrhynchos

 Ring-necked Pheasant (head) Phasianus colchicus

 Juvenile Eurasian Sparrowhawk Accipiter nisus

 Herring Gull Larus argentatus

Nature Conection with a Wren

One day, in 1994, when I was keeping a woodland sketchbook journal, I got up at dawn for a bird walk and sat down on a slope over looking a valley in Lion Wood LNR and waited to see what would happen by... a tit-flock, a jay, a woodpecker? 

Just about an arms length away, up popped a wren to sing its' heart out! 

This little bird remains just about the loudest thing I have ever heard in my life! The tiniest of all birds (well nearly), it had a voice that could pierce in your ear drums. Of course, I made some quick sketches...

I worked up my field sketches into a little water colour...

(The original was given to a friend of the family in Norwich.)

Feral Pigeons of Cow Tower

The next go at a large scale painting has taken me 20 years to complete!

I started it in 1993 but never finished it. I found it recently and made another attempt to complete it just this year. It is a bit sketchy in style, but I think I like that...

I struggled to work out how to paint the eroded brickwork. I also wanted to give the effect of warm and cool light; the direct light through a gap in the outer wall and the shadow light of inside the tower.

I chose two different colours for the highlights, instead of just using white which didn't look great. I used a Pale Violet for the interior highlights and a Naples Yellow (pale yellow ocher) for the warm highlights. Doing that just seemed to make the image come together so that I could finally call it finished.

The composition was based directly on a photograph I took in 1993 when you could still get inside the tower It is since locked and closed with an iron gate...

From my sketchbooks of 1993, it was going to be a much bigger painting with more of the design of the interior features in the brickwork but I'm sure I must have thought that would have been too ambitious for the time available in my course...

And the photograph of that scene shows more of the structure...

Cow Tower is an old medievel defensive structure. There is no city wall along Riverside in Norwich because the river was the defense. This tower stands at a bend in the river to the north-east of Norwich city centre.