Travelling sketchbook - murder!

This month I received a lovely vibrant drawing of a kingfisher and a series of bird silhouettes of different species in shiny graphite - the types of shapes that you might see in a bird identification book.

As usual, a day or so for it all to percolate..

Pretty soon, in my head the birds swirled over me, crows, rooks cawing, shapes against the sky. Winter in the woods. Night was falling. The wings were huge in my face.

A murder of crows....

I don't know, so many of these subjects seem to make me reach for something dark. Something with a twist of foreboding... But then I think, if that's what is there, that is what I should grasp. If this exercise is to be meaningful at all, it needs to tap into something real in me. That's its best chance of working, of feeling genuine and somehow 'connected'.

I was drawn to try to recreate that trepidation of crow shapes, wheeling ever closer against a darkening sky.

First a background.

I had sprayed some Brusho Shimmer Spray onto some sketchbook pages for what had seemed a totally random reason (as in, I found the bottles in the cupboard), but I could see how shadowy wing shapes would work well on such a sparkly background. A background reminiscent of a starlit sky.

 

I needed a darker canvas for the depth of the night sky and a red tinge at the bottom of the page suggesting something diabolical, so I shook up a couple of Procion MX colours into spray bottles to add to the mix...

Next I went onto Google Images, to get some crow and wing shapes to use as templates and cut them out in a variety of fairly matt papers, to give a decent contrast with my dark but sparkly sky. Then I had fun placing them to try and trade off the shapes being distinguishable one from the other, but also seeming rather claustrophobic. I tried to do this by using different sizes of birds and wings sections.

(I did wonder about having a pair of supine legs coming into the picture, 'stage bottom', but it seemed a bit over the top - ha!)

Translating this onto the landscape-oriented travelling sketchbook necessitated a bit of jiggery-pokery to make the composition work and all that spraying did mean that I got some dye on the previous page (eek!), but this is what I am passing on to the next person.