Travelling sketchbook - chomping fieldfares & Mark Hearld:

Again from M, I received a lovely couple of pages of very evocative feather designs and I was immediately off into the realm of birds again.

I spend the summer fervently hoping that our crab apple tree would have lots of pendulous ripe red fruits, as come winter, migrating fieldfares take up residence in from the fields on the very coldest of days and sit there until they've greedily chomped through the lot! Usually the tree is finally bare just after Christmas.

A December feather subject could not have come and gone without these characters making it onto my sketchbook pages.

As I thought about portly birds in wintery treetops, I recalled that the wonderful Mark Hearld has lots of work involving birds and the landscape and so I turned to his gorgeously produced book, called Mark Hearld's Work Book, to reacquaint myself with his subjects and just how he puts them together for maximum effect. The more I looked, the cleverer I realised he is.

Mark Hearld

For example, as above, I love the way the main subject takes your eye, despite all the other seemingly busy competing elements. The way your eye travels round the picture, taking everything in. The delightful positive and negative elements, just thrown in so you hardly notice them unless you look carefully, but which add so much richness to the whole. It was thrilling to keep looking.

What could I possibly learn when I was just dipping in and out? The more I looked the more I realised that something so apparently effortless is anything but. Of course.

And the above is a print, so doesn't even take account of Mark's frequent use of very varied collaged elements that I always find so exciting.

Anyway, back to my fieldfares. I had a bit of a draw of one and in my sketchbook had a little 'first thought' at a composition.

 

In fact I realised that a 'Mark Hearld' was out of the question. I just didn't have the skill to combine anything like as many elements. So I decided to keep it simple and anyway, I had started snipping tree branches out of a discarded gelli plate print that had just got too dark, but which I couldn't quite bear to throw away. You know the story..

And I quite liked the emerging texture, with bronze lights that I hadn't even considered, until there they suddenly were. I laid them out.

And I realised that with a gentle background, a cheeky fieldfare and some berries, that would be what I wanted. That would be enough.

This is what I passed on to the next person.

The background was just some watercolour swirling, using a couple of colours. After some further immersion into the World of Hearld, the fieldfare was collaged from scraps following my earlier sketch, the breast was a paper leftover with some Inktense pencil marks, some of the marks made into dampened paper. The eye was a couple of glued-on sequins, so that it had a catchlight. And the berries were plops of vibrant watercolour.

It's amazing just how much thinking and mulling I do to get to a pretty simple result. But I think for me it's all about gentle visual problem-solving, play, which takes some pressure off.