The Case Of The Curious Crow

The Case Of The Curious Crow, originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

Here are the illustrations for the book that Geraldine Taylor has written. It's going to be published in the autumn.

moonlight bear

"Slugs is to badgers as rice is to the Chinese"

I've finished the picture, and am very happy with it. I was worried about how the hawthorn tree would turn out; I blanked out the blossom with masking fluid, which I also used to frame the night sky and the moon. It took ages to get the latex solution out of the brush.... I'd never even heard of masking fluid until a few years ago; it's jolly useful. But a pig to get out of a brush.

I also had to put off painting the sky until the shops opened, so that I could get some indigo watercolour. And then hummed and hah-ed about whether I should get some Cotman watercolour at £1.99 a tube, or Artists watercolour at £5.99 for a tiny tube. I settled for the Cotman. It seemed to work OK. (I once made a nasty mess using some watercolour from LIDL. You can't be too careful. Well .....perhaps you can be too careful. Anyway...)

Still learning.

This picture is for Geraldine's next book, The Case of the Curious Crow. Here's a link to our last book, The Coffee Thrush

chiffchaff

summer wind
a sparrow re-rights itself
at the peanut cage

Alan Summers

I did this pic to accompany Alan's haiku, for one of the events he's organising in Bath. You can find out more if you follow the link above...

This morning I was sure that I heard a chiffchaff as I wandered around making my first cup of tea. So I took the tea and sat at the open window in the front room.

I heard:

a green woodpecker
wood pigeons
a wren
blackbirds
robins
blue tits
greenfinches
goldfinches
a starling
...and the chiffchaff.

I spotted it a few times, as it flitted from tree to tree; it landed in the plane tree outside the house, the tree that the magpies nested in last year; and gave a burst of song, then came to a branch very close to the window.

I kept perfectly still.

But it decided not to risk it anyway, and bobbed off to the next tree.

At one of my early morning wildlife-related meet-ups at the Downs cafe with Geraldine, Keith and Nick, recently, I met Myles Lucas, who was looking into why birdwatchers watch birds. My explanation was, or would be, something along the lines of 'because they are wild creatures whose space overlaps with ours, and it's interesting to get to know their characters and habits'. There is a lot of wildness going on close by, and it's just as wild as what you see on an African safari (and less likely to eat you too...). And the more you look, the more you see.

playing around with pictures

I'd been looking at the cover design for The Bald Blackbird, and not been happy with it but couldn't quite work out what to do. It just looked wrong, and lacking in something.



So I did this picture of hawthorn blossom
And then I removed the background from it, and copied and rotated and resized it a bit...


...and cleared some space behind the foreground things....



...and then stacked all the images up in layers, and ended up with the final version that I put at the top here. Fairly happy now. Paintshop Pro is really very useful.

On the other hand, it would be nice to create pictures that were finished entirely on paper, too. I was looking at some of David Inshaw's pictures the other day and thinking how nice they are. Bet he doesn't use PSP!

flights of fancy

Usually when I've seen a sparrowhawk it has been a fleeting blur of deep blue, flashing through the trees or over the crest of a hill and away, before I could even say "Did you see that?"

But yesterday I was looking out of the kitchen window at the flurries of snowflakes falling slowly to the garden below, when a sparrowhawk wafted along the walls and bushes that divide the back gardens of my road from the back gardens of the next road. It perched for a while in the ash tree, then wafted back the way it came, swinging from side to side and fluffing out its wing and tail feathers to make itself big and slow, or at least slow for a sparrowhawk. It was hoping to flush out one of the small birds that come down to the gardens for the food that I and the neighbours put out; next door is very popular with the goldfinches and tits; our garden is mostly patronised by magpies, pigeons, squirrels and the occasional fox or seagull; the hooligan element of the local wildlife.

I mentioned this incident to the a chap I was having a cup of tea with, last night, when I was round at his house picking up Katie. He seemed to think it was odd to take such an interest in the local wildlife. I think that not taking an interest is a bit odd, missing out on all the creatures that don't so much share the city with us as exist in a sort of parallel space. Sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like to see this environment as they see it. Sometimes I stand on the roof and half close my eyes and imagine that I'm on a coral reef, and the birds flitting overhead or swooping through the gaps between the houses are really fish, and we're all at the bottom of a very clear ocean.

And then I come back to the surface again and get back to work.

going to the zoo

I think I've finished this picture, and I'm both quite pleased with it and aware that I could do better, which is probably a good result.

On 2nd February there's an event at Bristol Zoo, where Geraldine Taylor will be reading from The Coffee Thrush and talking about bird song and adventures in wildlife; there will also be some poetry from Nick Winn, the Peregrine Poet, whose poems have also graced the sides of buses in the Bristol area. And I'll be doing a sort of son et lumiere thing with my illustrations.