Reworked Kingfisher

 

Painted this in 2007, but was never really happy with it, being fairly new at the time to coloured pencils I found it difficult, or maybe I didn’t have the patience, to build up the colour to the extent needed. I hope I have made a better hand of it now!

When, years ago, I first started painting, it was birds that were my main interest and I spent hours in the field trying to sketch through a telescope and then making finished paintings at home. I never felt that I managed to transfer the life from the sketches to the paintings, so gradually did less and less birds.

 

I think I’ll give it another try, for a long time I have wanted to do a series of common Irish birds, so maybe nows the time.

Bird sketches.

Thought I'd show another side to my art today. I started drawing and painting about 120 years ago, or so it seems, initially as a means of recording some of the birds I saw in my other obsession, birding, and twitching, which is not the same. Above is a bird called a Sharp Tailed Sandpiper, which is an asian wader that winters as far away as Australia, unfortunately it got lost when deciding to migrate and ended up on the beach in my village Ballycotton , in Ireland. This was only the 3rd record of this bird in Ireland. The bird below this is a Common Kingfisher, nothing terribly exciting about that, albeit a stunning little bird, except that I sketched it in Goa in India. In Ireland this bird is extremely

shy and hard to see, in fact I think I have only managed to sketch it twice in Ireland, but in India, apart from being very numerous, it is also very tame and confiding and allowed me plenty of time to draw, all the time diving for fish and coming back to the same perch.
The other two sketches were also done in India and are of a Black Capped Kingfisher and an Intermediate Egret.
Can anyone out there tell me how to move pictures easily on blogger as I always have enormous trouble getting them where I want them.