teal drawing update

lighting conditions here a little erratic at the moment so please excuse the darkening on the right side.All the teal are now in place with a little more work required on the smallest female.the next stage is to lay in a wash of H grade pencil to form the base for the water and then its reflection time!.hopefully this will tie it all together and really bring it to life.

Teal drawing progress

The second Teal is now almost complete and ive been able to do a bit more work on the water to make it a little more interesting.My next step will be to continue and complete all the teal and then i'll tackle the foreground water and reflections.The image will eventually comprise of 3 male teal and 2 females.

teal drawing update

The first Teal is now in place and now he's in i can more accurately judge the amount of toning that will be required on the water.i was a little wary of making the water too dark to begin with for fear of losing the teal in the background,now it's obvious that i shall be able to darken up and add some detail to the water.

Teal drawing progress

This is progress on my teal drawing as of last night,i meant to post it yesterday but the failing autumn light crept up on me before i got a chance.i have now completed the background vegetation to the top right of the image and layed in another wash in the centre of the picture for another stretch of water.i added reflections to the water from the vegetation and they will continue into the third stretch of water in the foreground.i'm working from top to bottom on this piece and once i've finished layering the mud bank that the ducks are standing on i'll proceed to add detail to them leaving the foreground water and reflections till last.i will work up the existing stretches of water a little more once i have more detail in the remainder of the piece as things come to mind.

quality scans of latest images

The Egret pool

The chase-moorhen and avocet

Serval portrait

Just received some better quality scans of my latest drawings so i thought i'd post them here for your viewing pleasure

New drawing started

this is today's work on my latest drawing.It's a drawing of teal resting in one of the lagoons at slimbridge in gloucestershire.ive put together this image from lots of photo reference taken in february of this year on a lovely clear day,so there will be plenty of nice reflections to work with.ive made a start by plotting in the ducks and some of the more detailed vegetation as well as some faint outlines of where the mud and water will be.the first mud patch has been more or less fully worked up with grades H thru to B and i have layed in some of the background vegetation working thru the grades from H to 3B as it is fairly dark in places.ive also layed in a wash of H grade pencil in the background and blended it with a paper stump to begin the process of drawing water.ive been meaning to draw this scene for some time as i love teals they're my favourite duck species.it's going to be fairly complicated and so likely to take a while to complete even though it's fairly small scale.hope you'll like watching progress unfold.

The chase-moorhen and avocet

Another day's work in the studio and this image is finished.lighting conditions are not great at the moment and so the image is a little darker than in reality.I'm happy that ive managed to get across the speed at which the moorhen departed the scene by placing it at the extreme left of the picture,this wouldn't work for all compositions but here it helps to increase the sense of the moorhen taking flight.ive enjoyed enormously getting back to my favourite subjects waterbirds over the last couple of pieces and in particular working in this smaller format 7"x15".i hope you've enjoyed them too.