I’ve not been in a very positive mood over the past couple of days. In fact, other the last few weeks, I’ve been feeling more and more overwhelmed and hopeless in our new Covid world.
In an attempt to snap me out of this, I thought back to June when I did a daily ‘act of wildness’ as part of the Wildlife Trusts’ 30 Days Wild campaign. Appreciating the wildlife around me really did wonders for my wellbeing back then. Not gonna lie, the occasional sunny day might also have helped – though I believe we did end up having quite a bit of rain in June too? Anyway, a particular highlight of 30 Days Wild was definitely the little fledgling in our garden – a blackbird fledgling.
I have lots of very fond memories of this baby blackbird. The first time I saw the little thing, s/he gave me a huge fright. I was out watering the garden when something suddenly dashed out from under the plants and hid in a bush near the fence. I honestly nearly jumped out of my skin. I wondered what on earth I’d spooked so I peered into the bush and saw this chubby little brown bird – it looked a lot like a thrush but it wasn’t quite large enough. I decided it was best to leave the poor thing alone so I went back into the house.
I was pretty intrigued so I sat and kept my eye on the garden for half an hour or so. A little while later, a male blackbird landed in the grass and the chubby brown bird jumped out of its hiding place to be reunited with its dad. From then on, I kept looking out for this little blackbird and even drew a doodle of her/him for ‘30 Days Wild’.
Through the doom and gloom of the lockdown (and some of the ‘easing’), this little fledgling brought me many happy moments. One particular highlight was when its dad was trying to feed it cherries from our tree. These cherries were pretty big in comparison to the little bird and they just kept popping back out of the baby blackbird’s mouth. I have to say, there was always an overriding concern that this little thing wasn’t going to make it into adulthood – it was just so clumsy at times and seemed completely helpless! – but, somehow, s/he made it.
I can’t remember the last time I saw the baby blackbird but I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot recently and it inspired a couple of my art pieces this week. The first one is an ink drawing. I do get a bit ‘perfectionist-overload’ while using pen, but I really do love the effects you can create with ink. I used a few different pens to do this one and I had a lot of fun trying to recreate the fluffy feathers. The only downside of using pen, I find, is that it can be difficult to stop. Every time I looked at the picture, I thought an extra stroke here and a line there would make it even better. But one too many and it could be ruined!
I was very happy with the pen version of my little fledgling but I decided to make this chubby bird the subject of a watercolour as well. I bought some A5 watercolour paper recently and I absolutely love using my watercolour paints on it. The colours mix so beautifully and it’s really easy to create some lovely effects. The more I’m learning about watercolours – and other mediums, to be honest – the more I’m realising how important layers are. In this case, I started with a very light layer of yellow/green in the background and then, just before this had dried, I layered darker greens and blues over some of the sections. I did something similar for the browns on the baby blackbird as well. I think I need to have a go at some more birds with this technique!
Right now, we have a couple of new fledglings in the garden. Our cherry tree continues to attract a range of birds and some juvenile pigeons have been sheltering there over the past week. On some days, these 2 juveniles have sat in our tree for hours on end doing nothing but cling to the branches they’re holding onto. And, at one point, with no sign of an adult pigeon at all, I speculated that maybe, perhaps, possibly, these little things hadn’t even realised they’d fledged! To my utter relief, an adult did come and join them in the end! They’ll definitely have to feature in a piece of art at some point! I’m sure that’ll bring another smile to my face 😊
Ramblings of a (very!) amateur artist 