Time for my OH

Belated Post 4

As part of the fair holiday plans it was time for me to take a back seat, (and get down to some creative stuff) on Monday, while my OH went round the Washington Wild Fowl Trust. It’s a very nice relaxing place to be first thing in the morning before the school children arrive, so I did manage to stick around long enough sketch a couple of birds, before I retired to the van for some art therapy.







I really liked the patterns and the colours on the red breasted geese, good job they had these illustrations, as my photos were useless. The Bewick swans were preening and they were moving their necks at the most amazing angles so it was really hard to try and catch any position at all.



As for the Ringed Teals their colours and patterns would make a great design source. You may notice an escapee puffin sketch (above) and I’m sorry to say that this and the Shag were all I could manage on the day we went to the Farne Islands, it was too windy and cold to have a sketch book out for long, Hmmm!!! Very, very poor excuse!!

Anyway I spent the afternoon happily working on my journal, that I had prepared bfore leaving home, so here's a few WIP pages.

Front cover,a melted wax exercise from Traci Bautista's book.


These 2 pages were centred on rubbings done at the Lindisfarne Centre, meant for children to play with , I suspect!





I just used WC's and any bits I found or packaging etc. as I didn't take that much with me, it was a good discipline exercise.

And these are some puffin experiments that I did from my photos and a PC. I also made some crude printing blocks with cardboard.




Just the outlines drawn on velum



At the end of the day we decided to move on down towards Shirley, who I’d arranged to meet up with before I left home. She had told us that there were some nesting Avocets near a petro-chemical site, so we headed off in the direction of Hartlepool.



As we’re both Southerners, born and bred, my OH and I haven’t had much experience of heavy industrial plants in our neck of the woods. It came as a bit of a shock then when we arrived at a sandy beach outside Hartlepool with this group of buildings in the distance.



As we got closer the Avocet site we met this bizarre line up over the brow of a hill, as the sign on the gate said it was a salvage company I can only assume these old ladies had gone there to die!!

We finally found the hide that the company had erected to view the birds and while we waited for the morning we took the opportunity to try out some night shots.



I must admit it did feel a bit like being in the middle of some awful Sci-fi movie being so close to all this industrial power with it’s occasional rank smells and strange noises emitting from the chimneys, as whatever it was puffed out at irregular intervals.

But it was worth it, my OH did get his sighting of the Avocets and a seal colony for good measure, so it has to be said that the vast amount of land these places occupy does become a nature reserve, by the simple lack of disterbance by people.