More Illustrations

I don’t have any logbooks in process at the moment, so it’s a good time to catch up with some illustrations so that I can change some of the more frequent appearances, and add to my bank of images should I need them. I definitely needed another Shelduck as he crops up in quite a few titles, and wanted to do an Avocet too. Having so much white, they will need to go on a blue background, and because I have to standardise the colour in Photoshop and fit them in to my scanner, I no longer try and make the illustrations saleable; they are simply to produce images for reproduction. I sometimes feel this is a bit of a shame, and it definitely alters the personality of the painting, but the fact is that most of my artwork is sold in the form of logbooks not stand-alone illustrations, so that takes priority!

I also wanted to paint a Hoopoe, as we occasionally get them here on the south coast, and as with the Bee-eaters in Norfolk, who knows if climate change will bring a few more of these continental European species our way.