Ardea cinerea – The Grey Heron

This week’s art is the last painting in the set of animals I’ve been drawing in the last month or so. It’s one of my favourite birds – the Grey Heron.

Here are a couple of process images…

This is the finished picture…

Sea Turtle

This week I drew another ink drawing while I was recovering from my chest infection. It is of a Hawksbill Sea Turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata). Turtles are beautiful animals!

Here is a really nice overview of these amazing creatures…

I began my art with some very basic pencils…

Then I put in a simple ink outline…

Next I added in all of the solid black areas I wanted…

Once the basics were done I just filled it in with ink textures…

Finally I added black watercolour and white gouache to render the turtle’s shape and to push the tonality a bit deeper. Here’s the final image…

I do LOVE turtles! In Crete when I was in my twenties I stayed up into the night to spend time with a turtle protection team helping them and learning about their work. It was wonderful to be very small part of that.

See you all next week. Until then, here’s another turtle I think is kind of cute – it’s Kooper Trooper!!!!

Starting Again Next Week

Hi Everyone

Just a quick note to let you all know that I’ll be starting up my blog again next week after a hiatus following the death of my father.

Thank you so much for all your kind messages! I will get on top of my comments soon and start reading all of your posts too!

All the very best to all of you,

Jo xx