More Bees..

This time I have been working on an image of a bee playing a pipe. It’s a trial both for a bit of reduction lino practise and a possible visual for a poster which will include a poem.

It took rather a long time to get this far. I am not sure reduction linos are for me. I find them a bit limiting and have ended up actually preferring the black and white. But its all good practise.The character of the bee was important and that is always a challenge especially in lino. One tiny slip of the cutter and everything changes.  It’s an all purpose bee of no particular species. Not quite as stylised as I wanted, so may try another version.

First reductions and colour trials

Four not-too-bad prints. There are 4 colours plus white in the most complex print.

But I love the simplification and choppy marks of lino and woodcut. These sort of marks would be hard to achieve in any other medium. The happy accidents and unforeseen marks are particularly rewarding.

Final black and white print and the plate.

Some (late) Spring Bees

In between things I am continuing with recording what happens to the Bird Cherry this year in print. The idea is to be able to make a small book. Rather than rely on photos I am waiting until things happen to the tree so I can make some observations from life.

In the Spring with the first blossoms came the bees. I have had the plate cut for ages and only now got round to printing some trials. I combine the plates so it’s a slow and uncertain process. here are the first ones.

This one is the nearest to what I need.. I wont be able to print the set until much later in the year. So plenty of variations to come.

Small Owl Dancing with Bees

Yesterday we had a morning in Cambridge, first the Botanical Garden and then the Fitzwilliam Museum to see the Turner Watercolours and the other exhibition of watercolours which trace the development of the watercolour. Both were fascinating. But also walking through the ceramics gallery there were two lovely owls. One a huge Martin Brothers owl and the other a gorgeous smaller slipware jug.

I made a couple of quick sketches because it just so happens that I have been making a small experimental print of an owl. It started out as just a regular if stylised owl, but it seemed to need a bit of action so I changed the drawing to make it dance… and then it seemed to also need some companions so I gave it some bees.

There were brown/yellow and  blue/dk blue prints. The image is 6 x4.

Small Owl Dancing with Dees.

What was most interesting about the slip ware owl was the dot/dash decoration of the slip. The simplification is very design-y. So is my owl. I may try a print of the slipware owl too. but in some ways it seems like cheating because the “design” element has already been done…. unless I could bring something new to it….

All prints are just more experiments in combining plates, improving my cutting and trying to get the registration right. I am getting better, slowly …..

The Busiest Bee in the Garden.

The warmth has brought out flowers and bees and none is as busy, as the delightful hairy footed flower bees. For the third year running the females are nesting in the blue strawberry pot. It has never grown strawberries but the variety of side entrances seem to make it very attractive to these industrious little bees.

The females are all black with ginger legs, the males gingery with white faces. This year they were very early, slightly too early I think as one of the girls didn’t make it, but they are all doing well now with a bit of competition for nest space. The males have a higher pitched buzz and a very characteristic hover and zoom flight pattern.

 

The early male warming up on my hand and below approaching the violets

Approaching the violets

 

 

 

The very early female who did not make it, but she is about to be the model for some more sketches,so will live on in a way!

They love pulmonaria, and comfrey and approach the flowers with their tongues out, ready to go!

I painted them both for my British Bee set, but I was in the US at the time and had never seen them in action. But I read about their characteristics, their habits, sounds, flying patterns etc  and it was wonderful to catch up with them when came back to the UK.

The two paintings from 2010... time for some more I think. Sketches to come.

The Fenland Black Bee: The (almost) Finished Piece.

The final piece with some foliage, a suggestion of the birch trees and a view of the distant bird hide. I am dithering about adding a Highland Cow.
The hide is known as“Jon’s Hide” an eco friendly straw bale hide created by Jon Smith one of the restoration officers at the Great Fen project. You can see how the building of the hide progressed here.
The Highland Cattle are there to help manage the land. I included them in my first sketches at the beginning of April. They are good grazers for wet lands and will eat tough weedy plants, keep the vegetation down, break up the ground and so encourage more marsh loving wild flowers. 

As I quoted in an earlier post, “artwork is never finished…just abandoned”. At this stage I usually put a picture away for a week or so, out of sight. Then have another look. I might add another leg to the bee… I might add the highland cow…I might play about with the hairs on the bee’s thorax a bit more… but that’s for another time. I shall be back in about a week.

Bee and Flower

It’s mid way and the drawing of the White Dead Nettle flower is more or less compete. The leaves are deeply veined but this is not a “botanical” drawing so I don’t feel the need to draw every one of them, just give an impression of their complexity.

It’s a time to assess the weight of various areas. The black bee and the two bugs are the main focus but I need some more weight at the top left. I am going to add some straight lines for an indication of the strange silver birch trees that form the background to Holme Fen and will add the distant bird hide which you can see when you look towards the wood from the info centre where the white dead nettles grow. maybe even a Highland cow.

 

On the board..image about 10 x11 inches . Watercolour and pencil on Arches HP 300

The Pied Shieldbugs

Progress on the pied shieldbugs:
I re-positioned the main shield bug a little further away from the bee to give better balance to the piece. I had spent quite some time watching these tiny bugs and their interaction with other insects. It’s a fascinating micro world of uneasy relationships. Who is predator and who is prey? The shieldbugs did not seem to mind the bees apart from just having to get out of their way. I saw one tumble to the ground, knocked off a leaf by a huge bumble bee landing on a flower and bending the whole flower spike down. It flipped back like a catapult.

The painting of the bugs was fiddly as the largest one is only 1 inch long .

 

I love the way these tiny bugs get to the edge of a leaf and peer over. Bees and beetles do the same, as if contemplating the vista spread out before them. It’s a long drop but having wings must give you an extra sense of confidence.

The two bugs and the bee…. Next the flower and background. Lots of decisions to be made at this stage…

Back to the Bee

My Beautiful Beast this week continues with the Black Bee, Bombus ruderatus, Reading University and Friends of the Earth’s Iconic Bee for the East Midlands. (See my “A Fenland Bee” post)

By my last post here I had roughed out a design .. which I then changed. Such is life.
I decided to change the pose and design to include the odd little pied shield bug which I had found on the same plants at Holme Fen.

 
The foliage rough including the two bugs

I got down to painting the bee last week: (see “The Black Bee Continued”)

 

Almost finished bee.

Sketch and painted bee, roughly combined to check composition. It will be about 10 inches square.

And I did a bit of extra shieldbug research. They are very interesting and attractive little “true” bugs, with a staged lifecycle going through at least 3 instars.

The neat, design-y shield bug instar stages.

This week I will be finishing the bugs and the foliage. There is another bee to come as well. A new drawing of a special Bombus hypnorum.

A Little more Bee Progress

It’s a good time to draw this bee as the White Dead Nettle is just coming into full flower.There are many patches in and around my hedge so I brought two flower stalks in to work from.

 
The White Dead Nettle along with my chestnut twigs, my bee models one of which is  B ruderatus very kindly given to me by my main bee ID helper Alan Phillips and the best book I have found so far on solitary bees. “Bees of Surrey” by David Baldock.

I’m still thinking about how to portray this bee so it’s more rough composition sketches and some more detailed bee drawings

 
Bee and the Dead nettle flower

I might even add a bit of colour on the main flower stem this time.

 
B ruderatus colour notes
And I might add some pollen to the pollen basket to contrast with the black bee.

Things that are black are very seldom seen as black so I have to decide on the colours. There is sometimes a deep red/brown to the black bee’s coat. The shiny exoskeleton will reflect blue sky where the hairs are sparse or rubbed away. The wings will shimmer with reflected light but do have a slightly dingy yellow/brown colour…like old discoloured Sellotape.
There is a European relation to this bee Bombus argillaceus who has spectacularly dark brown wings.. very beautiful. It does not live in the UK..yet. Things do change.

Bee Habitat

When I am going to draw a particular bee it’s important to me that I understand its habitat. I am rather hoping I might find a B ruderatus somewhere on the Fenland and the habitat in parts of Holme Fen is just perfect.

Holme Fen Habitat Sketches
The  dyke banks near the info boards are planted with White Dead Nettle, Red Dead Nettle and Mallow, favourite forage for this bee.

The different shapes of the plants are interesting and I am thinking about the possibility of a pencil background to the bee, but with more foliage than I would normally use.
Curiously there are some Highland cattle grazing on the grasslands. They are used to help manage the pasture.

A gouache sketch looking over the fen past the sleeping cattle to a distant farm. Looking this way there is no sense of the black peaty soil because these fields  have been deliberately laid down to grass.

A Fenland Bee: The Large Garden Bumble Bee, Bombus ruderatus

My beast this week is a bee I have been wanting to paint for a long time. As part of this blog, Sue and I are exploring our local region, the Fenlands and low lands of the East Midlands of England. Its fauna and flora can be quite specific and this bee is found most commonly in our sort of area.
In 2013 the University of Reading and Friends of the Earth published a list of Iconic bees of the UK.Their aim as follows:

“A project to put together a list of local ‘Iconic Bees’ - one for each region (or in some cases county) of the UK.This will be a species which has a story to tell – be it negative or positive. Once completed it will be a useful tool for local campaigners as it will give the general public a bee species to support locally and could also go a long way to raising awareness of bee diversity in the UK.

My photo of the beautiful black Bombus ruderatus in my fathers garden in 2011

For our area and luckily for me it is the beautiful Bombus ruderatus. The Large Garden Bumble Bee. This is the description from the PDF issued by the Friends of the Earth where you can read about all the bees which have been allocated to each region.

“This is Britain’s largest bumblebee with a long face and extremely long tongue. It strongly resembles the more widespread Small Garden Bumblebee (Bombus hortorum) with a yellow band either end of its thorax, a single yellow band at the top of the abdomen (often broken or faint) and a white tail, however its hair is shorter and ‘neater’ and the yellow bands tend to be duller and more mustard in colour. Also, unlike the Small Garden Bumblebee, it has a completely black form.

B. ruderatus’ preferred habitat is flower-rich meadows of river valley systems,
fenlands and other wetlands. This is due to the presence in these areas of White
Dead-nettle, Comfrey, Marsh Woundwort and Yellow Iris on which it likes to forage.
It also has a strong liking for Clover and other leguminous plants and so is also
found on farmland that contains margins and ditches rich in these species”

It’s a difficult bee to identify unless you find the all black form which I saw a few years ago in my fathers garden. Luckily I had good enough photos to make a pretty confident ID and of course to work from, for a painting.

So  sketches and ideas first from my model which is the banded form but will show me that long face.

 

This striped version of the bee varies tremendously in its colouration and the width of the bands and it is very like B hortorum. I will be drawing the all black version, officially called Bombus rudertus v.harrisellus

 

 A4 sketchbook work and notes

 
Thinking about seeing bees in the white dead nettles near Holme Fen on Sunday. It’s the perfect habitat for this bee.

A small colour sketch:  watercolour  5 x 4 inches