Wildlife in France

I recently came back from a trip to France with my family. We were staying with my aunt who lives in Bourges, about 40 minutes away from the official centre of the country, which gives you an idea of just how smack-bang in the middle we were! It's a beautiful area with an awful lot to offer and we spent some lovely days visiting various sights, including a walk along the Marais. This literally translates as the swamp but it's certainly far from a swamp, or how I picture one to look! It's a series of waterways that runs for miles through Bourges and surrounding areas, creating little islands of land that are used as allotments. 

It was a bakingly hot day (a max. of 38 degrees!) so there wasn't a huge amount in the way of birdlife. There were several families of coots with chicks at various stages of development; some brand-new and still fluffy and other nearly fully-fledged adults. I also spotted a heron flying across the horizon. 

Most exciting for me though was the pair of little grebes I glimpsed briefly. Although I've seen great-crested grebes before, little grebes were a new one for me so I was quite pleased that I spotted them before they ducked under the water and swam off. I actually heard them before I saw them; they have a pretty distinctive call! 

Not a great photo but they didn't stick around for the paparazzi!

As I said, it was extremely hot for the entire week and this meant that there were a huge amount of butterflies out and about. I snapped a couple which is an achievement I feel, as they are the most difficult creatures to photograph! They either flutter around so quickly you can barely identify them or, when they land, they close up their wings and hide away their beautiful colours! 

Walking along the marais, I also spotted a beautifully coloured moth which I'd never seen before and had to Google for I.D. The only reason I knew it wasn't a butterfly was because of the shape when it landed. When I had a look online, I discovered that it was in fact a Jersey tiger moth. Another first for me!

Look at that fab pattern!

The other thing I noticed while in France was a huge number of birds of prey in the skies and in the fields. That particular area (Bourges, Sancerre etc.) is very much arable which is very different to the grazing land around us at home. There were buzzards, kestrels, hawks, all sorts!

My favourite moments were sitting in the garden and watching the butterflies in the mornings, although I won't miss the flies over there; they bite!

Featured in Etc. Magazine

If you follow my Facebook page or are one of the few who read this blog, you will know I recently did an interview for Etc. Magazine. Well, the issue I am featured in is now live on their website and the hard copy of the magazine is out soon, and yesterday I got to see the finished piece.

You can read the full interview at this link, just look for pages 109-111. Apart from the rather unflattering photo on the first page (I've never liked my arms!) I'm really pleased with it! The journalist asked for some examples of my work and I sent a large selection over but I never imagined they would include so many pieces. That is a bonus really as it shows a good variety and proves I don't just draw dogs!

I can't wait to get my hands on a hard copy at some point next week (hopefully) then it will feel real. Let me know if you have read the article and what you thought about it!

Exciting news for Miss Magpie Designs!

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from one of the feature writers at Etc. magazine asking whether I would do an interview for them as they were interested in doing a feature on my work.  I'm quite familiar with Etc. (a complimentary magazine that is part of the West Sussex County Times) and have seen some lovely features in previous issues about local artists, craftspeople etc. (ha!) so naturally I was extremely excited to be asked!

As they were aiming for publication in the August issue, it had to happen quite quickly to work with the deadlines so I answered some questions via email then had a photographer visit last week to take some pictures of me at work. The latter was interesting as it meant I had to have a HUGE tidy up of my work space, which is at one end of my bedroom (no studio just yet, maybe one day...)

Quite conveniently, I happened to have a portrait in progress on my drawing board so that made it much easier for me to 'pretend' I was drawing for the photos and I think it will help to show a little of my process in the article. I can't wait to get a copy of the issue and see the piece although I'm quite nervous at the same time; especially having my photo in there! Hopefully it will provide a little local advertising for me as I have a reasonable online presence but not too much locally at the moment.

If you live in the Sussex area, make sure to keep your eyes peeled for Etc. in August and let me know what you think!

Tis the season to get fledging!

After all the built-up excitement around our two nesting bird families, the nuthatches and blue tits, I had to come to the conclusion over the past couple of weeks that the chicks have now already fledged. I wasn't fortunate enough to catch the event as it happened and I suspect this will be because the parents chose a very early morning when the garden would have been much quieter and therefore safer for the fledglings. As disappointing as this realisation was, I still feel very fortunate to have witnessed the activity that I did. Seeing the nuthatches excavate their nest hole and patch it up with mud; watching the blue tits pulling tufts of cat and horse hair into the nestbox; hearing both blue tit and nuthatch chicks chirping away whenever a parent bird arrived with a wriggling grub in their beak. This is behaviour that I've never been lucky enough to see before and for that reason, I feel very fortunate.

That said, this past week or so has made up for the lack of fledging activity as the garden has played host to a variety of species, young and old. For a while, during the nesting period, it all went very quiet out there and if the nuthatches and tits hadn't been nesting, I think it would have been a rather dull few weeks, bird-wise! Understandably, during that time, all breeds of adult birds are very much occupied by the important task of raising a brood of chicks, something that doesn't allow for much lesiure time to visit feeders. I have noticed now that the garden has come alive again. It's absolutely bursting with life, including all our usual suspects; robins, blue, coal and marsh tits, blackbirds, dunnocks, chaffinches, woodpigeons, nuthatches, great tits and great spotted woodpeckers. Those last two are the most exciting to me, as it hasn't only been the adults I've spotted!

At one point maybe a fortnight ago, I noticed one rather scruffy-looking great tit pecking around on the grass, watched very closely by an adult. The bedraggled bird still had some of it's downy chick feathers attached and it was very yellow. Several days after this and daily since, the feeding station has been bustling with a flock of juvenile great tits, maybe eight or nine of them, all still with a yellow tinge but well-developed and the same size as their parents. They all stay close together, choosing to huddle in the surrounding trees and jostle for space on the feeders. There is a lot of chasing too and once one or two take off, the rest seem to follow quite quickly!

We are certainly no strangers to the woodpeckers in our garden. It is a daily occurrence to see at least one of them on the peanuts, but more likely we will see both the male and female on separate visits throughout the day. Occasionally they visit together which is a wonderful sight. This week though they have been joined by a juvenile and I have assumed that it is their chick, although I know that there is more than one pair of woodpeckers in our area. It was instantly recognisable by the nearly all-red cap and rather sandy coloured belly feathers. The behaviour too, especially when it was joined by one of it's parents, was a very good indication that this was a recently-fledged juvenile. When I first spotted it, the adult male was also there and the juvenile hung from the top of the feeder waiting to be fed by the adult. 

I took this picture at the end of May and since then, the red cap has started to fade towards the back. All three of the woodpeckers are certainly making good use of the peanuts as they are almost permanently hanging from them. Frequently,  I see both the juvenile and one of the adults together on the feeding station and on a few occasions I have seen all three of them together in the garden. One of these moments looked like it could have been a flying lesson for the juvenile as it was hopping from trunk to fence and then flying low across the garden. 

They have such a distinguishing call as well that I quite often hear them before I see them! I often remind myself of how lucky we are to have woodpeckers visiting. I know our rural location is the reason we get such a wide variety of visitors and I never take this for granted.

Franken-dog!

I was asked to draw a lovely staffie/boxer cross called Cassie who sadly passed away recently. The customer Vicky provided a wide range of photographs but there was one in particular that she liked and wanted me to base the portrait from. It showed Cassie in a classic pose that captured her personality and included her feet, which was an important factor for Vicky.

As you can see, it's a wonderful expression but the photo itself is slightly washed out and not a true representation of Cassie's colouring. I decided I would have to do a little 'patching' so to speak, and take sections from the other photos to create a truer representation.

I used the above photo as my main reference for the colours and also took several of the facial features, such as the eyes and nose, from another provided image, then 'patched' these onto the original photo to create a more realistic version of Cassie's face, giving me more detail to work from. This is what I ended up with:

You can also see I have grafted on a new foot on the right as in the original photo, it was folded under and would have looked like a stump in the portrait! I couldn't help thinking of this new version of Cassie as "Franken-dog" every time I looked at it! 

Sometimes one photograph just isn't enough and I do have to refer to several, but being able to take parts from several images and patch them together is really helpful for me and I think that the final portrait turned out well for it; at least, I hope it did! 

**Artwork is Copyright of Emily Summers 2014. Please do not reproduce**

New work and jumping out of my comfort zone!

I recently completed this commission of a beautiful white horse. It was only the second horse I have drawn since starting MMD; the first was a birthday gift for my friend last year. My most common subjects are of the canine variety, with cats coming a close second, but I certainly don't feel that the dogs hold me in a particular comfort zone. Yes I draw a lot of them but they are all different; different breeds, colours, long and short fur etc. etc. so I never consider myself to be drawing the same subject over and over by any means.

Having said that, it was definitely a refreshing change to draw Ollie. I have become very much accustomed to the shape of a dog's face; the direction of the fur around the muzzle; the fold of the ears; the shape of the big pink tongues! Drawing a horse is a whole new experience as they are such a different shape! Most noticeably the long, long face ending in large nostrils and with two eyes very far apart, there are very little similarities between drawing a dog and a horse, perhaps apart from the sparkle in their eyes.

I'm hoping to receive more horse commissions in the future but even better would be rabbits, chickens or even lizards! That would be GREAT fun!

Birding update-the last few weeks!

I've been pretty darn busy these past few weeks! My waiting list for portraits is lengthy so I've been working non-stop on new pieces and barely had time to think about blogging let alone actually doing it! Having said that, I have managed to squeeze some birding in here and there, including a couple of exciting spots (for me anyway!)

I paid a visit to one of my local country parks, Buchan, during April after reading that their female great-crested grebe had finally joined the male there on Douster Pond. I had never seen one before so thought it would be the perfect opportunity to tick another species off my bird list and if I was lucky, catch them doing their infamous mating dance. I wasn't disappointed!

I only caught a small snippet of the dance, but it was enough to see them shaking their heads and swimming away and back in a perfect mirror-image of one another. I was really, really pleased to have seen it. They certainly are beautiful birds, particularly the russet colouring around their heads.

I also enjoyed watching this cormorant busy himself with lots of diving to the bottom of the pond. Trying to catch a photo of him when he kept disappearing was a challenge; I had to try and predict where he would resurface next! Alongside the grebes and cormorant were coots, moorhens with four very new chicks, canada geese, foraging blackbirds and mallards. Buchan had mentioned on their Facebook page that they also had Mandarin ducks on the pond, but sadly I couldn't find these. I wish I had as they are another species I haven't seen before! 

 We've had further visits to our garden from goldfinches this month which I am thrilled about. If only they would invite their friends along; the most I've ever seen is four but usually I'll only spot two on the feeder.

Last month I went on a long walk through the countryside. We followed footpaths we'd never walked before and discovered fields and tracks we never knew were there. Best of all, we heard the first cuckoo of the year, a day before it is traditionally heard! What an unmistakable call; I don't quite know how anyone can possible mistake it for a wood pigeon. I also spotted a blackcap on that walk and plenty of butterflies including orange-tips, small tortoiseshells and peacocks.

The blue tits have officially nested in our new nestbox. I collected fur taken from our cats' brush and some hair dropped by the passing horses on our lane and put it out for the birds; it was extremely popular and was carried away by the tits very quickly. It was wonderful to see them with beaks full of fur and knowing that their nest would be the cosiest in the neighbourhood!

Both the blue tits and the nuthatches have recently started carrying insects into their nests. It's hard to tell the parents apart but after reading up on their nesting habits, I've decided it's a bit too early for their eggs to have hatched (I certainly haven't heard any chicks cheeping) so the food must be from the male feeding the female as she incubates the eggs. I'm greatly anticipating the day when the chicks fledge!