February

It's nearly Spring!

Continuing my posts about the illustrations I did last summer for Lia Leendertz's 2019 edition of The Almanac - a seasonal guide. For the inspiration for February I used memories of my own garden as it comes to life after the winter months.

The opening spread for February includes Hazel catkins, Winter Aconites and Crocuses; Bluetits doing a mating display and a Blackbird pecking at moss ... feeding on grubs underneath or maybe collecting some to start nest building. Look out for the Blackbird appearing again in the illustrations in the coming months.

You can see the sun shining in the illustration, low in the sky in the early morning. The January illustration is set at dawn and the next one for March will be late morning ... the illustrations take you not only on a journey through the year but through the day from dawn to dusk.

Here are my notes of what could be included in the illustration, my original quick sketch, tracing for transfer to the lino, the carved lino and printed proofs for scanning. (I describe more about how I worked in the post about January.)

This year February began with some grey dark days, the Hazel catkins were silhouetted against the sky, wriggling in the breeze.

Half way through February the weather suddenly warmed up, the birds including the Bluetits have been singing in the hedges and trees. They are tricky to photograph!

The sunshine transforms the Hazel catkins, look out for the haze of pale yellow in the hedgerows against the blue sky.

Moss seems to be all over our garden this year, I wonder why? Hot summer and a mild winter must have been good moss-growing conditions. The Blackbirds have been pulling out chunks of moss searching for worms and grubs.

Our Winter Aconites have mostly faded in the warm sunshine ... 17˚C today! But the Crocuses are loving it and open like stars.

To celebrate the Chinese New Year, which this year is the year of the pig, the ID page is of British traditional pig breeds. Given the very short time I had to do the work I worked from photos, which was a shame as I wold have loved to visit some pigs to draw them from life. A few miles from my studio this month I've noticed some lovely Sandy & Black and Saddleback pigs and there are some Gloucester Old Spots in the next village ... but they seem to hide when I'm out with my camera. To include the names in the linocut illustration and make a pleasing composition I depicted the pigs as if they were Staffordshire flat-back pottery figurines, which gives them a folk-art feel.

Here is the carved lino, the print and my sketches.

There are more Spring flowers on the back cover of The Almanac ... Hellebores and Sweet Violets. This is my initial rough idea for the cover and part of the full size design on tracing paper (I accidentally tipped a jar of water all over it, which is why it's so crinkled! luckily I'd already scanned it so I could print out a clean flat copy to trace down onto the lino.

I printed the cover linocut in three colours ... turquoise, red and sepia. I scanned these separately to use to digitally overlay each other and collage together to create the final artwork.