Great Spotted Woodpecker Feather

A short return to one of the other things I've been doing and that's been drawing large scale feathers on the beach.

I've had about a 50% success rate with these and I'm only showing you the ones I'm happy with but I think I'm getting better at producing more pleasing results.

First of all I've been drawing feathers I just liked but hadn't actually seen and this was my second attempt at a Greater Spotted Woodpecker's feather after Kestrel and Hoopoe.

Since then it has developed into something more immersive and involves real feathers and different interconnections, there'll be more of that anon.

The way I do this is to have a picture of a feather printed on a small piece of paper, then I try to scale it up with just a rake and my imagination. No string, ropes, sticks or measuring tapes. As I go along I stuff and retrieve the paper out of my back trouser pocket, try not to lose it in the wind every time I take it out and it becomes too crinkled to read after a short while. We are talking super high tech.

And that's where it gets a bit squirelly, I can't see what it looks like until I send my drone up later on and if I've gone wrong there might have already been five hours of back-breaking-raking before I know whether it was worth it or not.

The first attempt was not quite wide enough and after I extended it the white spots didn't reach the edges, and it simply looked all wrong. So off I went home without much to show for my efforts apart from the standard blisters on my hands.

It was another couple of weeks before I tried again, this time with a different feather picture to try and more trepidation and less confidence. These are about 80m/yards long so a feather with a lot of black on it is a lot of raking.

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