It's that time of year again

I don't do much commissioned work, or work to order. Being happy to work wherever the muse takes me. One regular piece of work that I do produce though is the cover design for the annual report of the Huddersfield Birdwatchers Club. Having recently celebrated it's 50th year the Club has published an annual report every year. Since 1989 I have been providing the cover designs so the report to be published this year will be my 30th consecutive cover. Initially the designs were black and white Pen and Ink drawings on scraperboard. With the dawn of the digital age it became cost effective to introduce colour and with the 2008 report I began to produce  full colour linocuts for the cover designs.
I try to make the designs decorative, choosing as a subject a species that I think will make an interesting and attractive print rather than some locally recorded rarity. I leave it to the photographers in the club to provide illustrations of such species. I also try not to repeat myself, with the species list currently standing at 274 I've still got a good few to go at yet.

My usual starting point is to browse through my sketchbooks hoping that some drawing will "leap out" at me as a promising design. In this case it was a sketch of a male Reed Bunting drawn on 26th August 1993.

Working from the sketch I began with a couple of thumbnail drawings to work out a composition then copied the original sketch at the size I wanted it for the print (top left). In my original drawing the bird had a Crane Fly in its beak. My intention was to reproduce this in the print but then I decided that against the background it would look too fussy and get lost. So in my second drawing I dropped the fly and just had the bird singing. The next step was to produce a full size cartoon to work out the design and colour separations before tracing it on to the lino and printing the first colour. The plan at this stage is to print the design in 6 colours - possibly 7.

Colour 1

Colour 2