‘Time’ Project research: Debra Sisson

I love Debra Sissons work, it differs from Steve Pardue and Neil Webbs work, her work is more abstract. To me they appear more alive in a sense than the previous artists works, the large loose brush strokes add a character to the animals. I actually really like that these paintings have backgrounds, it makes the painting more whole and makes it more appealing than just looking at something that gives the impression of a scientific study.

‘Time’ Project: Animal Study Woodpecker

Today I painted a woodpecker, I painted them on a tree because I wanted to add more of a habitat in the painting.

‘Time’ Project: Animal Study Eagle

I decided to paint another Eagle, this time I focused more on the feathers rather than other aspects;  this is because Prehistoric birds have feathers very similar to birds nowadays like Eagles.

‘Time’ Project: Animal Study Eagle

I have done another set of works, these are all however on birds. I have done this as I believe from research and my own, that birds have changed and developed the most through evolution. From Prehistoric times where birds were dinosaurs and to today birds have changed a lot, variation of sizes, feathers, colours, flightless and flightless, preditor/prey etc. I have had a go at painting a modern day eagle, practicing with the beaks, feathers, eyes and talons.

‘Time’ Project research: Neil Webb

Neil Webb works mainly in pencil crayon and gouache, which he feels enables him to represent effervescent colour and precise detail in his all of his studies. From an early age, he has had a passion for nature and the outdoors, and he has nurtured this fondness through travelling to many beautiful parts of the world once he finished his degree at Falmouth College of Arts.

He mainly focuses on painting birds, like Steve Pardue he focuses on detail, the birds all have their own little perches it seems, suggesting something about each bird. I would like to have a go at creating paintings like these

‘Time’ Project Research: Steve Pardue

Steve Pardue is a natural history illustrator and designer specialising in British Wildlife Illustration for interpretation panels, trail leaflets and wildlife identification guides.

I really like his works, they are realistic detailed paintings. There are no backgrounds to distract from the animals. I like how they are quite small scale works.

‘Time’ Project: Animal Studies

I have started doing some studies of animals using watercolours. This is because I really would like to get a lot of detail in the paintings so I am practicing painting animals; also I would like these to look quite scientific, this is because I would like to show a comparison of the same animal from prehistoric times and from now so I believe this is a good way of showing that, like images from a natural history book. Here are my works so far-

‘Time’ Project research: Museum research

Today I went to Cardiff Museum and saw these works by these artists and I really thought that they reminded me of my own work. I admire how detailed they are and yet they are so simple, they are small works which I quite like.

‘Time’ Project: Evolution

Evolution is the change in the inherited characteristics of animals over successive generations. All life on Earth is descended from a ancestor that lived approximately 3.8 billion years ago.Existing patterns of biodiversity have been shaped both by speciation and by extinction. Evolution shows how animals altered and changed due to change in habitat and atmosphere.

Charles Darwin was the first to formulate a scientific argument for the theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Evolution by natural selection is a process that is inferred from three facts about populations:

1) more offspring are produced than can possibly survive

2) traits vary among individuals, leading to different rates of survival and reproduction

3) trait differences are heritable, so when members of a population die they are replaced by the parents that were better adapted to survive and reproduce in the environment  in which natural selection took place.