Teals and Trials

I got so frustrated yesterday. I had a list of a few items I needed to get from an art shop. If I was in Melbourne I'd know exactly where to go and that the shops would have what I'm after. But not in Belfast! It's so difficult moving to a new place, even though Belfast isn't technically a new place for me, I'm just not used to it and I don't know the secrets! Although I think the secret is you have to buy everything on line because Belfast just doesn't cater to the specialist market of printmaking supplies, grey board or 0.5 2B pencil leads! I have to get used to it and realise Melbourne has nearly 4,000,000 people whereas Belfast has 267,500, so it's obvious really that supplies will be more limited here. Grrrrrr! I've been spoilt!

Oh, hold on, I'm baby sitting my nephew and he's just woken up, I'd better go and see if he's ok.................................................

................................................................ok, nephew on knee here, now there's one thing melbourne doesn't have, my wee nephew! oh and Belfast has a BRILLIANT display of birds in the museum. Here are a few more drawings, I did these yesterday.

Grey Heron

Brent Goose

Teal

Bird Spotting

We went for a trip down the Great Ocean Road this weekend and we saw some super birds! This may not be that exciting for a number of people, I am aware that things that cause me much interest cause others minimal. But don't care! The photos here aren't even my own photos, I got them off the Internet because I never had the camera with me when I saw these birds, and I've now realised how small the images are. But anyway...

Well, as usual we stayed at Wye River camping ground and the resident Gang Gangs were making their lovely crunchy screeching sounds. I love these black cockatoos.

Then one of these lovelies landed in a tree beside our tent. A white faced heron. I don't think I've ever seen a heron in a tree before. My friend said it looked as weird as seeing a duck in a tree.

On our way home we could see a cloud of white on the road, as we got closer we saw that it was a huge flock of Long Billed Corellas all eating grain that had fallen from trucks leaving the animal grain warehouse. Poor silly things were eating alongside their fallen comrades who'd been squashed by passing vehicles. 

But the ultimate  spot this weekend was this bird. We were driving along the inland road back from the Twelve Apostles and suddenly this great white bird caught the corner of our eyes. We all saw it and knew, even in that flash, that it was something special. Jeremy did a three point turn and we drove back to the spot we saw it. There it was, a huge white bird of prey sitting on a dead bunny. When we got back to Melbourne I looked him up in my bird book and found out he was a white morph of a Grey Goshawk and that they were uncommon to rare, so we were very lucky to have seen it.

Now I have to go and tidy up my studio because it is a shocking mess and I've started working in the living room to avoid the mess, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a studio.