Lockdown 2020.  Sometimes I forget how extreme it was and then I remember a detail – like there being chains round the gates of play parks, or that we could only leave the house to exercise once a day, or that it was impossible to buy pasta in the supermarkets – and I get swept back to those strange, strange months.  March to June 2020 will be months we tell our grandchildren about.

I couldn’t have been in a more fortunate position.  I work from home anyway, I have a safe and happy home, and home is in the middle of the most beautiful woodland.  Piglet turned one during the first lockdown.  He was just small enough to still be carried on my back on walks.  We still had Buddy dog.  And the weather was, mostly, absolutely glorious.  We spent hours and hours walking in the woodland (and picnicing.  Don’t tell anyone that though).  Doing the same routes never got boring because in the springtime there’s endless change.  I fell in love with the waves of wildflowers that took it in turns to populate the woodland floor (and I wrote a blog about it at the time.  See here.)  I even learnt, and swiftly forgot, the names of all the flowers.

Since then, I’ve had a drawing in my head that I wanted to do.  It was of one section of the path – between the steps and Kingfisher Corner – that was crammed with dandelions and bluebells.  Walking along there at 6pm in the late afternoon sunshine was absolute heaven. I took lots of photos at the time.  Then, a year later in June of 2021, I finally found time to plot my drawing.  

There wasn’t one photo that captured what I wanted to draw so I pieced the layout together from four photographs.  My process goes a like this: I print the photographs at the approximate size of the drawing, chop them up, select certain elements, and then make a paper template of the layout.  I use that paper template to make guideline marks across my surface so that when I start drawing I know what goes where.