Primo Vere (early springtime)

 

One of my usual New Year's resolutions is to participate in painting challenges and I do try each year, but most of the times the challenges do not inspire me at all, so I do not participate more than I already did. 

This time I am inspired by a challenge in one of the Facebook groups I am in. The theme is 'Spring' and I have to participate with a work of art, not necessarily a watercolour.

Of course I could make a nice painting of flowers, birds, green foliage or something like that, but I want to do something different (no surprise here).

Springtime is also bird's nests and eggs hatching in those nests, so I chose to use that theme.

Using a book for colour and size reference I have chosen some of the birds that visit my garden, a blue tit, a robin, a blackbird, a dunnock and a jackdaw. The hatching egg is a chicken egg. 

I have tried to draw nests as the birds probably would make (again using the descriptions in the book) and I have taken care to draw the eggs in the right scale, taking the chicken's egg as my standard. 

The scientific names (in Latin) are written under the nests and I have used a dictionary to find the Latin words for 'early springtime'.

The information about the size of my work, the materials I have used and the availability can all be found in my Tumblr blog