Butterflies, moths and squashed bugs

The Drawing Buddies had another lovely trip to The Castle Study Centre, this time to draw british (and many Norfolk) butterflies, moths and bugs, also nests and animal architecture but these turned out to be too delicate to get out of their labelled boxes so we have deferred that session until we can see the best examples in the in the natural history galleries. When we first arrived I was worried that some of the drawers were "under whelmed" by the scale of the things that I had asked to look at and I thought we may have to split the session and go over to look at bigger things in the Galleries. However the courageous drawers were not to be defeated and became completely absorbed by the display cabinets full of british butterflies moths & insects some of which where miniscule! and squashed ! I was so impressed with their patience and tenacity and think that the drawings reflect just how involved they were. We followed up on a previous session (when we 'adjusted' each others drawings by drawing on top of them in a different colour, Trevor's inspired suggestion) by making sure we moved around and critiqued of each others work. We were helped by the Leonardo de Vinci quote "we all know that errors are more easily recognised in the works of others than in ones own, so that often whilst criticizing the small errors of others you will overlook your own great faults .........." and we used his trick of showing our drawings to the mirror which produced amazingly instant recognition of 'errors', not that this lot can put a foot wrong in my opinion. The challenge is to make the most of fact that we are a group, and use each other to develop our drawing but also finding enough solitude to be really receptive the subject, somehow it does all happen.