Releasing Purchased Pigeons.....

            I've been working on the illustrations for "Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine". The libretto is very graphic, even cinematographic, every sentence contains many images and yet....my concern is that I don't want it to look like a comic strip, or let it descend into the banal. This choral piece is so dramatic yet sensitively nuanced and I'm trying to strike the right note. So here is my interpretation of "Releasing purchased pigeons one by one into the golden Tuscan sunrise...." This drawing will have a final tweaking and then be made into a polymer plate and printed on one of the coloured Bicchu Torinoko papers as shown in a previous post. 

          My drawing relates to Leonardo's studies and notes on the flight of birds, and Tony Silvestri's interpretation, where Leonardo buys pigeons from the market, and releases them so that he can study and sketch the movement of their wings. It's difficult for us to imagine what a problem that would be for a pre-photography era. We can slow down and study film of birds' flight, but Leonardo had to observe and record in real time. 

          I have to get all the illustrations ready, and the text, before sending to the plate maker, otherwise it becomes very expensive, so I have to be patient. This drawing may have a gilded sun, as per previous experiments. I'm awaiting arrival of the new size from France, to replace the one that got frozen in January and was unusable, and will post the results of experiments with that as and when.