REPLAY: 'The Best of Spring' - Live drawing session
Emma from the Creative Flock
Join us in the Flock and stay inspired and connected this Spring 🐝If you’re ready to grow your confidence, take your practice to the next level, and feel supported and encouraged along the way, Spring is a beautiful time to join us. Or, you enjoy making art for yourself, and you just want a safe and supportive space to share and grow, you’ll find it in the Creative Flock. REPLAY: 'The Best of Spring' - Live drawing sessionCatch up with this session where we celebrated highlights from spring in nature
A reminder that i’m pausing the membership for June and July, so if you wanted to upgrade to the Creative Flock membership, Now is a great time as you’ll essentially get two free months to explore the full Flock archive! There’s now over two years of posts, live session replays and videos in the paid membership, themed on everything from Witchcraft and Magic to Winter Birds. If you’ve been on the fence, this is the perfect moment to dive in.
Thank you to everyone who joined me to sketch from some joyful, spring photos! This is our last live drawing session for a while, it was such a nice one to end with 🐝
We had some lovely chat about the things we have spotted in nature this spring, here’s a mention to some main topics plus some bonus wildlife facts!: Moorhens & cootsID tip (thanks to Vivien Minto for the trick!) “Moorhen has an R in it for red: - moorhens have a red mark on the bill/shield; coots don’t. RobinsHannah Camarra said she thinks that Robins build ‘test nests’ but wasn’t sure so I did some research and although a number of bird species can build ‘test nests’ or ‘decoy nests’ I couldn’t find any firm facts about the robin. They do however, often build their nests in unusual spots, so not just in a tree or hedge. Hannah told a story about a robin nest in her mums garden hose reel, and at my son’s school, a Robin built a nest outside a classroom, on some storage shelves, a busy spot where children and teachers were going by every day! I loaned my wildlife camera to the school, so the children were able to watch the nest each day from a safe distance and see the young birds fledge which was lovely! Bees & bee hotelsI shared that my bee hotel had some new residents - a diffrent type of solitary bee to the ones we’ve had previosly. This one plugs the tunnels with mud/sandy material, not leaves which is what our previous (leaf cutter bees) did. I shared a fact from Bees & Beyond about types of bees in the UK, it was really interesting to discover that there are around 270 bee species in the UK, but Only one is the familiar honey‑making honey bee. The other 269 species are solitary bees, most of them ground‑nesters rather than hive bees. This is why not mowing your lawn helps our bees! Here’s the note where the information was shared, go and follow Bees & Beyond for more in-depth facts and discussion.
I mentioend a facinating BBC documentary – My Garden of a Thousand Bees, where a wildlife cameraman films the bee life of his own wild garden and captures the species diversity in a single garden, nesting and foraging behaviour and the dramas that play out between different bee and wasp species. Highly recommend! Birds and ButterfliesChiffchaff was one of the birds we sketched, it’s a small migrant bird and its simple chiff‑chaff call is one of those sounds that, for me, really signals the arrival of spring. Our final prompt was a male orange tip butterfly - white wings with bright orange tips and a beautifully mottled green underwing for camouflage. The female looks a lot different to the male, it has dark black wing tips instead of orange. Lastly, I want to mention Coltsfoot, (the yellow flower in the butterfly photo) I first really noticed coltsfoot in Wales, (almost mistaking it for a dandelion). It stood out to me as it’s not a wild plant I see much where I live. I did some research on it when I got home and discovered it has a history in traditional cough remedies, which is reflected in old names like coughwort. Part of the reason I chose that photo of the orange tip, is because it featured the Coltsfoot, a plant I’ve only recently come across but learned a lot about through sketching and journalling. This is one of the many reasons I love nature journalling - I learn so much through the act of looking closely and drawing! Enjoy the replay!... Subscribe to The Creative Flock to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of The Creative Flock to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
© 2026 Emma Carpendale
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