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This week featured guest
Valerie Littlewood will discuss her work documenting wild British bees and how she teaches the public about the bees and their plants.
As you know, one way Valerie informs the public about plants and pollinators is through her book series, BUZZ. In Volume I of this series, Valerie pairs exquisite drawings and paintings with information about 14 bee species. Each two-page spread features a detailed painting of a bee and a graceful pencil drawing of a plant the featured bee pollinates. In her description of each species, Valerie includes interesting information about a bee’s identifying characteristics, its behavior, and its conservation status. She includes with her text thumbnail sketches of work-in-progress revealing how her finished drawings were completed.
Volume II of BUZZ is in preparation and will highlight 14 additional species of British bees. Overall, there are over 250 species of bees in Britain.
Thank you again for joining us Pollinator Week. You are invited to ask Valerie questions or post comments as our conversation progresses. Simply post your question in the Comment box below.
Valerie writes about creating “Joe’s Bee”, her first bee painting (click image).
Question #1: How did you become involved in the documentation and preservation of wild British bees?
Valerie Littlewood:
Some three years ago now I was doing some gardening for my elderly father and found his old beehives behind the garage. They were disintegrating and forlorn but such memories flooded in about the delightful bees, the honey and those beekeeping days that I decided to paint a honey bee. I do like to work from life whenever possible, so my local bee keeper provided me with some natural casualties from his hive and I painted that one little bee, ”Joe’s Bee” which you can see on the left.
From that first bee came a commission from Deborah, for my Pencil and Leaf blog, a USA bee enthusiast to paint a set of 16 bees (did you know that Deborah means “bee” in Hebrew? ) and it was during the course of my research that I became aware of all the “other” bees in the world, which are so crucial to the well-being of our flowers, our crops and of course.. us. I started to read about the decline of not only our honey bees but also the wild bees, mostly due to habitat loss. So when an opportunity arose to have a small exhibition in London in June, it seemed a perfect time to highlight these other, often overlooked, bees.
The response to that first show was enough to convince me that I could do something in a small way to tell people about our wild bees and how to help them. So now I have leaflets, charts, my well traveled box of models, postcards, prints and a great deal more knowledge to share with the public. The response is always so delightful and I can confidently say I have made quite a few converts.
The Leafcutter Bee uses tiny pieces of rose leaves to make her nest. This bee was the poster girl for Valerie’s book, BUZZ. Click the image to learn more.
Question #2:
In 2010, you launched the solo exhibition, BUZZ… A Celebration of British Bees & Their Flowers showcasing 24 British bees at Lumen Arts in London. Your exhibition is a traveling exhibition. How have you been able to share your work and your message with the public?
Valerie: I have been very fortunate to have had the opportunity to show my bees at some wonderful venues, including the fabulous Lost Gardens of Heligan, the Nature in Art Gallery which is the finest Gallery and Museum dedicated to wildlife art here in the UK where I have been artist in residence for the last two years, and my more local Easton Walled Gardens where I am making a return visit this year with a show and a workshop as part of their Meadow Days celebrations. I also talk about bees to small groups and clubs and to anyone who asks me! I realised, after the first London exhibition which I could only attend for a few days, that I really need to be there with the paintings. People have so many questions and want to share so many experiences. So now at the shows I spend all day talking bees, flowers and about how we can help, taking bee walks when I can and generally enthusing. Not many people escape without a leaflet, a postcard or list of bee-friendly flowers. I am always astonished by the interest in both the paintings and my little box of “models”.
People do love to talk about bees and want to help. They tell me about their wild bee experiences with real affection and concern and now, thanks to the efforts of institutions such as the Royal Horticultural Society and various bee and ecology societies, bees have a much higher profile here in the UK. But I was, and still am, very surprised how many very keen gardeners know nothing about the wild bees. And gardeners are the ones who can really help.
Do you want to use your art as a teaching tool in environmental education? Ask Valerie.
Valerie writes about bee flowers and herbs, such as the comfrey seen here in her watercolor painting. Click on the image to read about bees and herbs.
Question #3:
Is BUZZ your first self-published book? What are your thoughts about the self-publishing process? What tips do you have for teachers or artists who may be thinking about self-publishing a book?
Valerie:
Yes it is and I do have mixed feelings. I think the ability to now self publish is wonderful but I do have some reservations.
For putting together a personal record of, say, an exhibition, an event, a series of words and images or a collection of students works and to have that in printed book form (and I am still a lover of books as tangible things) the opportunities provided by self publishing are quite amazing. To be able to make just a few copies and distribute them is something that was financially impossible before, due to the enormous setup costs.
It is really nice to have something for people to take away and I also include sections about which flowers to plant for the bees at different times of the year. So it is a more than just a record of the exhibition. “Comfrey”, the flower sketch above, is one of the very best early bee plants.
However since a recent price increase, both the price per book and the shipping are very high. I make only one dollar per copy on my BUZZ book and yet it is still very expensive when compared with volume publishing.
This prevents people from buying the book who would just like to know more about bees! So a colleague and I are in the middle of writing a book with a working title of “Bees for Gardeners” which will (hopefully) find a mainstream publisher and be more accessible to a wider range of people. It will be very different from BUZZ, but just another way of trying to get the bee conservation message to as many people as we can.
The mechanics of putting a book together is not difficult although it does involve a lot of sitting in front of a screen. I think I spent 10 days solidly refining, redesigning and editing the text and images. The time is certainly worth it for having your own book, but you may not be able to retire on the proceeds! I do hope that soon a company with a more reasonable price structure will emerge.
But yes, I will be doing another slender BUZZ volume and as there are over 250 species of wild bee in the UK alone, possibly more!
Readers, ask those questions you’ve always wanted to ask about using a self-publishing service.
Have you self-published a book? What are your thoughts about this new option for authors?
Today’s conversation was picked up by Indie Pub Today. See links to other articles about self-publishing.
Designs and Drawings
Question #4:
Can you share with us some of your process and do have you any advice for artists?
Valerie:
Ways of working are very personal but what helps me enormously and what I always advocate in my workshops is to be clear about what you are trying to do. My four guiding principles are these:
Clarity:
Unless I am just sketching, I ask myself these questions before I start a formal piece of work:
Why am I doing it?
Who is it for and what do I want to communicate?
Then I see how I can best achieve that with the skills that I have. With the bee paintings for the BUZZ show I was very clear about my aims and knew I wanted a certain emotional response to the paintings and designed and painted them with this very much in mind. I could have painted a set of static bees, renderings of pinned specimens seen from above which could have been very beautiful, however to engage the hearts of the public, it was important that the bees had life. If I sometimes err on the side of the anthropomorphic and that is absolutely fine by me.
These are not meant to be scientific illustrations or paintings for an ID guide which I would have approached very differently. I think of them rather as bee portraits.
Research:
I am also a “research-aholic”. I am never so happy as when I have something new to discover and learn.
For the BUZZ paintings I read everything I could get my hands on
This Tawny Mining bee was one of Valerie’s models. Click image to learn more.
about bees, from every age, fiction and non-fiction. I looked at hundreds of photos, watched films of bees and most important of all, went outside and observed them. It became clear that they have very different life styles, different characteristics and “personalities”. I studied their anatomy and made sure I was familiar with how they move. The image at right shows a little Tawny Mining bee who visited my garden in the spring. She happily sat on my finger for a while in the sun. She had a bit of an antennae brush-up and polish before flying off.
Drawing:
I also love drawing, I draw a lot and make thumbnail sketches and jot down ideas. You have to get things out of your head and onto paper somehow and sketching and drawing helps me clarify my thoughts. Over the years I had become rather lazy about drawing but one thing that really helped was keeping a blog, which I started in 2008. I had decided to get back to basics with a simple leaf drawing almost every day with some accompanying research. It was the perfect combination for me, a mixture of exploring and drawing! I would recommend that any artist, whether beginner or well practised, should try to draw every day even if it is just for a month. Find something that holds your attention and explore it. For me putting the drawings on my blog also meant a certain commitment which also helped!
Design:
The design of an image on a page is important to me, especially when working on a series. I made thumbnails of the whole set of BUZZ bees so as to have variety of pose and composition and I decided to only paint the bees in colour with a simple pencil background, to really focus in on the main subject.
I thought very carefully about the size of the bees, not too big as to appear monstrous (sometimes large insects can be a bit off putting), but big enough to show off some of their beauty.
Then after all of that, you are probably ready to paint!
The wool carder bee is Valerie’s latest illustration. A beautiful little bee who uses the wool from Stachys leaves for nest material. Click on this image to see how it was created.
Question #5:
From your experience, which aspect(s) of the plant-pollinator relationship is the least familiar to the general public? How did you discover this? What do you do to educate the public about this aspect of the plant-pollinator relationship?
Valerie:
I think that many people are totally unaware of the number of insects that do pollinate flowers and crops but are also unaware of the needs of the insects. To thrive they need safe habitats, a variety of food, nesting sites and a steady supply of both nectar and pollen plants throughout the year.
Bees also emerge at different times of the year so it’s not just a question of having lots of flowers in, say, June, because that does nothing for the spring bees who will pollinate all the fruit crops. The most crucial thing for gardeners to try to do is provide flowers for the whole year and leave areas of the garden undisturbed. I now know from my own experience of starting to plant an almost empty garden, that the bees WILL come. Plant the right flowers, simple, single old fashioned, cottage garden, and native flowers. Plant them in clumps in a sunny sheltered spot and you will have more flowers, more and bigger fruit and more bees and so the cycle improves.
It is so easy to help them!
From a bee/plant relationship and the sheer beauty of functional design, exploring how flower shapes, colours and patterns have become adapted to attract certain insects is completely fascinating and something I have yet to explore visually. For example, it needs a big heavy bee to push down the lower lip of the antirrhinum or snap dragon flower to gain access to the nectar. Stripes and spots on some flower petals act like a marked landing strip for insects, leading them to the location of nectar. The long tongued bees will be able to access nectar from long tubular flowers like honeysuckle whereas the short tongued little bees will run all over the big flat flower heads of umbelliferous flowers and the compound flowers of daisies and dandelions.
Then of course there are the ingenious ways that bees make their nests.
The image above is a detail of my latest painting of the beautiful Woolcarder Bee who “cards” the hairs from Stachys leaves to build her fluffy nest with. They are amazing and charming creatures.
My painting and drawing workshops encourage people to think about how these relationships work and once I explain these wonders of nature it is as if a light is switched on!
“Oh” they say.. ”How fascinating! I have learnt something about bees today”
Those words make me feel that all my work is worthwhile!
Do you include pollinators or other insects in your botanical illustrations?
Do you include information about pollinators in the classes that you teach? What have you observed?
Valerie,
Love your drawings.
I feel the same way – I like to draw and I love to research things. How did you get your start? What is your educational background?
Sue
Hi there Sue
It’s an interesting question because although I did attend Art College in the early 70´s in the UK it was just at a time when teaching the basic building blocks of drawing and painting had gone and meditating on a blue square was the preferred activity. So to learn my craft (and I do love the word “craft”) I started looking at artists I admired and reading and researching them in my spare time.
There were also some Victorian illustrated books around when I was a child and that is where I think my first inspiration came from. I am still a great lover of black and white work and in fact am just in the middle of some commercial pen and ink work and my very first paid work was pen and ink illustration. The written word has often been a trigger too. I was always torn between studying English or Art. Sometimes as a commercial illustrator you do get to combine the two.
Over the years I have returned regularly to study different aspects of art and I eagerly look forward to the research and the new doors it will open. The most inspirational course I took was when I was 37. It was my Masters at Brighton here in the UK. The course mainly concerned all aspects of “the Narrative”. It was a one day a week course for two years and led by the most inspirational and knowledgeable tutors I have ever met.
You have to learn and practise your manual painting and drawings skills, no tutor can do that for you, but they can inspire and guide.
That is something I try to do in my classes and workshops, so I don’t teach formula painting. I see so many copyists now which worry me as I am not sure it is the route to being a really fulfilled artist, but that’s just my opinion.
Sue! Thank you so much for you question. It has brought back some wonderful memories and writing this has made me want to take up my studies again!! I have always said the acquisition of knowledge is my drug of choice.. so I am going to check out some courses right now!!
Thanks for a quick reply!
I think we have a lot in common in that respect – practice and research. I have been drawing since I can remember but have a degree in Biology and a master’s in education. I will have been teaching science for 10 years in December, but really need to start focusing on art again for myself (and sanity – LOL). What media do you use for the bees?
Sue
Hi there Sue, I use watercolour and some gouache white for the fine hairs. A degree in biology would be useful!
Val