I’ve been promising this for a few weeks and yet I almost never managed it tonight either as my scanner decided it was firmly offline and couldn’t be persuaded otherwise. Luckily I bought a cable for it recently and so I was able to connect it up and get it working in the end.

Wildings

You know how I love a book with a map in it. It’s a very large map and as even a single page of this book is too big for my A4 scanner, this is the best I could do – combining several scans into one image. I think it is enough to give you an overview of the size and scale of the gardens as well as the key features. Click on it to see a much larger version.

Something new on every page

There is honestly at least one illustration or painting on each page, often more than one.

From sketches in various stages of progress,

To an array of wildlife drawings,

Some of which are also in colour.

There’s even a self-portrait or two. These are of Soper bundled up to go badger watching – unsurprisingly she put a lot more effort into her renderings of the badgers than she did into drawing herself.

There are also a dozen or so full and half-page colour works, such as the badgers that sketchy Eileen above was observing.

This is only a tiny fraction of what’s in the book – and that’s only a fraction of the thousands of drawings that were found at Wildings. The book is almost worth it for the artwork alone.

I’ve stuck to just a handful of examples here as for one, it’s late (it always seems to be late when I’m blogging!) but there’s also copyright restrictions to consider. Saying that, if there’s anything specific you’d like to see of Soper’s work then just ask and I’ll see if there’s anything in the book that matches.