04 Jun 2025

Common Kestrel

Falco Tinnunculus / Common Kestrel / Turmfalke / Faucon crécerelle

Stylized image of a kestrel, printed on gray paper. The bird sits with its back to us, looking to the left. The head is gray with light cheeks and a slightly darker stripe below the eye. The back is reddish brown with black spots. The wingtips are black, tapering to a point and just crossing over the gray tail, which also ends in black.

The Common Kestrel is the Dutch bird of the year 2025. It still is one of the most frequently seen birds of prey in the Netherlands. But even the kestrel is finding it increasingly difficult to survive in a depleting landscape.

Two small and simple pen sketches of hovering kestrels.

The kestrel is a mouse-eater par excellence. Its hunting method is its hallmark: some ten or fifteen meters above the ground, hovering in the air (in Dutch: praying), searching for prey.

Birds of prey have been my favorite birds from childhood. That fierce, built-in scowl, the mighty bright yellow talons, that almost armor-like yellow patch around the nostril (called cera, I just looked it up). And just imagine their view on things. High in the sky, slowly circling and gliding on wings of, important fact, a certain wingspan.

And so, birds of prey in LEGO letterpress had been on the wish list for some time already. There’s an early buzzard in the 50 Birds series, a hawk, and a little owl, but the focus there was primarily on the smaller songbirds. Those were simply better suited to the small format.

As characteristic as that mid-air hovering may be, I couldn’t quite manage to depict the kestrel in that pose! The wings are at odd angles, viewed from a very foreshortened perspective, and with the less intensely colored undersides visible. Difficult.

Detail photo of the print with focus on the pattern on the back.

No, much better to show it in such a way that highlights the pattern of black spots on the male’s reddish-brown back. (The female is really beautiful too!)

Een abstract patroon van kleine cirkels met daaronder kwart-cirkels met de punt naar boven gericht.

That motif for those black spots became a printing form that itself yielded an interesting graphic image. So I printed it several times as a standalone print.

The Common Kestrel print

Prent van de torenvalk op zo goed als wit papier

The print was made using eleven printing runs.

I printed two editions:

  • 25 copies on white, 638-gram Saunders Waterford paper
  • 25 copies on warm gray, 160-gram Canson Mi-Teintes paper

The dimensions are 30.5 by 23 centimeters.

Photo of a framed print. Thin matte aluminum border. A pencil is placed next to it to indicate scale.

Works well in a 30 by 40 cm frame, as you can see.

Price: €275. This includes the mat, but excludes the frame.

Buy a print, support the research

I will donate ten percent of the proceeds from selling this print to Sovon to support this important work. Read more about that here.

Want to buy one of the original prints? Contact me.

Design notes

The question was how different it would be to work on a larger scale. Would that offer more freedom? Would more be possible? Would something perhaps be lost?

Detail of the beak and head. There's a slight gradient from light cream to gray on the cheek.

In the last few prints of 50 birds, I had found a way to place elements at angles other than 0, 54, or 90 degrees. These extra possibilities quickly proved useful in designing the hobby and kestrel. They have larger wings that end at a pointy slant. The tail also needed to be angled differently for a balanced pose.

The larger dimensions, combined with those unusual angles, made the design process considerably more complex. Finding the right shapes and fine-tuning their proportions required numerous test prints. Even those initial test prints for the overall shape quickly required multiple printing plates, precisely because of those unusually angled elements in the types. Because, as always, where the shapes overlap, they can’t be printed simultaneously.

Bigger sizes also offer more room for detail. But those spaces weren’t necessarily easy to fill. I suddenly needed one and a half thicknesses, or circles in an intermediate size that wasn’t available.

The way I could stylize the designs in 50 Birds didn’t transfer directly to this larger format. Clearly, a matter of working at a different resolution.

08 May 2025

Bildung Digest 6

Five things for this week:

A database of paper airplanes with easy to follow folding instructions, video tutorials and printable folding plans.

I find this a spectacularly cool, modern use of initials and blackletter. It’s on show in this exhibition at the Letterform Archive.

The largest bible page was printed in Mainz, Germany the other day. Video

Also in German: well produced and researched radio documentaries, each around three hours long at Lange Nacht.

This book on birds in art and illustration looks quite nice :-)

Enjoy!

Groetjes,
Roy


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06 May 2025

Print & Play, 2025-05-s1

Many A5 sized prints in black and white lying in a drying rack.

My Print & Play students are very talented.

The first of three sessions in the printmaking studion, starting with experiments in monoprint.

From subtly shaded landscapes to whirls of string and studies in complex patterns. As always, the personality of the maker seems to find its way into the work.

The assignment is to make twenty prints each. That seems like a lot in the beginning but usually everybody easily hits that target. It helps that I don’t allow prints to be thrown away.

Two reasons: 1) you don’t decide in the moment of making. 2) even the crappiest piece can be used as a starting point for next weeks session. Which is all about letterpress with wood type.

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