Insects on Ivy

wasp on ivyIt’s now twenty years since I started writing this online version of my nature diaries and sketchbooks and I remember my first ever post on my Wild West Yorkshire website included a sketch of wasp visiting the flowers of the ivy.

fly on ivyToday wasps and flies were busy visiting the flowers on next door’s ivy. The clusters of male and female flowers might not be showy but there are plenty of them. The decadent fusty-ness of ivy is a scent that sums up autumn for me, as much as flowering privet does for late summer.

It seems like one last party for the assembled wasps and flies before the onset of winter.

Link

My first blog postInsects on ivy from my first blog post (although the word blog hadn’t been invented then) for Sunday 8 October 1998.

The drawings were scanned from my A5 page-a-day diary and coloured in Photoshop, probably, at that time, using a mouse rather than a graphics pad.

I quickly moved on to drawing in an A4 sketchbook, which saved having to erase the ruled lines in the diary. I didn’t start using watercolour until three months later, which was far less fiddly than adding colour with a mouse.

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