Month: February 2019

Catfight at the O.K. Veg Bed

crocus

At first glance I can’t see why the brown cat is sitting motionless at the end of the veg bed, fluffed up like a teddy bear.

brown cat

There’s tension in the air; the female pheasants have left off preening and pecking and they’re just standing there, looking startled and anxious, although that’s pretty much their normal look.

pheasants

We seem to be getting all the movie cliches you’d get in a western shootout as the tension builds: the Clint Eastwood stare from the bristling cat, the gaggle of townsfolk, we’ve even got the ineffectual sheriff, looking on from a safe vantage point as the cock pheasant watches from the top of the hedge.

Finally the greenhorn – in this case the athletic-looking tabby that’s trying to muscle in on the brown cat’s territory – emerges from under the hedge, trying to look as cool and unconcerned as it can under the circumstances.

We don’t have a saloon in the meadow area for the final shootout but the newcomer went for cover under my homemade bench. The brown cat followed him, slowly and menacingly then with a final spurt to drive home his message.

cat

Just one more movie cliche: the victor walked away in slow motion, pacing confidently along the top of the timber at the edge of the veg bed. It reminded me of the opening titles of Walk on the Wild Side. I’ve never seen the movie, but the titles, with Elmer Bernstien’s sassy score, are rightly celebrated. It features an alley cat patrolling its territory in slow motion.

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Categorized as Drawing

The Zen of Watching Wood Pigeons

Wood pigeons

Borrowing scenery is a theme in Japanese gardens, Monty Don explained in the second of two films on BBC2 yesterday. Because of the topography of the country, space is usually limited, so skilful planting and pruning can give the impression that a garden extends to the trees on the slope beyond. Presenting gardens as a work of art, the experience of strolling along paths through cloud-pruned shrubs or crossing stepping-stones might feel like browsing through a scroll painting of mountain, river and forest. Alternatively, a particular, carefully constructed view might be framed by the open wall of teahouse – a picture window on a grand scale – as if it were a single painting.

My niece Sarah and husband Will have managed something similar in their orangery extension on the back of the house. It’s been almost like summer today so we had the windows wide open with a view of three wood pigeons relaxing in the trees beyond the garden fence. Drawing them, with a pot of tea and a bacon sandwich to keep me going, thank you for that Sarah, as we caught up with my brother and his wife, made for a suitably English take on the Japanese zen garden ideal of contemplating nature from the calm surroundings of a teahouse. Calm because of I refused my great nephew Zach’s offer to act as goalie for him.

wood pigeons

The three wood pigeons didn’t seem to have any pressing business to attend to. I’d noticed a wood pigeon this morning twisting a twig from the top branches of a silver birch but these three weren’t in nest-building mode. One of them indulged in a relaxed preening routine the other two just sat hunched up close to each other, watching the world go by.

Sofa, so good

ofa

I’ve drawn our Ikea Ektorp sofa using the Milli Pen fineliner in Clip Studio Paint. I’m trying to improve my watercolour technique in the program, to make it resemble my regular sketchbooks, so this time I went for the Running Watercolour Brush. To take away the airbrushed smoothness that I’m trying to avoid, I added a texture on the final top layer, to give an impression of paper.

cushions

Even with those tweaks, I can’t recreate the organic line of this little Safari Fountain Pen drawing of cushions from a couple of weeks ago. The original is three inches (8 cm) across.

handbag
Barbara’s bag

This drawing of Barbara’s bag was in my A5 landscape sketchbook, so it’s about four inches square. I don’t have the skills to recreate the unpredictable nature of ink on paper in Clip Studio Paint, but I’ll certainly continue with it, if only to keep emphasising to myself what a pleasure it is to draw with real pen and ink.

Graphics at Batley, 1967

road signs

One student at Batley, Nicholas Meagher, who was a year or two older than the rest of us, once commented that he could see why so many students liked graphics because you could take a so-so drawing and turn it into a finished graphic. That was certainly the aspect that I enjoyed in Colin Wood’s graphics class.

road signs

I liked the idea that by dint of putting in an hour or two’s work, with a bit of practice with oil pastels or a ruling pen, that I could convert my wobbly grey sketchbook drawings, in this case of road signs, into something presentable. We had access to the glossy Graphis magazine in the college library and I can see it’s influence in my oil pastel design.

trees

Colin Wood, our tutor, was fresh from the Graphic Design course at Leeds and I loved the crispness and wit of his designs, which generally made use of black and white photography – usually featuring himself in some role or other – on a cut-to-white background with a pithy slogan. A useful antidote to my habitual woolliness.

pan lids

These pan lids hanging below the shelf above my Mum’s kitchen sink, make me nostalgic not only for the simplicity of the Batley version of 1960s graphic design, but also for the everyday quirks of our comfortable home. I’ve still got that mirror, my Dad’s shaving mirror, hanging on the end of a shelf in my studio. Note the tube of adhesive: there was a lot of make-do-and-mend at that time, and it was usually my Mum who acted as handyman.

Party Time, 1968

Party people, 1968
Mr & Mrs Littlewood and my Dad

This gouache-on-paper painting dates from my time at Batley School of Art, 1967-1969, and I’m guessing that this was Christmas 1968. I remember my Dad grumbling that although people had been invited for seven, they had yet to turn up as it approached eight.

“They’ll be watching The Val Doonican Show!”

I was frustrated at my ineptitude when I painted this but, looking back at it now, I love the awkwardness of it and I wish that I’d done more paintings of the people around me. I made a sketch in pencil, which I’ve still got somewhere, and worked this up, most probably at college. The black may well be poster paint. It wasn’t until my time at Leeds that I made a start with watercolours.

The kidney-shaped coffee table and the hand-turned lamp base were designed and made by my Mum at Mr Bailey’s evening class in the secondary school woodwork workshop in School Yard, by the gates of St Peter’s Junior School.

It’s good to see Thelma Littlewood posing so elegantly, wine glass in hand. Mr Littlewood, as usual, looks a little reserved. Is that supposed to be their son Adrian with the half pint? Perhaps I’d be able to identify the figure if I looked out the original sketch.

Even from this back view, I can tell that my Dad, looking relaxed and genial in his cardigan, is launching into an animated conversation. As you might be able to tell, he trimmed his own hair with clippers.

The glow of the lamp on the pianola and the brilliant white gloss-painted door instantly bring back memories of those drinks-and-nibbles gatherings. I probably reached for those salted peanuts several times during the course of making my drawing. Very often there’d be party games, such as the Drawing Game, but I suspect this was meant to be a more sophisticated social soiree.

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Categorized as Drawing

Carr Lodge Park, 1961

Carr Lodge Park, 1961

Carr Lodge Park, powder paint on grey sugar paper: a familiar subject to children at St Peter’s Junior School, Horbury. Probably painted when I was in Mr Lindley’s class, so about 1961, when I was ten years old. The reflections in the water are from my imagination, as I never remember there having been water in the ha-ha at Carr Lodge, although they did still fill the paddling pool, just up to the left, in the days before there was a danger that someone would leave broken bottles in it.

The view looks rather open without the avenue of trees along the path on the right but I suspect they hadn’t been planted at the time. I guess that we went along and sketched the scene in pencil, as powder paints would have been impossible on location.

You can see how fascinated I was by the texture of stone. I remember the sandstone of the wall in the school yard, which was weathered into crevices and crannies. One lad had discovered that you could put a marble in one hole and it would roll down through unseen passages and pop out from another hole lower down. He must have been a trustworthy boy, as I leant him one of my marbles for his demonstration.

I found the painting while retrieving a little sketchbook that had slipped down the back of my plan chest.

Butterwort

butterwort

You’ll find the starfish rosettes of greasy-looking yellow-green leaves of butterwort, just an inch or two across, dotted around on boggy ground. Common Butterwort, Pinguicula vulgaris, is a small carnivorous plant which traps insects on the sticky surfaces of its yellow-green leaves. The in-rolled margins gradually curl around to digest the prey. It’s a member of the bladderwort family, found on heaths, moors and in bogs, in damp, acid habitats where nutrients are in short supply.

In 1635 the herbalist Gerard wrote:

“The husbandmans wives of Yorkshire do use to anoint the dugs (udders) of their kine with fat and oilous juice of the herbe Butterworte, when they are bitten by any venomous worm, or chapped, rifted, and hurt by any other means.”

I drew this on my iPad, using the program Clip Studio Paint, from a photograph that I’d taken in May last year, by the track up onto the moor at Moss End, Oughtershaw, in Langstrothdale.

Down-looker Snipe-fly

Snipe-fly

This Down-looker Snipe-fly, Rhagio scolopacea, was keeping watch from a fence-post at the edge of the parkland alongside Top Park Wood, Nostell, in May last year. It habitually rests facing downwards and it will dart off on short flights, like a snipe.

This was probably a male defending a territory as it waited for a female to appear but this common species of snipe-fly has occasionally been recorded snatching insects in mid-air. The larvae are predators, feeding on small earthworms and insects in leaf litter and in decaying wood.

Despite its impressive appearance, it is harmless to humans.

Garageband

Garageband

I like a bit of challenge, so I’m composing my first movie score. It might be just a two-minute film of frost-covered plants in our back garden, but it’s taken me several hours at the keyboard and computer so far!

It was an article in the latest copy of iCreate magazine that got me started; they demonstrate how easy it is to drop your movie into Garageband, Apple’s music-creation software. I plugged in my midi-keyboard, set the film going and played the simplest of chords as carefully as I could.

Just how difficult can it be to compose a snippet of wintery background music?

You Know the Score

Garageband score
The curly-topped ‘7’ symbol represents a pause – musically a rest – of one crochet’s length. A crochet is a quarter note but the dot after it means that I paused for slightly longer.

You can watch the score appearing as you play, which is astonishing, but, as you’d expect with my shaky hands, it does end up looking rather messy, with my pauses there for all to see, marked with dots and squiggles. In the stave above, the hash mark reveals that I accidentally hit one of the black notes, F sharp (this is the lower, bass clef, normally played with the left hand).

On a Roll

Garageband

This is where Garageband comes to the rescue: having mapped out a sketchy version of my idea on the keyboard, I can switch from the intimidatingly professional-looking Score view to what they call the Piano Roll. This gives a visual representation of the notes that I hit, which I’m much more at home with.

I can see where I’ve failed to hit all three notes of a chord simultaneously but it’s easy to click the offending note with a mouse and adjust its length, so that it’s perfectly synchronised. I don’t mind the playing being slightly ragged, but I definitely need to be more consistent in hitting the beat, which is indicated by the bolder vertical lines on the graph. I’ve got a lot of clicking and dragging to do to get this score into shape.

Back in Score view, can see that I’m clomping across from one bar to another, without any sense of the four-beats-to-a-bar rhythm that I’m supposedly playing in. I’m learning so much from the process.

Links

Garageband

iCreate magazine Facebook page

Bearded Tits

Bearded tits

A small group of birdwatchers have spotted a party of bearded tits by the path to the Reedbed Hide at RSPB Old Moor Reserve. At first I don’t spot them because I’m looking up amongst the seed-heads of the reeds, but they’re down on the ice at the the foot of the stems.

Soon they’re up feeding on the seeds and their colours harmonise perfectly. There are three males with moustachial stripes and three plainer-looking females, or possibly juveniles. I don’t hear any calls, but there’s a busy road not far away, so perhaps I missed the chirrs and pings that are usually the first sign that they’re around.

The lagoon that the Reedbed Hide overlooks is mainly ice-covered. Coot, dabchick, gadwall, mallard and a couple of female tufted ducks are making the most of the open water alongside the far edge. Shovellers are resting close to the reeds.

Ings hide

There’s an even greater expanse of ice over Wath Ings, alongside the River Dearne, with wildfowl confined to a small pool. On the river embankment, wigeon graze alongside Canada geese. A green woodpecker calls from the woods on the far side of the river.

Lesser Redpoll

redpoll
redpoll

The bearded tits were a new bird for me, I’ve looked for them before, but I don’t remember ever seeing them; I certainly haven’t seen them showing as well as they did today in the low winter sunlight. Lesser redpoll is also a new species for me – or at least it is under that name. It doesn’t appear in my older field guides because, when they were published, it was considered a subspecies of the North European common redpoll. It’s now a species in its own right and I like its Latin name, Carduelis cabaret: ‘cabaret’ is the French name for a kind of finch. The word cabaret also refers to a small chamber, so perhaps this was meant to refer to the kind of finch that was often kept as a caged bird at the time the German naturalist Müller gave it its name, in his translation, published in 1776, of  Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae.

Redpolls are happier in the tree-tops, nibbling at birch cones, as the three that we saw were doing today, next to the Visitor Centre at Old Moor, as we made our way out.