Day: August 8, 2021

Maris Peer

drawing potatoes

Just harvested half a row – that’s two or three feet across our raised beds – of Maris Peer second early potatoes and decided they’d be a suitable subject for attempting to draw with a Canada goose quill.

quill and feather ink and wash drawing of Maris Peer potatoes.

I tried using the feathered end of one of the quills to add the wash. This is Noodler’s Black Ink.

I’ve been reading books on Hokusai and Quentin Blake, who was one of the tutors during my time on the Illustration course at the Royal College of Art. Birds feature a lot in Blake’s work and he’ll sometimes use a feather to draw and paint with.

Red-tailed Bumblebee

Red-tailed bumblebee

No prizes for guessing that this is a red-tailed bumblebee, Bombus lapidarius, but it’s different to a regular worker, as this is a male, with a yellow collar and cap and a foxy-coloured ‘tail’ that’s more orange-red than scarlet. On a dull afternoon at Wrenthorpe on Friday, it was doing what drones do best, hanging around taking a break on our friends’ herbaceous border alongside another equally unmotivated male.

Helophilus Hoverfly

Hoverfly sketch
Hoverfly, Helophilus pendulus, on Himalayan balsam leaf.

In most hoverflies you can tell which is the male by looking at the eyes: in males there’s no gap between them, presumably an adaptation because the males spend so much time hovering, keeping an eye out for females or rival males. Helophilus hoverflies are different: the male does have a gap between the eyes, so you have to look at the tip of the abdomen. In the female this is pointed while in the male its rounded off with a genital capsule.

So this is a male Helophilus pendulus, a species name that translates as ‘pendent sun-lover’, appropriate as in summer male hoverflies typically hover, more or less on the spot, as if suspended by an invisible thread.