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.
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.
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.
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.
On our walk around Carr Gate, near Wakefield, yesterday, fat-hen, a common weed, was growing on a grass verge alongside a slip road and perennial sowthistle at the side of the track by a small wood.
Fat-hen
Fat-hen, Chenopodium album, is in the goosefoot and orache family. The similar-looking common orache also grows as a weed in similar habitats and is also typical of open ground by the sea, so it can be found on roadside verges which get salt spray from de-icing.
Small white butterflies fluttering around a patch of lavender. Small whites have two spots on each forewing but in males, as in my sketch, the second spot can be indistinct.
After my woodcut experiment in Adobe Illustrator, l’ve gone for more of a lithographic effect for these portraits, simplifying the tones in my original pen and wash drawings into ragged-edged blocks. You don’t get the texture of the original watercolour wash but it’s implied in those irregular edges.
This is Liz White in character as Fiona Grayson in Chris Lang’s ITV crime drama Unforgotten, drawn from a photograph in the Radio Times in March.
George Stephenson
It can be disappointing if you’ve painted a subtle watercolour and the nuances are lost on the printed page. A reduced tonal range might make for a more successful printed image. I’ll have to try it.
George Stephenson was all set to have a walk-on part in my current Addingford show at the Redbox Gallery, Horbury, but he was upstaged by Stan Barstow’s Joby, so perhaps I can use him in a print publication, looking suitably robust in the Image Trace treatment that I’ve given him in Illustrator.
Hepworth
I’m considering printing the series I drew of Wakefield Women in History and the graphic feel would work well as I’m trying to keep the subject brisk and lively, rather than making it archival and authoritative, like an illustrated Dictionary of National Biography.
Dame Mary Bolles
Another Wakefield Woman in History, Dame Mary Bolles, the formidable Stuart-era lady of Heath Old Hall, also lends herself to this treatment. It’s easy for me to go for too much detail in a historical costume but what I want in this series is to sum up remarkable lives in broad brushstrokes.
These are my sketches from the weekend given the Image Trace treatment in the desktop version of Adobe Illustrator as I was after a lino-cut or woodcut effect. It gives my pen and watercolour natural form a graphic chunkiness.
So how about the grapevine I drew yesterday? Would lend itself to the sort of woodcut-inspired design that you see on a wine label? No, it doesn’t have the graphic presence of the bluebell stem, I’d need to draw it again with the context of the design in mind and make it a bit bolder.
This wood pigeon feather works better as it’s a simpler form. I could imagine using it for a logo.
At Cannon Hall garden centre, this bumblebee was busy visiting the flowers of a salvia but instead of entering the flower in the usual way it was using the back entrance, checking out those holes nibbled in the back of the flower and bypassing the stamens and stigmas. It occasionally paused, apparently to do a bit of nibbling itself, perhaps to enlarge an existing hole or start another.
Grapevine
At Hilary’s Village Store in Cawthorne we sit under a vine laden with bunches of small green grapes. We’re told that this vine is a cutting from a desert grape grown in a large south-facing greenhouse in Scotland. There the grapes were edible – although they were best eaten outside in the garden so that you could spit out the seeds – but here, outside and north-facing, they’re not going to ripen enough.
However we didn’t come here for the grapes, in a village tea garden it had to be cream scones with our lattes.
Newmillerdam lake, 10.15 a.m., 62℉, 16℃, 90% alto-cumulus: Looking in the net after a sweep beneath the nettles and alder, I appeared to have caught nothing but debris and a single pond skater but when I transferred my catch to the old washing-up bowl that I’d brought with me, I saw a tiny black water beetle swimming around and an equally small water mite, trundling around like a character from a speeded-up silent film.
Most intriguing was an irregular fleck of plant debris crawling determinedly towards the edges of the bowl: a caddis larva in its protective case, just over a centimetre long. With this cumbersome camouflage, to change direction it had to do a three-point turn.
Skaters
Pond skater’s eye-view.
There’s a slight anticlockwise current swirling around the bowl, and I’ve noticed that the skater has decided on a favourite spot and is making little hops to stay in position. Looking closely, this little pond skater is accompanied by four even smaller companions. All of them favour this side of the bowl.
The largest skater pauses to groom its longest limb, brushing it with its shorter back leg. Its two short front legs resemble antennae and it keeps them in contact with the water surface to detect the vibrations of potential prey items, such as a small insect trapped on the surface film. It also keeps tabs on its companions, zipping forward to chase a smaller rival away, the pond skater equivalent of the dodgems.
On the opposite side of the bowl I notice a little group of water fleas, each smaller than a printed full stop. They bob up and down individually but seem to favour keeping together in a in an irregular cluster.
My sketchbook spread of found objects picked up on a lawn has an autumnal feel. We’re not quite there but on a dull August day there’s a feeling that the end of summer is looming.
Fine rain this morning picked out orb webs with glistening droplets.
I started this page at a family get-together yesterday afternoon in West Melton, near Rotherham, in a garden with several lime trees, planted in Victorian times. There were hundreds, probably thousands, of the limes’ helicopter seeds strewn over the lawn but so far not many leaves. This green heart-shaped leaf may have been torn off the tree in recent high winds but, because of the prominent damage, I wonder if the tree deliberately jettisoned it in an attempt to rid itself of whatever herbivore was starting to nibble holes in it.
The robust bluebell stem with upward-facing seedpods is probably Spanish bluebell, which was often planted in gardens but which has naturalised and in some places threatens to oust our native species.
