Fungi at Harlow Carr this morning included common puffball and a large bracket growing on beech.
Autumn Fungi
Month: October 2021
Haversack
After my practice at cross-hatching using a dip pen on a tilted drawing board, I looked around for an object to draw and went for this Lowe Alpine haversack.
The wind has just changed from mild, from the mid-Atlantic, to cold from the north-east, so I sat with a latte to warm me up as I started this drawing at the Boathouse Cafe at Newmillerdam this morning. I used my Lamy nexx fountain pen but I think, now I’ve scanned them both in ‘text’ mode, pure black and white, that it would be hard to spot the difference between this and the dip pen in the haversack drawing.
The black areas were brushed in later from a photograph I’d taken on my phone, outlined with a Rotring Tikky Graphic pigmented ink pen and filled with a number 10 Prolene series 101 synthetic brush using the Rohrer’s india ink which I used with the dip pen.
Drawing Board
In Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden recommend drawing with your board angled at approximately 60 degrees. My old cast iron letterpress gives me just the right angle to prop the board against, which I’m resting on my knees. My parallel motion drafting board can’t be manoeuvred to that angle.
They also recommend always drawing with arm movements when you’re working in pen, so definitely not my the finger movements that I always go for in my detailed work. I’m going to try some of the exercises they suggest for getting used to working with a dip pen.
It’s going to take a lot of getting used to but I like the feeling of making marks on what feels to me like a near-vertical surface. Bristol board, also recommended in Abel & Madden’s book, doesn’t tear as I scratch away with my dip pen and it gives a crisp line with no bleeding into the fibres of the paper surface.
Link
Drawing Words & Writing Pictures website
Acorns
Last year was an exceptional one for acorns, at the top end of the wood in places it was like walking on a gravel path. This year it looks as if they’ll be in short supply. That shouldn’t be much of a problem for the grey squirrels at Nostell, who are making the most of what appears to be a good crop of sweet chestnuts this year.
Duck-feeders
I stuck to black and white at Newmillerdam this morning – a B-nib Lamy filled with De Atramentis ink and a Pentel brush pen.
When people are wearing bright yellow or blue, it’s tempting to add that as a flat wash but I’m experimenting with black and white for my werewolf comic, to create an inky gothic atmosphere.
Also as an experiment, I scanned these at 600 dpi (dots per inch) in ‘1 bit B/W’, reducing everything to either pure black or white.
Peasants from Flagey
For my werewolves project I need one or two French peasants who claim to have encountered a loup garou, so I’ve taken a look at Courbet’s Peasants from Flagey.
For the werewolf itself, I thought that the lean look of this wolf sculpture from Chatsworth might be the way to go.
Felix Natalis
Rumours soon spread that ‘The PhantTOM Topiarist’, a.k.a. ‘The Latin Banksy’ was one of the masters at the local Academy.
Happy birthday to Richard.
Chatsworth
When we visited Chatsworth on Thursday, it was the first time that I’d set foot in the House since I was seven years old. I remember an exhibit of old documents in a glass case which I think was in a corner opposite the main stairs in The Painted Hall. My mum explained these were the calculations made by the ‘first man to work out how weigh the Earth (because he couldn’t put it on a pair of scales, as he hadn’t one that was big enough)’.
On Thursday, I mentioned this to one of the guides and she suggested these might have been papers from the Chatsworth archives relating to Henry Cavendish, 1731-1810, who devised a way of measuring the force of gravity. I’d be about seven at the time of our visit, so this would have been connected with International Geophysical Year, 1957-58.
On the Bonnie Banks of Loch Bogle
Birthday card for an outdoor enthusiast.
Hope he’ll feel just as enthusiastic bright and early the next morning.
Meanwhile, on the plains of the Serengeti, a biodiverse gathering for another recent birthday.
Menagerie
With a possible Victorian werewolves project coming up, I soon got into the delights of the gothic decadence of the Menagerie Gardens at Nostell at the weekend.
This secluded corner beyond the Middle Lake with its gravel path, old holm oak, worn stone lion and gothic zookeeper’s lodge always reminds me of the small park on the hill top, adjacent to the Pope’s Palace in Avignon.
Turkeytail, Trametes versicolor, grew on a felled birch trunk used as path edging on the track at the lower end of the lake.