Month: November 2021

Frantically Relaxed

the wood

As so often, something – perhaps the buzzard – put up the wood pigeons and they’re perching in the top branches of the two tall ash trees, surveying the scene, as if waiting for the all-clear. There are still patches of snow amongst the clumps of grasses in the meadow.

I was hastily drawing this on a busy day before popping out for an annual blood pressure check at the doctors’. The idea was the therapeutic process of drawing and tuning into the natural world would calm me down. It didn’t work! But they’re giving me a second chance so I’ll give myself more chance to settle down before my return visit next week.

View from the cafe at Blacker Hall farm shop
Size of page 12.5×8.5 cm, Hahnemühle D&S (Draft & Sketch) sketchbook

It was more relaxing today when we were able to take the morning off to go to Blacker Hall cafe, giving me chance to draw the view from the cafe over coffee and cranberry scones.

trees sketch

There wasn’t time to add the watercolour so I took a photograph and added it later.

sketch from Blacker Hall cafe

Cutting Corners

model fireplace

I’ve made a start on the fireplace for the Redbox Gallery’s Night Before Christmas display but I keep going back to my model to work out the details on the grounds that it’s easier to make changes there than it is when you’ve already cut into an A1 sheet of foamboard.

Redbox Gallery model

There’s not a lot of room for the armchair and table we’re planning to add but hopefully I can dovetail a couple of foamboard cut-outs into the two corners without obscuring the fireplace.

Teasel

sparrowhawk sketch

3.02 pm: A sparrowhawk swoops around the bird feeder, perches in the crab apple for a moment, then flies off without catching anything.

snow on sedum

Early afternoon snow, an after effect of yesterday’s Storm Arwen, covers the seed heads of the plant formerly known as Sedum, now Hylotelephium spectabile. A female blackbird and dunnock forage beneath the feeders which attract great tits and blue tits, a coal tit and a nuthatch.

cyclamen

The snow soon starts to melt and these cyclamen, in the bed beside the patio beneath the cordon apples, look none the worse for it.

sketchbook page, snow in garden
8×8 inch (20×20 cm approx.) Pink Pig Amelie watercolour paper sketchbook. TWSBI Eco Fountain Pen with De Atramentis brown ink, Winsor and Newton Professional Watercolours.

The Buzzard on its Rounds

buzzard over the wood sketches

4.10 pm: A kestrel hover over the meadow and dives as if it’s about to make a kill but abandons the dive at tree-top height and flies off over the neighbour’s garden.

sketchbook page, birds of prey and Coxley Wood.

The buzzard was doing its rounds over back gardens and the meadow at breakfast-time this morning and it’s back again as the light fades, just thirty feet above me, as I sit at my desk by the skylight studio window.

Rusty Brown

Reading Chris Ware’s hefty graphic novel (really six closely related graphic short stories) is good for building up my biceps but I’m struggling with the one millimetre high all caps captions, some of them on coloured backgrounds so I’m calling on the opticians today to see if they can recommend some extra strength reading glasses, specially for reading Chris Ware graphic novels.

It’s clear enough when I come back to it in the daylight, so perhaps I should be thinking about improving the light that I read by.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

The Night before the Night Before

The Night before Christmas rough

The night before Christmas: ‘a fire place with roaring fire & stockings hung down. Maybe a chair & table & treats left out for Santa on the table . . .’

That’s what we’re aiming for, now all we have to do is work out how to fit all that into the Redbox Gallery, the old telephone box on Queen Street, Horbury.

Christmas set rough

I’m designing the stage set and it will be up to the local Brownies to add the decorations. I think that I could fit a small fireplace diagonally across the far corner of the box but that doesn’t leave any room for a table and chair, so I’m imagining those as illustrated cut-outs, as if we were looking at a pop-up Christmas card.

The View from the Terrace

Newmillerdam

This morning our pond had frozen over but a month from today the days will start getting longer.

On the little roof terrace at the Boathouse Cafe, Newmillerdam, black-headed gulls glide past the castellated balustrade a few feet away from me at eye level, a fluid, effortlessly elegant flight. A grebe preens out on the lake, a male goosander swims by, crisply black and white in the low winter sun.

A coot calls tetchily, mallards quack and the smell of fresh coffee drifts up from the kitchen below.

Whitby Ammonites

Ammonite in boulder clay cliff
ammonite cartoon

As we walked along the beach between Sandsend and Whitby on Friday morning, I spotted this ammonite fossil embedded in the boulder clay cliff. The closely spaced ribs are almost straight, so that it reminded me of a section of reinforced hosepipe.

Dactylioceras was a slow swimming ammonite from the Early Jurassic. This looks like a fragment of the shell of Dactylioceras tenuicostatum, a common fossil found in the Whitby Mudstone Formation at locations such as Port Mulgrave.

calcite crystals

The hollow chamber inside the shell has been filled with calcite crystals.

Hildoceras

Hildoceras ammonite fossil

Hildoceras, also from the Early Jurassic has sickle-shaped ribs and a groove along the triple-keeled groove along the outer edge of the shell.

Hildoceras keel
Triple-keeled groove of Hildoceras

Hildoceras features on the title page of my book Yorkshire Rock, a journey through time, which was published 25 years ago by the British Geological Survey (see link below).

Yorkshire Rock

There’s a folktale that they’re the fossilised remains of serpents, driven from the cliff top at Whitby by Abbess St Hilda.

Link

Yorkshire Rock, a journey through time at my website Willow Island Editions