Making a start on the flowers of Bilberry Wood. Heather grows in tussocks on drier ground, cross-leaved heath in damper places.
Heathers
Month: January 2022
Scots Pine
Drawing this Scots Pine for my Bilberry Wood article makes me realise that I’d love to make a return visit to Speyside. My summer and Easter breaks as a volunteer warden at the RSPB osprey reserve at Loch Garten were where I really got into the sketchbook habit.
It was a contrast to the rest of the year at art college, latterly in London but I feel that I learnt as much wandering around the Caledonian pine forest with my sketchbook as I did back in the studio in South Kensington.
The Big Dig
Birthday card for an archaeologist/organic gardener. Based on actual events (no, not the bit where Prof. Roberts identifies the variety of potato).
Moral: always let the guy who’s doing the rotavating where you’ve planted the potatoes.
Frost at Nostell
A confused Great Dane attempts to take a drink from the pond below Joiners Wood. On the Lower Lake mallards and a single mute swan have gathered in the one corner that is still ice free. A shoveler drake and two females rest at the edge on the ice.
By midday the sun has got out and the expanse of white parkland in front of the house has turned green, with just a few frosty patches remaining in the shade of trees.
Ferns and Mosses
The low winter sunlight was perfect for macro photography, so I took my Olympus E-M10II fitted with a macro lens to Newmillerdam this morning.
Storyboard to Draft
Going through the Clip Studio Paint tutorial, from storyboard to draft.
Bilberry Comic Spread
The final panels drawn, hand-drawn borders added and a hopefully subtle paper texture added. Hope my editor likes it but, if not, I can soon adapt it to a regular nature diary format.
Natural Colour
The flat colour that I like for my figures and cartoon animals doesn’t suit the straightforward natural history I’m including in the comic, so I’ve gone for gentler watercolour effect in Clip Studio Paint. As the colour is on a separate layer from the line drawing it’s easy to start again with a fresh layer to try alternatives.
Sketchboard Pro
This Sketchboard Pro, which arrived this afternoon, is a big improvement on the drawing board propped up on an offcut of decking that I’ve been using.
To test it out, I drew one of the frames for my Bilberry Wood comic. It holds the drawing board at just the angle I like and it’s so robust that it doesn’t slip around slightly, like my previous makeshift arrangement.
I’m enjoying adding the colour, and I think the flat colours are going to work. The Ruskin panel will be just 7 cm (2.75 inches) across, so, as I said yesterday, it shouldn’t be too fussy.
Darwin’s fossiliferous strata in this panel remind me of when I worked on Yorkshire Rock, and make me think about tackling something in similar style.
Colour: Flat or Fuzzy?
Adding flat tone, texture and colour: as this is destined for an A5 sized page, flat tone might work better than subtle effects, but for now I’m leaving these frames as they are. If any one of them stands out as looking out of place on the final spread I can go back to it.