A group of these plants were growing on the riverbank and on a rubbly bank at the side of the riverside path behind industrial units. It looks like a relative of water avens but doesn’t have the drooping flowerheads of that species. Most of the flowers were yellowish green but some plants had flowers midway down the stem with magenta petals. A garden escape?
Next day we spotted this plant amongst the ferns at Brodsworth Hall and Gardens. It’s a Heuchera, a member of the saxifrage family from North America, so definitely a garden escape.
I drew the buildings from the Seed Room at Overton recently but added the colour later. I thought about taking a photograph as colour reference but decided it would be a better exercise for my memory and imagination to recreate my impression of the colour.
I added the colour later to the sycamore from Ossett (left) but had a few minutes to add a quick wash when I drew the sycamores bursting into leaf at Newmillerdam last week (below).
Happy birthday last Friday to Connie, who enthusiastically organised a memorable newt survey of our garden pond last summer.
The final count of smooth newts was 22, of which only 5 were female, so in this sample less than a quarter of the population is female. This is despite the fact that on the occasions that I’ve seen a newt caught by a blackbird at the pond I’ve often spotted the bright orange belly of the male.
Where was my mum, Gladys Joan Swift, one hundred years ago today on Monday 25th April 1921?
Thanks to the 1921 Census records now available on Find My Past, I’ve been able to track her down. She was just three years old at the time, living at 77 Nether Edge Road, Sheffield.
Maurice Swift
Maurice Swift
Her father Maurice describes himself as a Cabinet Manufacturer and Undertaker, the employer at his firm Swift and Goodison Ltd.
His signature seems to fit with what I know of his character, bold with a bit of a flourish.
Childhood drawing by Maurice Swift senior.
Maurice Junior
But there was another Maurice Swift, Maurice T. Swift, cabinet maker at number 77. This was my uncle, then aged 16 who was employed as a Cabinet Case Apprentice at Maurice Senior’s workshop on Headford Street.
Giving your son your own Christian name and training him up in your business isn’t without its risks and after a falling out with his father, Maurice junior set up his own funeral business, resulting in confusion when people turned up to pay their bills. Maurice senior had to resort to placing a notice in the local paper pointing out there was no connection between the two businesses.
Sarah Ann
I checked out 79 Nether Edge Road because I knew that my great grandma, Maurice’s mum, Sarah Ann Swift (nee Truelove) was living there at the time of Sheffield Blitz but she hadn’t yet moved in a hundred years ago today.
33 Cemetery Road, Sheffield, August 2020, copyright Google 2022.
A search of the census shows that, aged 70 and a widow, she was supporting herself as a boarding house keeper at 33 Cemetery Road.
1921 Census record, 33 Cemetery Road, Sheffield.
Her boarders were a Singer Sewing Machine Salesman, James Pemberton, aged 50, and Mantle Shop Manager, John Robert Preston, aged 46.
She was born in 1851 so her signature is Victorian copperplate. I’m intrigued that she ran the Sarah and Ann together, signing herself as Sarahann Swift.
I’m reading Marcos Mateu-Mestre’s Framed Drawing Techniques and trying his suggestions for using tone. This cloth hat lying on my desk was drawn with an Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro in areas of tone only – no initial line drawing – using the Lasso Fill tool in Clip Studio Paint.
Previously, as in this drawing of chitted potatoes, I’ve gone for a linocut or silkscreen printing effect using areas of solid tone, set to 100% opacity.
But following Mateu-Mestre’s method in his chapter on The Gray Scale, these tone swatches are actually all based on pure black.
Tone number one really is black but it was applied with a Clip Studio brush set to 70% opacity. The resulting grey was then sampled with the eyedropper tool and painted as swatch 2 but again at 70% opacity, making it that bit lighter and so on, grading the tones almost to pure white.
Meteorologist Tomasz Schafernaker apologised for using the phrase ‘easterly breeze’ repeatedly through his forecast yesterday but that’s what’s dominated the weather today. My barometer is showing 29.6 in Hg, 1002 mB, so it’s fine but the breeze from across the North Sea is keeping it cool and keeping the cloud moving.
