Horbury High Street drawn from Auckland Opticians this morning.
High Street
Month: July 2023
Fur Balls
Back to my animal illustration course and today we’re making our own Procreate brushes to represent animal hair. It’s the equivalent of using a fan brush or an old splayed brush in traditional watercolours.
In Search of Lost Courses
At last, it’s time to go back to my Domestika courses including Román García Mora’s Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate.
Unfortunately my courses have disappeared (apart from Mattias Adolfsson’s cartooning course) and the Domestika chat-bot can’t help me locate them.
Does anyone know how I can contact Domestika? There’s no contact form on my version of their website on Safari.
Found!
Hurrah! I’ve found them again. As the chat-bot suggested, for some reason I must have created a second Domestika account, using my Apple ID instead of my regular e-mail. I must take those chat-bots more seriously in future.
Junction 32
As part of my attempt to get to know my way around my digital camera I’m making a point of taking it with me whenever I can, even on a trip to Junction 32 shopping centre at Castleford this morning. This is the view from our table at Bakers and Baristas.
Just to get started I took a photograph of the gabion wall by the car park.
If I can get relaxed about using my camera in public I’ll move on to including people in my photographs.
Kestrel Preening
RSPB St Aidans, 12.30 pm, Tuesday: A kestrel lands on the track ahead of us, apparently for a brief bathe in a puddle although by the time I get my binoculars on it, it’s dust-bathing then going through its preening routine for a few minutes.
It seems very relaxed about us standing just twenty yards from it. We chat with a bird watcher as we get back to the centre:
“Was it streaky?” he asks “It’d be a juvenile, they’re more trusting of people, and like all juveniles, they’ll sometimes do silly things.”
Gatekeeper
A male gatekeeper flutters past us, heads for the long grasses alongside the track and immediately gets stuck in, to us, invisible strands of a spider’s web. I feel that I ought to give it a second chance, so I gently extricate it. Free of any strands of silk, I can’t understand why it doesn’t fly off, then I notice that, hidden beneath its left wing, a spider has it firmly in its grasp.
I replace the pair amongst the grasses, leaving the spider to finish its lunch undisturbed.
Dancing Brass
Okay, so I struggled to draw the massed instruments of the Castletown Silver Band dancing at their annual rave. If AI is so clever, let’s see what it can do with the words ‘brass instruments dancing.’
I typed the words ‘brass instruments dancing’ into Adobe Express BETA version. Time taken to come up with eight finished illustrations: 45 seconds. Some do look rather odd, but this one comes pretty close to what I had in mind.
But illustration is like music isn’t it? It’s the little imperfections that bring the performance to life! That’s what I’m telling myself 🙂
Happy birthday to Zoe. Keep on raving.
Six-spot Burnet
A RSPB St Aidan’s this morning: volunteer wardens Tom and Evelyn, rivers MEET cafe crafter Miss B, moorhen footprints and a six-spot burnet on knapweed.
We also saw a drake common scoter, spoonbill, bittern, a juvenile kestrel dustbathing and preening and a gatekeeper blundering into a web amongst the grasses and being instantly caught by a spider.
Outlet
A mallard – possibly a youngster as it seems to be in the process of growing secondary wing feathers for the first time – standing at the cascading outlet of Newmillerdam lake this morning.
Meanwhile this adult female and her mate were paddling alongside the Boathouse Cafe.
Bag and Brush
Barbara’s mum and her friend used to go into town on the access bus on a Friday morning and she’d often come back with a brush. This bannister brush from Wilko’s was a bit of a bargain at £1.49.
I drew the brush and my camera bag in Procreate on the iPad, using Procreate’s Technical Pen.
Camera and Kit Lens
Portraits, landscapes, nature, still life, movement and street photography . . . I feel that I’m got to know my Olympus DSLR and its 14-42mm kit lens a whole lot better in the past week.