Author: Richard

New Year

Garden
long-tailed tits

It’s hard to believe that we’re already two decades into the twenty-first century.

Six long-tailed tits visit the feeders at breakfast time. They tend to come as a group either early or late. Before Christmas we had eight of them gathering around the edges of the two half coconuts, pecking at the fat as the light faded.

Too Many Swans

Obelisk Lodge
Obelisk Lodge, Nostell
swan

It’s that time of year again: the Mute Swans are starting to establish their territories. On Nostell’s Middle Lake this morning, the resident pair with their six cygnets are up at the top, shallower end of the lake but they’ve got competition because at the other end of the lake two pairs of swans are circling each other, wings raised in a threat display.

Twelve swans on one small lake isn’t going to work. In the next two or three months, the grown-up cygnets will spread their wings and leave, or be persuaded to leave, and the three rival pairs will have to fight it out.

There are another eight swans on the Upper Lake, one standing by the sluice that connects with the Middle Lake. Another possible contender in the contest to claim the territory.

aconite

Beneath the hollies near the house, the first winter aconites are beginning to show. A nuthatch investigates the branches of a lakeside tree.

Nostell
Middle Lake, path to Menagerie, Nostell

A few gadwall have joined the regular mallards on the Lower Lake and we see a single drake wigeon there. Goosanders seem to prefer the deeper waters of the Middle Lake and we’ve noticed that they sometimes dive alongside the swan family. I wonder if they’re attracted by the chance of catching small fish that have been disturbed by the activities of the swans.

Small Tortoiseshell

small tortoiseshell
ichneumon wasp
Ichneumon wasp

On one of the colder days last month we had a small tortoiseshell butterfly fluttering around in the dining room and decided that the best place to release it would be in the cool shelter of our garage.

A few days later it had emerged and it perched motionless for a day or two on the outside of the up-and-over garage door. It must have eventually flown because I then saw it fluttering about at the back of the house, caught on a strand of spider’s silk in the top corner of my studio window. I released it and it flew off across the garden. Ideally I should have offered it sugared water, to allow it to replace some of the energy that it has lost.

There was no frost this morning and today a few insects were active. A tiny black fly drifts around in the kitchen and a small ichneumon wasp (or possibly a sawfly?), perhaps a centimetre long, climbs up the bedroom window. I catch it in a bug box and take a few macro shots as it goes through a grooming routine.

December was a warm month and I regularly noticed an orb web spider run out to despatch some tiny insect that had been trapped in its web in a corner on the outside of our living room window.

Keep & Barbican

Barbican

Working in from the edges, I’ve finally made it to the centre of my Sandal Castle aerial view, finishing off the Barbican: an impressive internal gatehouse between the castle’s bailey and the Keep.

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Ruins

Ruins

I’ve been working on this illustration as if it was a jigsaw, making a point of going around the edges of the Sandal Castle site, drawing the trees and hedges before turning my attention to the centre. This afternoon I’ve made a start on finishing off the centre by redrawing the ruins of the Great Hall. That’s working pretty much as I imagined it, although I think that it now needs a suggestion of a shadow, to look more three-dimensional.

Sandal Castle is rarely this lonely, so I also need to add those cars, dog walkers and visitors. And perhaps a table or two outside the cafe.

Earthworks

earthworks

I’ve been adding shading and hatching to the aerial view of Sandal Castle to create a more three-dimensional effect. I had intended to fade out the hedgerows around the perimeter but as the earthworks are looking so solid, I think that might be too much of a contrast.

I’ll probably add a few figures for scale and a few cars in the car park. I’m drawing with an Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro, using the program Adobe Fresco.

Greater Black-backed Gull

reeds

10.30 a.m.: On North Ings, RSPB St Aidan’s, a greater black-backed gull is feeding on the carcass of a brown hare. Two crows and several magpies, dwarfed by the gull, have gathered around it, like vultures at a kill on the savannah, waiting their turn in the pecking order. As the gull tears at the carcass with its large bill, we glimpse the long back legs of the hare and the black and white markings on the tips of the hare’s long ears.

At the field centre, there’s speculation about who was responsible for the kill. One possibility is a peregrine. For a peregrine, St Aidan’s isn’t far from the nest site on the tower of Wakefield Cathedral.

Peregrine Pellets?

pellets and feathers
breast bone
Sternum, about 6 inches long.

A few days ago, we were looking at the remains of what looked like a duck or goose, perhaps even a cygnet. Pellets left by the scattered feathers and bones could have been those of a peregrine.

A short distance, perhaps twenty yards, along the track we saw a sternum, the breastbone of a bird, which we thought looked large enough to be a goose or swan. We can’t be sure that it was part of the same kill.

pellet
Pellet about an inch and a quarter long.

There were fox droppings nearby, so the red fox was our number one suspect, but, as far as I know, foxes, unlike birds of prey, crows and herons, don’t produce pellets of indigestible material. In my photograph you can see that the two small feathers appear to have been flattened and nipped off at the quill, rather than plucked, which to me suggests fox.

It’s unlikely that the brown hare that we saw the gull feasting on had been killed by a fox, as it was on a part of the reserve that is surrounded by what is intended to be a fox- and badger-proof fence.

When we walked back past the kill nearly an hour later, the gull had moved and three magpies were picking over the remnants.

Simplifying Sandal

bailey

If I was working from life, I’d want to indicate every bramble bush in the moat and every hawthorn growing on the motte at Sandal Castle but, as I’m more interested in the structure of the earthworks, I need to simplify.

I’ll add shadows and highlights to build up a three-dimensional effect. For the stippling to represent the vegetation I’ve used a virtual brush with the appropriate name of ‘Seurat’ in the Adobe Fresco drawing app. I’ll use a dry brush following the contours to further emphasise the form.

Grandma’s Cupboard

Robert and Jane Bell at Vine Cottage, Sutton-cum-Lound in the 1950s. Colour added at colourise.sg. In real life the bricks and pantiles were terra cotta red, the paintwork green and creamy white.

My grandma, Jane Bagshaw, met my grandad Robert Bell at a celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, on Tuesday June 15th 1897 at 3 o’clock at Serlby Park, Nottinghamshire. He was then aged 19, working as second coachman to the Galways at Serlby. Jane, a domestic servant was 14.

Vine Cottage

After living in Sheffield, the couple retired to Vine Cottage, Sutton-cum-Lound, near Retford, Nottinghamshire in the 1950s.

As you might guess from the photograph of them, standing amongst the hollyhocks in front of the cottage, they were the kind of grandparents that you might encounter in a children’s story.

The ‘Grandma’s Cupboard’ prompt in my writer’s notebook.

Taking my cue from a prompt on the Start Writing Fiction course that I took this autumn, I’ve recalled some of the features of Vine Cottage, as I remember them from my childhood, from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, when they left the cottage and moved to a bungalow at the other end of the village.

Grandma’s Cupboard

shelf edging

The prompt on the fiction course was to write about ‘Grandma’s Cupboard’, so let’s start with the shelves in the narrow scullery at the back of the cottage.

Grandma lined the shelves with newspaper, cutting a decorative zig-zag on its trailing edge. My father saved copies of The Times for her. At that time it was a broadsheet consisting almost entirely of text so it gave the shelves a more uniform effect than her own Weekly News, a popular tabloid. She always saved The Weekly News for me because I liked the cartoons in it. And they would sometimes also pass on a copy of the Salvation Army’s newsletter, which featured a comic strip of The Adventures of Black Bob, featuring a hill shepherd and his faithful border collie.

Continue reading Grandma’s Cupboard

Fresco Folk

Remains of the gardrobe shafts – medieval toilets – attached to the great chamber at Sandal.
peasant

My brief, for this illustration of life in a castle, is to draw ‘someone using a well’.

Following the restoration of Pontefract Castle, there’s now a scheme to improve access and restore the ruins at Sandal. I’ll be illustrating various features including the twelve-metre deep well, excavated in the bailey, conveniently close to the privy chamber, the castle’s private apartments.

I’ve tried to imagine the kind of servant who would have been assigned the task of hauling buckets from the well. Although the shaft of the well has been preserved, we can only guess at the arrangement of pulleys or rollers that were used but I’m sure that it would have involved a bucket and rope.

Wooden Poses

I’ve drawn the character on my iPad Pro using an Apple Pencil in the Adobe Fresco drawing program but for the pose I’ve used a 3D figure in Clip Studio Paint, tweaking the pose and the proportions. I felt that he would have developed broad muscular shoulders because of all that heavy lifting.

I’m still at the rough stage but this should give the team designing the interpretation a clear idea of what I have in mind. Just fourteen more illustrations to go . . .

In the days before computers, I’d occasionally use a Polaroid camera to take a photograph of a friend in a particular pose or I’d establish the proportions by setting up an artist’s lay figure, an articulated wooden doll.

Both these methods had disadvantages: under my direction, the friend would be likely to adopt a static self-conscious pose and the lay figure inevitably looked stilted and wooden.

My favourite way to draw people is to go out with a sketchbook and to try to capture their movement and character.

Virtual Brushes

Fresco drawing

I’ve got a bewildering number of virtual brushes available to me in Fresco including instant cross hatching and screen tones (left).

For the Sandal rough, after tracing the 3D figure with a virtual pencil, I’m going for a quick pen drawing – the one I used here is ‘vintage inks’.

The flat colour goes on a layer below the pen and ink. I outline each area of solid colour with a vector brush – such as ‘basic round’ – then fill using the paint bucket tool.

Reflections, Milby Cut

Reflections, Milby Cut on the River Ure at Boroughbridge, North Yorkshire.

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Howgate Wonder

apple leaves

Last year was our best ever for the two small cordon apples by the patio but this year out of the few small apples that grew, all were blemished by insects or pecked by birds.

We grow a double cordon of Howgate Wonder and a single stem of Golden Spire. They’re in a tiny bed close to the wall of next door’s conservatory so in September I added a thick mulch of garden compost to refresh the soil. I also planted dozens of crocus bulbs.

Time spent travelling in wild places

‘We know that time spent travelling and in wild places, with the people that matter most is precious.’

It might sound like Thoreau or John Muir, but it’s a quote from this year’s Rohan Christmas catalogue. If I wrote a mission statement, that would have to be part of it. Rohan’s soft-sell marketing must have worked on me because I’m going to try out their new Nordic Jeans, ‘with innovative infrared technology’. That would have been perfect yesterday at St Aidan’s RSPB nature reserve.

It’s the nearest you can get to wilderness and wet within ten miles of Leeds City Centre and we head there when we need wide open spaces. On a clear day you can see the moors of the Peak District moors twenty miles to the south but on Sunday morning mist filled the Aire Valley and the pattern of lagoons and reedbeds as seen from the visitor centre over a latte and flapjack resembled the floating world of Chinese brush paintings.

There’s just one bird, a coot, in my photograph of Fleakingly Reservoir, in the north-west corner of the reserve, but I’ve managed to position it behind the topmost seed-head of the knapweed. Coots were probably the most abundant bird with several hundred on the various lagoons. A smart drake goldeneye dived repeatedly on the main lake and a stonechat perched on a seed-head of dock alongside the track at the foot of The Hillside.

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