It’s too hot to do much work in the back garden but, as it’s in the shade until lunchtime, the front stays cool. I finish weeding the narrow bed below the lounge window. Welsh poppies would happily take over here but, much as I like them, we’ve got other plans.
Inevitably, as I go, I keep digging up spring bulbs. I replant all the smaller ones. The tête-à-têtes are doing well but I pick out the larger daffodil bulbs because, in this shady bed, they grow too leggy and keel over. I’ll replant them at the end of the back garden. I’ll need more than a hand fork and trowel to get to grips with the chicory and bindweed down there.
The drawing process
I drew these on my iPad using Procreate. I wanted the entire process to be visible in the finished drawing: the false starts, the construction lines and the multiple attempts to get a shape in proportion. I limited my use of the eraser. There was a detail on the trowel that I’d painted too dark, which I took back a bit with a soft, semi-transparent eraser.
As with yesterday’s view of the back garden, I used only one layer. Because of this I had to paint over my line work, so I needed to go over it again with the ‘Gesinski ink’ pen.
The virtual ‘dry brush’ is useful for painting fur in Procreate on an iPad, and you don’t have to mistreat your prized sable watercolour brush to get the desired effect!
One of the Rodley Nature Reserve harvest mice, drawn from one of the photographs that I took there earlier this month. Hopefully this will make it into print next year in one of my Dalesman nature diaries.
Stripy brown-lipped snails hunker down on ivy leaves in our hedges. I find them even when I’m up the steps, cutting back the top branches.
We’re continuing to harvest plenty of produce from the veg beds – courgettes, potatoes, spinach, rhubarb and autumn raspberries – but we’re taking a break from beans: the french and broad beans are over but the runners, which have masses of scarlet flowers, are taking their time to burst into full flow.
One or two holly blues have been visiting the ivy, which, along with the holly, is one of the food plants of the caterpillar.
Drawing on one layer in Procreate
My drawing was made in the Procreate drawing program on my iPad Pro. For a change, I’ve drawn it all on one layer. I usually keep pencil roughs, ink and colour on separate layers, which keeps the line work unblemished but that means that I’m missing out on all the efforts that the Procreate designers have put into making digital drawing feel like its real world equivalent. In this case, I don’t mind if the pen and ink gets slightly blurred as I add the colour.
My homework for the final week of my web comics course. This little animation was produced in Adobe After Effects. I did try to add a falling snow effect too, but at least I managed to add a bit of movement.
Original drawings in my pocket-sized A5 (landscape) sketchbook
It’s rare for me to sit and draw from life but I get the chance this morning as I wait for my appointment at Specsavers on Little Westgate, Wakefield. Perhaps because we’re still in the holiday season, there aren’t as many people in town as I’d expected. This is a good thing because instead of picking out a favourite character from a crowd I have to draw, at random, whoever happens to be walking past. Often there’s only one person in view.
After my course in web comics, I realise that every person embodies their own short story. Each person has a particular walk. The man with the striped trousers is the most determined and confident, while others are more diffident. The woman in the centre pauses at the threshold of a shop as if debating with herself whether she should enter.
Watercolour added later. I remember the colour of the carrier bag better than the colour of some of the footwear and trousers.
“A goldfinch has just flown into the window,” Barbara tells me, “It’s lying there on the patio, its little beak trembling.”
I go out, prepared for the worst. It’s a juvenile, lying on its back, wings trembling, a startled expression in its eyes and, like Barbara said, its beak opening and closing, as if it’s gasping for breath. Ringers will keep a bird calm by consigning it to the darkness of a soft drawstring cloth bag. I would usually put a stunned bird in a cardboard box to recover but I haven’t got one to hand, so I pick it up and cup it in my hands.
I can feel its heart thumping. It begins to perk up. I part my fingers and it does seem to be sitting up and taking notice. It has a tiny mark on its head but no other sign of injury.
I take it down to the lawn by the bird feeder and gradually open my hands. It moves onto the grass then, after a second or two, it flies off, up over the hedge . . .
. . . and right into next door’s bedroom window!
Luckily this time it doesn’t stun itself and it sits on the windowsill as it recovers.
Boris Karloff, drawn in Procreate on my iPad Pro. I’m trying to echo the style of the original 1964 ‘Thriller’ comic.
From my homemade comic from January 1965
Boris Karloff makes an appearance in my homework for my latest free online FutureLearn course, Infinite Canvas: Making and Understanding Web Comics from the Comics Studies department at the University of Dundee.
We spent the first couple of weeks defining web comics and discussing how they might be used. There were also practical tutorials, including a run-through of my favourite comic-making program, Clip Studio Paint, plus suggestions for getting started with free programs, notably Madefire, where you can compile and publish your web comic, complete with animations.
Now, in the final week, we’re given the opportunity to develop our own web comic.
The Broken Leg
We’ve been looking at a few medical public information comics, which got me thinking about the first time that I landed myself in hospital. On Boxing Day 1964, when I was aged thirteen, I was hurrying home to watch Fred Hoyle’s Universe when I slipped on the icy pavement and broke my leg.
My spell in Ward G gave me a fresh insight into the world of comics. As a child, I’d always read a weekly comic, starting with Playhour during my infant school days and moving on to the Eagle at junior school. Shortly before starting at the grammar school, I’d been wowed by the use of colour photography and illustration in the new educational magazine Look & Learn, so I’d moved on to that.
The newspaper trolley, which made a daily round of the wards, gave me the chance to dip into American comics for the first time. The black and white Weird Tales was a favourite, because of the variety of stories packed into one issue but it had a rival in Boris Karloff’s Thriller, illustrated in colour.
I’d love to draw a web comic which combined my experience in hospital, as illustrated here in my ballpoint pen and crayon drawings from 1965, and combine that with the escape that I was able to make into the world of comics and science-fiction short stories (I borrowed books from the hospital library trolley). I can still remember a dozen of these stories: performing ants, hypnotic pebbles, post-apocalyptic New York (yes, even back then New York was the go-to city for apocalypses), a dimensionally unstable house, a time-travelling mystery hound, space age weather manipulation, assorted aliens . . .
Our G ward art class
I’ll draw a few sample frames but I won’t have time to illustrate the whole comic because a week from today I start my next FutureLearn course, Invisible Worlds: Understanding the Natural Environment, based on the Eden Project’s Invisible Worlds exhibition.
Link
My father in his office at the National Coal Board,Newton Hill, Wakefield
With its meadows now full of wild flowers going to seed, Rodley Nature Reserve, to the west of Leeds, is a perfect habitat for harvest mice.
My photographs were taken in the visitor centre there where a large vivarium contains a captive colony. Since 2012, 900 harvest mice have been released here.
They build tennis-ball sized nests amongst the stems of reeds and grasses.
As it clambers about amongst vegetation, the harvest mouse uses its long tail to grasp stems.
One morning last week, after a wild and windy night, we found this nest, which I think was made by goldfinches, on the lawn at the foot of the rowan in the front garden. It’s just three inches (8 cm) across and very light. There were no signs of eggs or chicks in or around it, so I think that it had been dislodged by the wind, rather than raided by a predator, such as a magpie or cat.
It’s composed mainly of frizzy wool-like material, which might be dog hair, wool or even some manmade down. It is too long and curly to be thistle down. The nest is decorated with strands of moss around the outside with a few long threads curled around the inside of the cup, which are possibly horse hair but more likely textile thread. As I went out to measure it just now, a week after it fell, I noticed a tiny rove beetle amongst the fibres in the centre of the cup.
A month or more ago, a goldfinch was singing from the telephone cables near the rowan tree and sometimes there would be a pair of them perching there, so I wondered if they had a nest nearby.
It’s been a good year for goldfinches and garden birds in general, with young bullfinches, chaffinches, blackbirds, starlings, blue tits and great tits coming to our back garden bird feeders, but goldfinches are the most numerous. Yesterday a flock – a charm to use the collective noun – of goldfinches flew up from feeding on the fluffy seed-heads of creeping thistle in the meadow by the wood.
Even by boosting the contrast, I can’t really pick out any definite tracks at the entrance to my animal tracking tunnel, which has now been sitting amongst the long grass by the hedge at the end of the garden for two days. The damp paper along the edges might have been nibbled by slugs.
As I moved in to take a close-up photograph, a vole ran out from the tunnel. It happened so quickly that I wondered if it really had been in there or whether it had been hidden in the grass at my feet but when I slid out the bait tray I could see that half the sunflower hearts had disappeared.
One of the sunflower hearts had been nibbled at one end to expose the seed inside.
In the milk bottle top that serves as a bowl for the bait something has been nibbling away at what I think might be fragments of peanuts in the peanut butter. Traces of slime suggest that slugs or snails have been visiting the tunnel.
I’ve topped up the bait with sunflower hearts, so my tracking tunnel has now become a vole feeding station.
