Struggling to draw garden birds flitting around the feeders, I realise why I like to get out drawing ducks, geese and swans resting and preening at the water’s edge.
As these smaller birds move so quickly, my aim is to just watch one of them until it flits away then attempt to draw the whole pose in one quick drawing.
A goldfinch at the feeder can be there for a minute but a blue tit can be in and out in less than a second. Sparrows usually settle for longer, which is helpful as each one has slightly different plumage, the males particularly: the face and ‘bib’ markings vary a lot.
Drawing whatever bird comes along for an hour or so is quite a session but if I could keep doing that I think it would improve my ability to observe.
Drawing from a photograph or a stuffed bird would be a good way to take in the smaller details but to get an impression of the life and individual character of a bird I need to stick with these flitting about garden birds.
The Sun claims dominion over it . . . the dried leaves shred small, and smoked as tobacco, helps those that have any cough* . . .”
Culpeper’s Herbal, Nicholas Culpeper, 1616 – 1654
*Please don’t try this at home!
This morning I bought an attractive 1983 Culpeper’s Colour Herbal from a charity bookstall but I’m sticking with my old version as it includes the full text, including the advice to smoke rosemary like tobacco if you have a cough!
It must be decades since I last opened this old Quality Street tin, stowed away in the attic.
No box lid and I don’t remember the subject – a joust perhaps – so we’re going to have to reconstruct this piece by piece . . . starting with the edges.
Why the punched hole in the centre of the tin lid? Did we keep string in the tin?
Writing Christmas cards is now often the only time of year when I settle into an extended session of writing with a fountain pen. Normally I alternate between pen and keyboard for blog posts or articles.
It takes a while until I settle into a rhythm. My shaky hands and the rather worn joints in my right thumb don’t help me feel at ease but, if I happen to get into the flow, for a while it can feel natural and comfortable.
The trouble is that I’m never sure how I managed to get myself into this flowing and relaxed mode of writing. That’s partly because, once I’ve got going, I’ve moved on from attempting to consciously control it. I’ve switched to a kind of muscle memory.
I stop worrying about wobbles and shakes and badly formed letters. I can even get to the stage where a capital ‘S’ doesn’t feel like too much of a challenge!
Font versus Flow
My training in graphic design has left me fascinated by fonts. I’m keen to observe every nuance of an individual letterform but that’s not going to help me get in the flow if I’m constantly changing gear to draw each letter as a separate entity.
For the past four or five months, Barbara and I have been regulars at a weekly Tai Chi session and we’ve both found that the relaxed attention that’s needed to follow the flowing moves has been helpful.
I see parallels between the practice of Tai Chi and the process of handwriting. Our teacher Pat is keen that we should get the moves right from the start, rather than fudging through and getting in the flow but potentially developing bad habits which might be difficult to correct later.
“Is that a red kite?” I ask Barbara, because it doesn’t sound quite right to me.
“No, it’s a buzzard,” she suggests.
I scan around but I can’t see one circling.
We’re both wrong: a dozen starlings are gathering in the tree tops at the edge of the park. Amongst the usual soft starling chatter, one of the birds is, every now and then, giving a passable impression of the peevish mewing of a buzzard.
Met Office Maps
Rainfall as a warm front approached from the Atlantic crossing Ireland this morning. Met Office website.
The low sun can’t cast shadows this morning as it shines through a veil of cloud. There’s no halo, caused by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere, so I’m guessing that these are alto stratus – mid-range stratus clouds. They’re at the leading edge of a warm front which this morning is sweeping in from the Atlantic across Ireland.
11 am, warm air approaching from the west, Met Office website.
Later in the day, the warm front arrives bringing heavy rain. Met Office website.
As I write this up later, just after sunset, the front has arrived and rain is lashing on my studio window.
Link
Met Office as well as predicted forecasts, the Met Office website enables you to go back through the previous 24 hours to see maps of actual observations of rainfall, temperature, windspeed, cloud cover and lightning strikes.
Yorkshire colour swatches for a Dalesman article that I’m working on. Unfortunately it hasn’t been so colourful today.
The hill-top ruin is Sandal Castle where Richard of York gave battle in vain, resulting in the mnemonic for remembering the traditional colours of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
There’s some discussion about whether indigo should really be in there. It’s a useful colour in my larger watercolour box but I’m not sure whether I can really see it in a rainbow.
Novelist Stan Barstow at Lumb Bank, leading an Arvon Foundation creative writing course, 1975. Drawn from a photograph, photographer not credited, in his 2001 autobiography, In My Own Good Time.
This is the first drawing I’ve made using Procreate on my iPad Pro for quite a while. I used one of the new brushes from the latest version of the program: the Bellerive brush from the Pens folder. It approximates my Lamy fountain pen drawings.
In her studio in Wakefield’s Art House, down in the southern corner of Yorkshire’s Rhubarb Triangle, textile artist Kirstie Williams is checking out the possibilities of rhubarb root as a natural dye.
She creates swatches using traditional dyestuffs, such as oak bark, madder root and marigold heads, but recently she’s also experimented with avocado.
Rhubarb root gives a buff orange dye, a colour described by Scottish painter Patrick Syme in his 1821 version of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours as resembling the ‘Streak from the Eye of the King Fisher.’
Farrow & Ball colour chart and facsimile of Syme’s 1821 catalogue of colours.
Rhubarb & Iron
Kirstie found that adding an iron mordant resulted in a deeper brown, described by Syme as a Reddish Orange, resembling the ‘Lower Wings of the Tyger Moth.’
A mordant combines with the dye and helps it adhere to material.
On the Farrow & Ball colour chart, I’d go for Fowler Pink and Red Earth as nearest matches to the rhubarb root dye, without and with the iron mordant.
In the Winsor & Newton range of watercolours the nearest to Syme’s Buff Orange is Naples Yellow Deep and his Reddish Orange is equivalent to their Brown Ochre.
In real life my shoe is charcoal grey
I wouldn’t want too many earthy colours in my watercolour box, it can get confusing. I’ve tried to mix something similar from yellow ochre and sepia, but the colour hasn’t caught the character of Kirstie’s experiments.
Soda Ash
Rhubarb root with soda ash modifier.
Kirstie’s Soda Ash modified rhubarb dye is something close to Farrow & Ball’s Calamine.
Rhubarb dye with soda ash.
I wondered what my studio might look like if I went for one of these rhubarb-themed colours:
Photograph, Kirstie Williams
Thanks to Farrow & Ball’s AI-generated ability to try it on a photograph of your own room, I can try out the effect without committing myself. For a studio I’ll stick to white, but I’d quite like Red Earth for an old-fashioned study or library.
As I walk up Coxley Valley on a misty morning, I’m surrounded autumn leaves so, thinking about a new logo for Willow Island Editions, I decide that leaves might have more graphic impact than the tree-on-an-island logo that I currently use.
I pick up four crack willow leaves from alongside where the beck splits, creating the willow island that I used as a name for my self-publishing imprint.
A windswept version might have a lively look but the logo also needs a solid hint of authority as I want readers to feel that they can trust the instructions in my walks booklets.
“In nature you’re surrounded simple but stunning copyright-free design”
As I sat with a latte and flapjack by the The Little Acorn, the coffee cabin at the top end of the wood, I felt that their pun of a logo shows that simpler can be better.
A woodcut-style ink drawing of the willow-leaf ‘W’ would be more punchy than using the soft autumn colours of the leaves themselves. It would also hint at my hand-drawn approach.
The reason that I’m rethinking the look of Willow Island Editions is because I’m transferring my 27-year old website, www.willowisland.co.uk, from regular HTML to WordPress.
I find that a quiet walk in the woods in the perfect way to clear my mind a bit and focus on design. In nature you’re surrounded simple but stunning copyright-free design.
