Category: Art

December Garden Sketches

ivy

The Shortest Day

With the prospect of days getting longer, I feel the urge to start making a few natural history notes again.

bird sketches

Recent highlights have included sparrowhawks on their rounds again. So far we haven’t spotted one making a kill on one of its swooping surprise visit to our bird feeders.

It’s usually a smaller, greyish brown male visiting, which pauses for a few minutes break in the hedge or crab apple, then continues towards the woodland edge where its progress is marked by groups of wood pigeons flying up and away from the treetops.

bird sketches

One afternoon as I unloaded the car at the front of the house, a sparrowhawk sped past just one foot above the pavement, climbing swiftly to clear a tall larch fence and heading between the houses to the back gardens beyond.

Christmas Day

bird sketches

An immaculate-looking cock pheasant is pecking around near the bird feeders alongside three females. They’re not alone. There are another three females down by the pond, four checking out the hedge by the shed and more of them foraging over the veg beds, some of them pecking at all that’s left of our cavolo nero. It’s probably the calm before the storm for these pheasants as Boxing Day is a traditional day for a shoot.

Christmas Day sketches: holly, bay, Viola tricolor and a poorly chaffinch.

My father used to meet up with his shooting friends at Terrington, in the Howardian Hills, North Yorkshire, not far from Castle Howard. He’d bring back a few pheasants – two would be a brace of pheasants – which would hang from the shelves in our storeroom, smelling increasingly gamey until my mum plucked them.

Boxing Day Shoot, c.1962, Fred Green’s cottage. Fred Green, who I think is the figure in the centre, was the gamekeeper. The man in the beret, front row, right, is Eric Chalkley, who lived on Stanley Road, Wakefield and who, I believe, worked for the National Coal Board.

Boxing Day Walk

We join a motley procession. Two pied ponies with young riders are walking on, guided by an older couple, the man kitted out in yellow high viz jacket. Following ten paces behind them are four hikers in animated conversation then, another ten paces behind, a man with a dog.

We emerge from a footpath to tag along at the end. There’s no way that we can stride out to overtake them on this narrow country lane, so we adopt the measured clip, clop pace of the party, a relaxed pace that I could imagine a party of medieval pilgrims adopting.

Shepherd, Wakefield Mystery Plays

Chaucer’s pilgrims upped their pace when they saw the towers of Canterbury Cathedral up ahead We still call this pace between walking on and a gallop a canter.

Periwinkle growing in the hawthorn hedge.

It was spring-like enough on Boxing Day for a song thrush to be singing its varied thrice-repeated snatches of song. A robin sang its wistful trickle of a song in the hedgerow.

No spring flowers as such yet but a few periwinkle flowers are already showing on straggling stems in the hedge near some old cottages on Coxley Lane.

Bird Sketches

birds sketches

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.

bird sketches

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.

Pieces from the Past

jigsaw in old tin

It must be decades since I last opened this old Quality Street tin, stowed away in the attic.

jigsaw

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?

Handwriting

pen and paper

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.

Lamy pen

Warm Front

10.50 a.m., Carr Lodge Park, Horbury

“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.

Starling

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.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Yorkshire Colour Swatches

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.

watercolour box

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.

Stan Barstow

Stan Barstow

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.

Madder, Oak, Marigold . . . and Rhubarb

Photograph Kirstie Williams

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

rhubarb with iron modifier

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 with 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.

Link

swatches
Photograph Kirstie Williams

Kirstie Williams textile artist & printmaker

Farrow & Ball

Nature’s Palette, A Colour Reference System from the Natural World, Thames & Hudson, Patrick Baty, 2021

Osprey Daylite Plus

backpack sketch

On a recent rainy walk along the shores of Lake Windermere, my seven year old haversack was the worse for wear, the rubberised lining disintegrating, so I chose this Osprey Daylite Plus for our latest walk on the Thames path a couple of weeks ago.

Drawing in pen and ink

I drew in bamboo pen in Noodler’s black ink and, as the blotty bits are going to take a long time to dry, I photographed the drawing, rather than putting it on the scanner.