Recycled material in farm sheds, Dudfleet Lane, Horbury.
Dudfleet
Category: Drawing
Pheasants at the Pond
I spent an hour clearing algae, moss, grass and duckweed from our pond yesterday. The pheasants seem to appreciate my efforts.
The aim was to clear the pond before frogs started arriving but on my first sweep with the net I caught a large frog amongst the pondweed. It played dead but with a little gentle encouragement it hopped back into the water.
That was the only frog and I didn’t come across any newts, which I invariably catch in the net when I’m clearing duckweed in the summer.
The pheasants and a blackbird rummaged and pecked about in the debris that I’d left in piles around the pond to give any creatures that had got caught up in it a chance to escape.
Dalesman Diary
Yesterday I completed the last spread of a year’s worth of my nature diaries for the Dalesman. I’ve been writing for the magazine for 12 years now, once a month or bimonthly, so it now runs to 132 articles, more than 250 pages.
This is the first time that I’ve managed to get so far ahead. The icy weather at the start of the year gave me the opportunity to put in a good session and I completed six articles, which just made me all the more determined to get on with the remaining six so that I’d be a full year ahead.
My deadline is always 6 or 7 weeks before the month that I’m writing about so in that way I’ve always been thinking ahead but at the same time I’ve always looking back, looking through my wildyorkshire.blog posts for ideas from nine months ago.
At last I’ll be able to write and draw my articles in real time, in the present! But I’ll have to wait a year to see them in print.
Fascinating Ferns
Back to work on my Thomas Gissing ‘Ferns of Wakefield’ article for a forthcoming ‘Dalesman’.
The ferns, horsetail and clubmoss on the right-hand page are by botanical illustrator John Edward Sowerby (1825-1870). With exception of the clubmosses and the rare parsley fern, all the illustrations in the book were drawn from specimens that Gissing had collected within 12 miles of Wakefield.
New Year’s Art Bag
The rain’s lashing against my studio window and it isn’t looking promising for New Year’s Day but I’ve finished my old A6 sketchbook and I’m ready to start a new A5 landscape Pink Pig sketchbook tomorrow. Whatever the weather throws at us.
Old Glove
My favourite gardening gloves are worn through at the fingers, so a good subject for another textures drawing for my Procreate Dreams course.
The various texture brushes will have their uses but I like to be in control so my favourite way of creating a texture is to hand draw it, in this case with Procreate’s Dry Ink brush.
Hyacinth Jar
Three stages of a drawing in Procreate experimenting with different ways of showing textures in an iPad drawing. This is a practical exercise from Brooke Eggleston’s Procreate Dreams animation course on Domestika. For this exercise we went back to the original version of Procreate which has a wider range of drawing tools.
6B Pencil
At first I stuck with the virtual 6B Pencil, which felt close to my regular fountain pen sketchbook drawings.
Smudge Tool
As an illustrator I like to keep things clearly defined, so that the final printed version stays sharp, so stage 2, where I start creating tone by smudging with a virtual Damp Brush, isn’t my usual approach.
The nearest to that in my sketchbooks is when I’m using soluble ink in a fountain pen and I brush over with a drop of water to create a pen and wash effect.
Texture Brushes
In the final stage I used some of the preset texture brushes such as Twisted Tree, Heavy Metal and Rusted Decay from Procreate’s folder of Industrial brushes. I tried to find equivalents for the cross section of soil, roots and moss in the jar and for the sprouting hyacinth leaves.
There are various sparkle brushes available in Procreate but I felt the best way to get the effect of highlights in the glass was to knock back everything but the highlights by brushing in tone, in this case with a Short Hair brush from a Procreate course I took a couple of years ago.
This was intended to be an observational drawing but I could imagine some of those texture brushes being useful if you were trying to evoke a particular style: such as a 19th-century engraving.
I’d come back to this exercise again.
A Useful Tip
On a practical note, I tried replacing the PenTips tip of my Apple Pencil, which I’ve been using for at least a year, perhaps even two. That and cleaning the PenTips magnetic clip-on textured screen protector with my glasses spray and a microfibre cloth seemed to give me better control – more of a feel of drawing on paper.
Kelly, Banger, Mizzy and Guy
My 1981 Wakefield Market acrylic on canvas painting makes a rare appearance at Wednesday’s Wakefield ArtWalk at the Gissing House, Thompson’s Yard, at the top of Westgate, along with some of the sketches I made on location.
I’d taken a new A5 hardback sketchbook and was drawing in fountain pen so I hoped that no-one would notice me scribbling away as I sat on the low wall in front of the Old Queen Elizabeth Gallery and started on the first page sketching the backs of the fruit and veg stalls. No such luck.
“Penny for the Guy, Mister?”
Grudgingly I agreed to make a small contribution to their firework fund on condition that they’d keep still for a few minutes while I drew them. The whole point of my market sketches was to get practice drawing a variety of figures.
I’m sure that poor old Guy didn’t last long but I wonder what creative entrepreneurs Kelly, Banger and Mizzy are up to now. Would be great to meet up with them again at the ArtWalk.
I guess that they might be about 50 years old by now.
A Record of Wakefield’s Market
Sydney Granville as Bill Bobstay, the Boatswain, cover star of this complete performance on 78 rpm records (or it would be complete if one of the 12-inch shellac resin records hadn’t got chipped), makes a guest appearance at my Wakefield Market show at the Gissing Centre, Thompson’s Yard, Westgate, at the next Wakefield Art Walk, on the evening Wednesday, 27 November.
I came across the records at the market on the stalls over towards Vicarage Street, which sold the kind of secondhand bric-a-brac that these days you’d look for at a car boot sale.
Hauxley Nature Reserve
The Lookout Cafe at the Northumberland Wildlife Trust Hauxley Nature Reserve is an ideal place to sketch.
At the opposite corner of the reserve, on the lagoon near the outlet to Druridge Bay, a female gadwall is dabbling amongst a raft of washed-up kelp.
The spindle has fuchsia-red fruits which remind me of miniature pumpkins. It looks as if most of the orange berries of sea buckthorn have already been eaten, perhaps by redwings and fieldfares, but there are a few clumps left close to the path. We had a glimpse of what I thought was a flock of redwings going over, if so, these are the first that we’ve seen this year.
