Horbury High Street drawn from Auckland Opticians this morning.
High Street
Category: Drawing
Fur Balls
Back to my animal illustration course and today we’re making our own Procreate brushes to represent animal hair. It’s the equivalent of using a fan brush or an old splayed brush in traditional watercolours.
In Search of Lost Courses
At last, it’s time to go back to my Domestika courses including Román García Mora’s Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate.
Unfortunately my courses have disappeared (apart from Mattias Adolfsson’s cartooning course) and the Domestika chat-bot can’t help me locate them.
Does anyone know how I can contact Domestika? There’s no contact form on my version of their website on Safari.
Found!
Hurrah! I’ve found them again. As the chat-bot suggested, for some reason I must have created a second Domestika account, using my Apple ID instead of my regular e-mail. I must take those chat-bots more seriously in future.
Kestrel Preening
RSPB St Aidans, 12.30 pm, Tuesday: A kestrel lands on the track ahead of us, apparently for a brief bathe in a puddle although by the time I get my binoculars on it, it’s dust-bathing then going through its preening routine for a few minutes.
It seems very relaxed about us standing just twenty yards from it. We chat with a bird watcher as we get back to the centre:
“Was it streaky?” he asks “It’d be a juvenile, they’re more trusting of people, and like all juveniles, they’ll sometimes do silly things.”
Gatekeeper
A male gatekeeper flutters past us, heads for the long grasses alongside the track and immediately gets stuck in, to us, invisible strands of a spider’s web. I feel that I ought to give it a second chance, so I gently extricate it. Free of any strands of silk, I can’t understand why it doesn’t fly off, then I notice that, hidden beneath its left wing, a spider has it firmly in its grasp.
I replace the pair amongst the grasses, leaving the spider to finish its lunch undisturbed.
Six-spot Burnet
A RSPB St Aidan’s this morning: volunteer wardens Tom and Evelyn, rivers MEET cafe crafter Miss B, moorhen footprints and a six-spot burnet on knapweed.
We also saw a drake common scoter, spoonbill, bittern, a juvenile kestrel dustbathing and preening and a gatekeeper blundering into a web amongst the grasses and being instantly caught by a spider.
Bag and Brush
Barbara’s mum and her friend used to go into town on the access bus on a Friday morning and she’d often come back with a brush. This bannister brush from Wilko’s was a bit of a bargain at £1.49.
I drew the brush and my camera bag in Procreate on the iPad, using Procreate’s Technical Pen.
Camera and Kit Lens
Portraits, landscapes, nature, still life, movement and street photography . . . I feel that I’m got to know my Olympus DSLR and its 14-42mm kit lens a whole lot better in the past week.
The Leeds Bus
Coming home from Leeds on the 116. Colour added later.
Jenny
Jenny, natural history illustrator, drawing by our pond. She recently completed a commission to illustrate an information board about the wildlife at a pond on a nature reserve in West Sussex.
She started on John Norris Wood’s natural history illustration course at the Royal College of Art a year after I left, in 1976 and graduated in 1979, focussing on the Chelsea Physic Garden, it’s history and plants.
Lunch by the Swale
My Letts School-Boys Diary, Friday, 16th July 1965:
Trip. Wore jeans and pullover. Set off 9.10 got to Richmond at 10.45. Had lunch over looking Swale. Went round castle. Guide (1/-) got postcard of Richard III. Trip in Dales made 3 miles longer (?) because of road blockage. Developed film
Perhaps after such a long day I should have left developing the film until later but despite the botched job, I’m pleased 58 years later, to have rescued some images from the negatives.
I haven’t visited the castle since, so I think that it’s time to re-read the guidebook and take another look.
My friend Stefaniw appears, slightly solarised, in one of the photographs. We were in the third form and my diary records that the previous day our O-level subjects were decided:
Am taking Art and Physics with Chemistry. I did seascape in art. Read Beowulf. Gave in Maths and Eng. books.
Stef persuaded Mr Axford to let him take all three sciences.
Did Triffids.
Watched Matterhorn Anniversary Climb, M. from U.N.C.L.E
Thursday 15th July 1965
