Category: Drawing

Addingford, 10.30 am: A male reed bunting flits into a hawthorn bush by a pond between the canal and the river, flashing its white tail bars.

Wintering duck have now moved on but a single drake goosander makes its way down the river, diving occasionally as it goes. Later we see a female heading up river.

Swans often nest on the quieter side of the canal but this year a pair have built an island nest on a tennis court-sized pond by the Strands. They’ve built up the nest platform from the dried stems of reedmace, which is now bursting into fluffy masses of downy seed. Slender willows along the banks are dotted with pale catkins.

A pair of grey wagtails bob about on a flooded corner of the The Strands.

I could go on adding details (or start again and try to get nearer the actual proportions!) but there’s enough to evoke John Carr’s spire in my recycled materials model for the Redbox Gallery show.

Think of this as being more stage set – well a stage set for a stop action animation perhaps – rather than architectural model.

I’ve given my cut-out version of the Beechey portrait of Carr a bit of a Pop-Art makeover in Adobe Illustrator.

Continuing on the theme of using found materials, I’ve cut up a garden cane and a piece of left-over dowel that I’d used for stirring paint to make the pillars supporting the spire for my model of St Peter’s Church tower.

Another exercise in not lifting the pen from the paper as I draw. Colour and negative colour added in Photoshop.