Old Rhododendron at Temple Newsam this morning.
Rhododendron
Category: Drawing
King Henry VII Chapel
In June 1977 the Silver Jubilee Days on the Queen’s Official Birthday marked the 25th anniversary of the accession of Queen Elizabeth II on 6 February 1952. Architect and designer Margaret Casson organised a small exhibit ‘The Graven Image’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum and invited me to take part.
In the April of that year I headed to London and decided to give myself a bit of a challenge and I drew the interior of the Chapel of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey.
I found a corner stall and settled down for a long session drawing with dip pen and Pelikan ink (the original drawing is in Pelikan Special Brown).
I hadn’t realised the significance of the rather elaborate end-of-the-row stall that I’d set myself up in.
Guides would come in and point to the ceiling, and their group would look up, suitably impressed; then the tomb of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York (the couple who effectively brought the Middle Ages to a close by uniting the Houses of York and Lancaster) and finally, to bring things up to date, the guide would point to Prince Charles’ seat in the corner . . . the stall where I was sitting, scribbling away. I got some curious looks.
I’m struggling to remember the other items in the ‘Graven Image’ show which was in a corner of the entrance hall to the V&A but as I brought in my framed sketchbook spread, a stone carver staggered in with a large block with a beautifully carved inscription, a suitably graven image.
Snatched Sketches
A couple of quick sketches from this weeks errands and appointments.
Summer Sketchbook
Page layouts for my Summer eBook using a three-column grid in InDesign.
Golden Spire
Golden Spire cooking apple drawn in Pro Create on an iPad Pro using, you guessed it, an Apple Pencil. Music by Peter Ellis.
Summer
The last day of meteorological summer and I’m gathering my sketchbook drawings from the last three months together for an eBook.
I’m experimenting with the eBook option in Adobe InDesign, going for an iPad format. This gives me a more control over the way words and images are presented than I get with my regular blog.
Rather than use a regular typeface, I decided to use the carved lettering on one of the tombstones in Brodsworth Church as my starting point for a title logo.
In true Roman fashion the stone mason used the chiselled ‘V’ that you’d find on a Roman inscription to represent an upper case ‘U’, so I patched one together from the lower half of an ‘O’ and two different capital ‘I’s, keeping the slant he’d used one to fit it into the word ‘AETATIS’ (‘age’).
I imported my title logo into Adobe Illustrator and converted it into three tones using Image Trace, then took that back into Photoshop and replaced the three tones with colours derived from my cover image.
Alder Bark
As I sat drawing this alder at the lakeside at Newmillerdam I felt something drop on my back. An alder cone? No. My shirt needed to go in the wash. Not sure who was responsible but I’m guessing that the wood pigeon is the first one that I need to rule out of my enquiries.
Crayfish in Coxley Beck
The man with the headphones and baseball cap is looking intently down at the stream as we enter Coxley Valley so he doesn’t see us, but his terrier does and gives a yap and a tug on his lead.
“Sorry! I’ve been looking at the crayfish,’ he explains, ‘I’ve seen 8 or 9 of them.’
I’m told that years ago there were crayfish, our native crayfish, the White-clawed, in the beck but with those conspicuous markings on the claws and the size of this one, about 6 inches long, I’m guessing that it’s the introduced American Signal Crayfish, Pacifastacus lenuisculus.
It’s the first we’ve seen, so our thanks to the observant dog walker for pointing it out to us. I’m wondering how the population of bullheads is doing in this stretch. I’ve heard reports of run off from a septic tank finding its way into the stream. Herons still fly down to one of the quieter bends in the stream.
After the dry spell we’ve had the stream was unusually low today.
In the late 1960s friend of mine perfected the art of tickling trout by lying on the bank and reaching down into the spots where they used to rest. I think it was the deeper undercut bank on the outside bend of the stream.
Whitebeam
A whitebeam, berries starting to ripen, in a car park in Normanton.
Alder
They’re restoring the old water mill at Newmillerdam, re-using the flagstone roof tiles, a job that involves a lot of work with power tools so I’ve made my way along the lakeside to draw this multi-stemmed alder.
