Drawing some of our onions with the new Manga vector mapping pen in Adobe Fresco, using an Apple Pencil, iPad Pro and a sketchboard pro drawing board.
Growing through a dry summer and a heatwave, this year’s onions were smaller than the previous year’s – when we had a wetter summer – but they’ve kept better. One hazard last year was that the local foxes liked to pull up a few of the almost tennis ball-sized onions and stash them under the hedge. Thanks to damage by foxes and a wet spell before we lifted them, many of the onions went soft.
Drawing on the iPad Pro on the Sketchboard Pro drawing board
“I’m not surprised she knew,” chips in the other waitress, “She’s always singing. Every day is karaoke here.”
The date and apricot flapjack was good too. It had a hint of bonfire night about it, made with dark brown sugar and, I’m guessing, black treacle.
It’s the one with the line ‘I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee’, which is appropriate because I’m on to my second latté at the Thorncliffe Tasting Room, Emley, while Barbara does a round of the adjoining farm shop for a bag of shopping, including this cauliflower.
This was our first visit to the Tasting Room, although we’d often called at the farm shop but we’ll soon go back there. It’s only six miles from home but it’s another 150 metres in altitude. The panorama included Drax Power Station (currently burning wood pellets sourced from old growth forests in Canada according a recent BBC investigation).
Rough for my Greenhouse Mural, an elaborate identification chart for tropical birds that my tutor John Norris Wood kept in the college greenhouse. Yes, that is the Royal Albert Hall in the background, the Greenhouse straddled two floors at the top of the College’s Kensington Gore building.
Saturday 30 September 1972
We set off at 8.30 or so and whisked down the M.1. to Linnie & Dave’s
My sister Linda and David’s first home in Southall
Where we had lunch before going and putting my things in my room at Evelyn Gardens.
My room on the first floor at 14 Evelyn Gardens, London SW7
Then Shopping – Mother bought a bright Red Trouser Suit.
Sketches from Newmillerdam, Harrogate and Queen Street, Horbury, in my pocket-sized A6 landscape Seawhite Travel Journal. Lamy and TWSBI EcoT pens, De Atramentis ink (a mix of brown and black as both were running out).
Clip Studio Paint on the iPad: experimenting with adding colour.
Screen mirroring in Photoshop: iMac Retina, iPad Pro, Apple Pencil and Sketchboard Pro.
I’m also trying screen mirroring so that if I’m working in, for example, Photoshop on my iMac, and I’ve got something intricate to do, like erasing background texture on a scan of a sketchbook page, I can switch over to working with the Apple Pencil on my iPad.
It would be possible to do a whole drawing this way but with Adobe Fresco, Clip Studio Paint and even a version of Photoshop on the iPad there’s no need to, I can draw directly.
I haven’t noticed any delay when I’m drawing using screen mirroring; the marks appear in real time.
Graphics Pad
For years I’ve used as Wacom Intuos 4 graphics pad for erasing or drawing in Photoshop on the iMac but with the latest Apple operating system, Monterey, Wacom no longer support that model. Working on the iPad should be more flexible, once I’ve learned the ins and outs of it, as I can see the iMac screen on the iPad. The graphics pad was blank, so I got used to drawing on the desktop and seeing the results appear on the iMac.
Beech at Newmillerdam, drawn this morning with the constant accompaniment of cooing wood pigeons and the occasional clatter of a beech nut dropping from the still-green canopy.
