Golden Spire cooking apple drawn in Pro Create on an iPad Pro using, you guessed it, an Apple Pencil. Music by Peter Ellis.
Golden Spire
Category: Drawing
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.
The View from Bettys
The view from Betty’s, Harlow Carr and Farrar’s Palm Court Cafe in Harrogate today.
Marigolds
It’s years since we bought any marigolds but they’re good at spreading their seeds around the garden. We’ll have plenty of seedlings next year at the top end of the border.
Also well able to seed itself around, the Welsh poppy. If it just spread by seed that would suit me but, unlike the marigold, it can establish itself as a perennial, building up deep dandelion-like tap roots and crowding out other flowers.
This heron, preening in a quiet corner at Adel Dam became watchful and alert when first a buzzard and then a sparrowhawk flew overhead.
Handscape
In the waiting room at Specsavers and couldn’t draw anyone without them spotting me so it was back to drawing my hand in my A6 landscape sketchbook.
I was in for micro suction wax removal so I’ve done a few sessions in preparation lying on the sofa with olive oil in my ear. That’s an awkward angle for drawing and I realise that the Paperlike screen protector has lost its texture after eight months of use so my Apple Pencil was slipping about as I drew, so it’s time to renew it using the spare sheet that came in the pack.
I’ve never replaced the drawing tip of my Apple Pencil so that’s something worth trying to give more traction and feedback from the drawing surface.
Ducks and a Danish
Sketching the ducks, cormorant, Canada geese and in-between black-headed gulls, some juveniles, some adults beginning to lose their black heads. We were surprised how few – if any – there were at the black-headed gull colony at St Aidan’s last week. They’d been so noisy in the spring and early summer. Now I guess they’ve dispersed with a hundred or more – perhaps St Aidan’s birds – turning up at Newmillerdam, where they can perch on fallen willows on the quieter bank of the lake and keep an eye out for hand-outs on the war memorial side.
And yes, I might have drawn more of them if I hadn’t been sidetracked by a Danish cinnamon pastry at the Boathouse.
These coots have raised a brood at the nest site I drew last year near in the corner by the outlet of the lake.
Thanks to instant communication, I was able to message my photograph of the Danish pastry to the far end of the lake as a warning to Barbara that I’d got tied up on essential business, however I beat her and her brother back to the car park and had time to draw two of the chimney stacks of the Fox and Hounds, adding the colour later from a photograph.