There isn’t time to add colour when drawing passers-by and when I start writing notes it soon gets a bit complicated. ‘B’, for instance, could stand for blue, black or brown.
I’ve used the colour printer’s CMYK – cyan, magenta, yellow and ‘key’ colour, which is usually black.
A capital letter indicates a strong or darker colour, lower case a paler version, so my ‘gB’ is supposed to indicate blue with a touch of green in it.
I’ve drawn ducks, pond life, trees and flowers at Newmillerdam, so I thought that it was about time that I turned my attention to the people visiting the country park.
These guys weren’t actually feeding the ducks, just taking a break on a bench by the war memorial.
I’m drawing this with a scratchy dip pen with an F. Collins & Co. Tower Pen brass nib, made in Manchester. The elegant pen holder, which I bought in France, has a satisfyingly robust brass ferule at the business end and a dangerously sharp point at the end that is nearest your eye.
I’m using Rohrer’s Black which, of course, isn’t as free-flowing as the inks that I use in my Lamy fountain pens but it has a dense ‘inky blackness’.
It felt awkward drawing the pepper, as if I was drawing everything overhand. Perhaps if I’d been drawing it facing the other way, the curves would have felt more natural to draw: they might have sloped more naturally, like the slope of cursive handwriting.
Home-grown
But the scratchy line suited the wayward growth of the plant. I grew it from the seeds of a pepper from the supermarket, using our own home-made compost.
We’ve had only two peppers and we’ve used them green as they were showing no sign of turning yellow or red. They’re not as fleshy as the supermarket variety, but they’ve got more of a fresh crunch to them.
We grew peppers last year from seeds that a neighbour gave us. This year’s have a better flavour: last year’s were rather bitter, perhaps because of the weather or the variety.
Florence celebrated her birthday and moved up from Woodland School to Primary a few weeks ago, so my card was a tribute to Leo Baxendale and David Sutherland of the Bash Street Kids comic strip in the Beano. One of the highlights for me of V&A at Dundee was the original artwork for a Bash Street spread.
Florence moved up schools but sadly that’s not the case for schoolgirls in Afghanistan as secondary schools are not strictly male pupils and staff only.
“I am so worried about my future,” said one Afghan schoolgirl who had hoped to be a lawyer.
“Everything looks very dark. Every day I wake up and ask myself why I am alive? Should I stay at home and wait for someone to knock on the door and ask me to marry him? Is this the purpose of being a woman?”
Speaking to the BBC, her father said: “My mother was illiterate, and my father constantly bullied her and called her an idiot. I didn’t want my daughter to become like my mum.”
“Are they keeping still for you?” asks a passing dog-walker.
“Whenever you draw a duck, if you start when it’s facing that way, it turns the other way.”
Down at the duck pond in Thornes Park and what I really need to draw are Canada geese and swans but there are none about so I draw these balletic gulls and preening ducks.
All the work that I’ve been doing on animated cartoons makes me more aware of character and movement in birds, particularly ducks, but I realise that black-headed gulls and town pigeons could equally well have a cartoon to themselves.
Much as we like our homemade bread it doesn’t keep long at this time of year so while the wood pigeon tucked into that (see the greatest hits from of the 103 selfies it took of itself on my new trail cam in my next post), we enjoyed the roast Mediterranean veg sandwich at the Cafe Capri.
The storks in their natural habitat
While we’re in Horbury, we check out my Addingford display in the Redbox Gallery in the old telephone box on Queen Street. I’m pleased that the foamboard artwork isn’t buckling too much under the summer sun and that I can see the Addingford Steps artwork and map so well on the back wall, then I realise that the reason that I can see them is because the two stork cut-outs, suspended on fishing line, have fallen down behind Joby’s riverbank.
I’ll reinstate them, but I’ll draw the birds again at half the size, so they don’t blot out the display at they did previously.
Out of the goose feather quills that I’ve cut, my favourite is the thinnest and most flexible, so it’s quite suited to the curvy shapes of ducks, willow branches and alder leaves, drawn this from a fishing platform at Newmillerdam.
But it isn’t practical for field work because the ink goes on so thickly that I can’t close the sketchbook. Over three hours later I’ve put it on the scanner and blots of ink have stuck to the glass.
Even carrying back my open sketchbook I managed to leave my thumbprint on the wet ink of the drawing. It’s part of what makes drawing with a quill more spontaneous than drawing with my usual fountain pen, but for field sketches, that’s what I’ll be going back to.
Just harvested half a row – that’s two or three feet across our raised beds – of Maris Peer second early potatoes and decided they’d be a suitable subject for attempting to draw with a Canada goose quill.
I tried using the feathered end of one of the quills to add the wash. This is Noodler’s Black Ink.
I’ve been reading books on Hokusai and Quentin Blake, who was one of the tutors during my time on the Illustration course at the Royal College of Art. Birds feature a lot in Blake’s work and he’ll sometimes use a feather to draw and paint with.
