Category: Drawing

Lemurs, Llamas and Penguins

lemurs

The ring-tailed lemurs at Sewerby Hall were eating the green leaves from bundles of freshly-cut bamboo. One perched, sitting upright, on a log and spread its arms to soak up the sun.

llama

The llamas were also looking relaxed. This one, sitting munching with its companions in its paddock barely opened its eyes as I drew it.

humboldt penguins

The Humboldt penguins were more active, swimming around in their pool, twisting around to preen and scratch themselves.

HUmboldt's penguins

After a few minutes they started making their way out of the pond, heading for a spot in the sun to dry off. Amongst them, Pickle (bottom left), still in her plain grey juvenile plumage. After initial enthusiasm, parents Sigsby and Twinny had started to neglect their incubation duties so the egg was transferred to an incubator and Pickle was hand-reared by head keeper John Pickering and his wife Tracey.

Link

New Humboldt Penguin chick arrives at Sewerby Hall and Gardens

Tomatoes

tomatoes

I promise this is the final instalment in my vegetable trilogy: vine-ripened tomatoes. And these were supermarket grown, although I’m hoping we’ll still have some ripening in the greenhouse into next month.

Red Peppers

sweet peppers

Back to the veg rack for my subject today, red peppers. I did try growing them this year but in our unheated greenhouse they never ripened and we ate them green.

Sweet Potato

sweet potato

Looking rather like grey seals resting on a beach, two sweet potatoes from the veg rack.

Duck Feeders

sketches of people
colour swatches
sketches of people feeding ducks

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.

Green Pepper

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.

Tower Pen handwriting

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’.

green pepper

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.

Back to Bash Street

Back to School

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.

comic strip

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.”

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Categorized as Drawing

Bird Ballet

bird sketches

“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.

bird sketches

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.