Sketches from our lunch stop at the Rose Cottage Tea Rooms, Castleton, yesterday.
The Whodunnit Reader
Category: Drawing
Bird Ballet
“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.
Browning Trail Camera
We’ve been leaving our new trail cam, the Browning Strike Force Pro XD, at the end of our garden, strapped to the compost bins.
Not much to report from last night apart from the usual dunnocks, house sparrows and a juvenile blackbrd.
Rain seems to be enough to put off foxes from wandering around our garden, but we caught one on camera yesterday at quarter past four in the morning.
What appears to be the same fox had wandered through a few hours earlier, at 11.30 p.m.
Lakeside Haiku
Drake mallard dabbles and preens on the willow bough A soft feather drifts
This morning at the lakeside at Newmillerdam I’m trying a haiku.
I made three pages of notes, then went for the main observations that appealed to me, fitting them into the three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables.
Horbury High Street
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.
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.
Goose Feather
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.
Maris Peer
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.
Small White
Small white butterflies fluttering around a patch of lavender. Small whites have two spots on each forewing but in males, as in my sketch, the second spot can be indistinct.
Plain Portraits
After my woodcut experiment in Adobe Illustrator, l’ve gone for more of a lithographic effect for these portraits, simplifying the tones in my original pen and wash drawings into ragged-edged blocks. You don’t get the texture of the original watercolour wash but it’s implied in those irregular edges.
This is Liz White in character as Fiona Grayson in Chris Lang’s ITV crime drama Unforgotten, drawn from a photograph in the Radio Times in March.
George Stephenson
It can be disappointing if you’ve painted a subtle watercolour and the nuances are lost on the printed page. A reduced tonal range might make for a more successful printed image. I’ll have to try it.
George Stephenson was all set to have a walk-on part in my current Addingford show at the Redbox Gallery, Horbury, but he was upstaged by Stan Barstow’s Joby, so perhaps I can use him in a print publication, looking suitably robust in the Image Trace treatment that I’ve given him in Illustrator.
Hepworth
I’m considering printing the series I drew of Wakefield Women in History and the graphic feel would work well as I’m trying to keep the subject brisk and lively, rather than making it archival and authoritative, like an illustrated Dictionary of National Biography.
Dame Mary Bolles
Another Wakefield Woman in History, Dame Mary Bolles, the formidable Stuart-era lady of Heath Old Hall, also lends herself to this treatment. It’s easy for me to go for too much detail in a historical costume but what I want in this series is to sum up remarkable lives in broad brushstrokes.
Woodcut
These are my sketches from the weekend given the Image Trace treatment in the desktop version of Adobe Illustrator as I was after a lino-cut or woodcut effect. It gives my pen and watercolour natural form a graphic chunkiness.
So how about the grapevine I drew yesterday? Would lend itself to the sort of woodcut-inspired design that you see on a wine label? No, it doesn’t have the graphic presence of the bluebell stem, I’d need to draw it again with the context of the design in mind and make it a bit bolder.
This wood pigeon feather works better as it’s a simpler form. I could imagine using it for a logo.