Cat’s-ear, Hypochaeris radicata, flowering and going to seed on the front lawn, which I left untrimmed during ‘No Mow May’ but which is now due for strimming.
Cat’s-ear
Category: Drawing
Longest Day
I find a quiet bench by St James’ Hospital’s historic workhouse chapel and settle down to draw the cherry tree but get distracted as two town pigeons bustle past me inspecting the turf.
A crow chases a scrawny-tailed squirrel across pedestrian crossing, up a couple of steps and behind a low wall towards birches.
On the artfully boulder-strewn roundabout a blackbird gathers beak-fulls of worms. After a long dry spell, yesterday’s persistent rain must have brought them to the surface again.
The grand Victorian architecture around the hospital attracts me but I prefer to draw something organic. There was a breeze blowing around the cherry tree leaves so, returning after a break, I draw its trunk and the sandstone block next to it.
One of the crows finds an acorn-sized brown object, which immediately interests a second crow which follows it around until the item is either eaten or discarded.
Cat’s ear, self-heal, white clover and daisy grow on the lawn, although the much larger ox-eye daisy, or marguerite, that I drew was in a flower border, alongside berginia.
We have a brief shower in the afternoon, so I head for the church. The multi-coloured round-topped arch looks more byzantine than romanesque to me. There’s another similar arch above it with a balcony overlooking the chancel. As this was a workhouse chapel, I did wonder if anyone with an infectious disease would be put up there but it’s probably more likely that it was originally an organ loft.
Olympus OM-D E-M10 II
I’ve had my Olympus E-M10 for seven years but I think this is the first time it’s been to Europe, unfortunately I didn’t go with it. Thank you to Miguel Teixeira in Portugal for repairing the viewfinder and flip-up display, as well as checking it over, cleaning it and updating the firmware (something that I tried repeatedly to do but which never worked for me).
I’m now making efforts to relearn what all those dials and function buttons are capable of and particularly to improve my macro photography by at last working out how to use the focus-bracketing function.
Whelk Egg Cases
Whelks gather together for a mass spawning, so each of these egg cases was added by a different individual. Each case can contain 1,000 eggs but the first few to hatch will feed on the remaining eggs.
I photographed this egg mass on the beach at Druridge Bay and used a handy feature of Procreate, a reference image panel, when I drew it using Procreate’s ‘Technical Pen’.
Back Garden Kills
A song thrush has been catching garden snails in our garden and next door, using our patio and next door’s garden path as an anvil to smash the shell.
Down between the veg beds from a couple of days ago, wood pigeon feathers from a sparrowhawk kill. Three of the larger feathers that I found had a small scar around the quills where the sparrowhawk had twisted out the feather in its beak.
We saw a group of house sparrows gathered around and one flew off with a white downy feather as nesting material.
Chairs
The view from the waiting room is of a blank pebble-dashed wall, so I get another chance to practice drawing chairs. The blue chair was drawn using my usual method, lifting my hand from the paper frequently to check proportion and having a couple of goes at a line where necessary. The red chairs were drawn (almost) without lifting my pen from the paper. The disadvantage of this method is that for most of the time most of the drawing is covered, but I do like the wayward wobbly line that this results in.
Pelargonium
After a year, our zonal pelargonium is beginning to look a bit leggy.
Drawn in Procreate on the iPad using the Tinderbox virtual pen from the Inking section. Having got through all three of my PenTips 2 soft Apple Pencil tips, I’m now back to a plain Apple Pencil tip but the canvas texture of the PenTips Magnetic Matte Screenprotector is working well for me, an improvement on drawing on the iPad’s glass screen.
Stitched Up
I struggled to identify this flower, photographed with my iPhone as we walked around Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust’s Idle Valley reserve a couple of weeks ago. I think what’s happened is that greater stitchwort flowers are growing up amongst the foliage of some kind of cranesbill.
It was drawn in Procreate on the iPad but if I’d been drawing from the actual plant in my sketchbook I might have realised that they’d got mixed up.
Unless you can suggest the identity of a plant with stitchwort-type flowers and cranesbill-style leaves?
Horbury, 1964
I took this photograph of Horbury St Peter’s Church in 1964. That’s Ingham’s upholstery workshop and hardware store on the left. The advertisement was for Royal hardboard. I’ve colourised this photograph and the yellow and blue are as I remember them (but possibly not as they actually were).
I was using an Ilford Sprite 127mm camera and developing my own film at the time. This proved to be such a disaster that it’s only now, sixty years later, that, using my scanner and Adobe Photoshop, I can salvage images from the scratched, uneven home-developing disaster.
Dipping into the envelope of negatives is like opening a time capsule. Some of the locations I’m having difficulty recognising.
Not this one though which is Horbury Town Hall, which still looks very much like this today.
Trip to Leeds
Sycamores, bus passengers, limestone pavement and a glacial overflow channel at Newtondale, all drawn on a trip to Leeds (but two were from photographic murals in hospital waiting rooms, a change from drawing chairs for me).
Newtondale
Limestone pavement
Bus folk