Category: Drawing

Fan Palm

Fan palmThe fan palms weren’t looking bedraggled after recent heavy frosts. It wasn’t a promising morning for the crazy golf at Pirate Island, Outlet Village, Castleford, where these temperate climate palms have been planted. The attendants were checking out the course, using one of the log raft bridges across the water hazard to break the ice.

After two or three hours in Middle Earth watching the last instalment of The Hobbit, I did a quick sketch of these owls on display by the climbing wall at Xscape. £3 to hold a bird of prey, £2 for a reptiles.

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Categorized as Drawing

Just Visiting

trainerWe’re helping out with a short spell of visiting and I could spend a couple of hours reading or writing or drawing from a photograph but I’d rather not cut myself off entirely from what is going on around me so I do what I usually do; start drawing whatever I can find of interest around me.

As I’ve drawn my hands a couple of times on similar occasions, I go for the only other organic subject that I can find; my feet.

The blurb on the box suggested that these trainers are urbane and understated enough to wear when you’re out for a coffee but with their rugged tread and Goretex lining they’re ready should you suddenly find yourself invited to join an adventurous trek across the moors.

trainerHow could I resist! That fits my demographic perfectly.

Art Journalling

sketchbooks
Sketchbooks that I’ve been working on this year. You can imagine the pile that has accumulated over the past half century of my work!

“What have you gotten out of a life time of journaling?” 

Writing my ‘Wild Yorkshire’ nature diary for the Yorkshire Dalesman has meant looking back over the past 16 years of my sketchbooks and blog. It’s been a chance to review my work and to think about where I’d like to take it next.

Since my first online post on 4 October 1998 here’s been a gradual evolution, starting with a simple, sketchy format based on a nature journal that I kept in the mid-1990s. This became more ambitious and when I met art journallers Danny Gregory and Dan Price, I felt that I wanted to go a step further and put a lot more effort into my drawing.

Under the influence of the two Dans I went drawing mad and some of my favourite pages date from that period unfortunately they don’t work for my Dalesman unless they also tell a story. However evocative the drawing, a mossy stump on its own isn’t enough for my Wild Yorkshire column; I need a stoat rummaging around in its nooks and crannies to bring the scene to life.

I’m now trying to combine more ambitious drawings with stories that might hook the reader in.

Problems with People

people in IkeaAlthough I describe myself as a wildlife illustrator, riffling through those old sketchbooks I found that I liked some of the drawings that made me smile were of people in everyday situations, for instance the shoppers queuing up at the cafe in Ikea. I would like to draw more people but as I post everything online I feel that there’s a privacy issue! I can say what I like about the aggressive mistle thrush that this week has been bullying the blackbirds so that it can have the crab apple tree to itself, but you can’t write stories like that about family and friends, fun though that might be!

“Can an artist have shaky hands?” 

I’ve been reflecting on my work today as Danny Gregory has been interviewing for a feature that he’s planning to run on the Sketchbook Skool. He wanted to examine the issues that I raised in a post a couple of months ago about dealing with shaky hands, not looking at that particular condition but considering how apparent limitations – such as a physical disability or living in a less than inspiring neighbourhood – can spur creative innovation.

I commented that I’d love to have perfect vision – colour, high definition etc – but we all have to learn to live with the hand we’ve been dealt.

My books in print
My current books in print.

In discussion I concluded that the shaky hands and my partial red/green colour blindness hadn’t done me a lot of harm as I’ve been able to do the kind of work I love doing throughout my career.

Link; Sketchbook Skool

Danny Gregory

Dan Price

Willow Island Editions, my publishing imprint.

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Categorized as Drawing

Be a Tree

crab apple4.55 pm; Blackbirds are alarming as the gloom of sunset fades out the remaining colour in our back garden. Not that we can see the sun setting; it’s remained cloudy with varying degrees of gloom all day.

In contrast to the twilight mood, the golden hornet crab apple by the pond is bubbling with pale yellow fruits, festooned with golden baubles.

In movement and dance, school children are asked to be a tree. What kind of tree would you be if you decided to be an autumnal golden hornet?

Although it is stretching to the skies in classic tree-mime fashion, those awkwardly bent limbs suggest that it might be attempting to support the firmament – like the Viking cosmic tree – rather than reaching for the sky in hopeful supplication.

A couple of broken paving slabs that I’ve leant against the raised bed give the impression in my sketch that the crab might have used those scraggly limbs to scrabble and scrooge up from an underground lair, like Mole in The Wind in the Willows.

Dripped in Ink

sketchbook and notebookDrawn, or rather dripped, in bamboo pen using Daler-Rowney Calli waterproof ink, the drawing is so blotty that it will take days to dry, so I’m photographing it rather than laying it on the scanner. And thank goodness I didn’t use my regular sketchbook and put that out of action.

As I got inky fingers opening the bottle, I thumbprinted the basic shape of the main stem on the blank page before I started the drawing. I decided that might take away the some of the scariness of the blank white sheet while working against the clock.

I started at at five to four and called it a day after fifteen minutes.

Drawn by Hand

hand

albumLooking back on the black and white album that I put together for a Facebook challenge, I’m surprised how much I managed to do over a 5 day period, just setting myself the achievable goal of posting five black and white photographs a day.

My thanks to John Welding for suggesting the challenge. It came just at the right time and got Barbara and I out and looking at things in a different way. The weather wasn’t sparkling but the couple of days since have been even more damp and dismal.

‘November seems ideal for black and white.’ says John, ‘Grey, misty. Tonal.’

Yes, I always think of warm autumn colours but colour is so seductive that I neglect the tonal values that could give an image some structure.

handI’d like to try a similar thing with short sessions focussed on taking shots of animals or making widescreen movies about a particular place. It’s made me dig out the manual for my FujiFilm FinePix S6800 bridge camera.

But it’s back to pen and ink and watercolours and writing now, including these two hands drawn in waiting rooms yesterday.

‘You’re passing the time by doodling!’ quipped a passing physio.

Doodling? Hmm!

 

Caphouse Nature Trail

  • Canker.

Photographed this morning on the nature trail at the National Coal Mining Museum for England, Caphouse Colliery, Overton, West Yorkshire.

Just my Bag

mantaray bag

I dream about drawing, literally; in one dream I was looking through a booklet thinking these drawings look like mine but I don’t remember doing them and is that really my signature?

In another dream I was trying to find a space in a busy workshop to continue work on a rough splodgy oil painting.

mantaray bagIt’s my subconscious reminding me – as if I needed reminding – how frustrated I’m feeling because of my current enforced break from creative work.

tree tops

foliageTo make things as simple as possible I wanted a discrete still life kind of object; not my hand which is my usual subject when I’m stuck for anything else to draw and not, for instance, a tree, attractive as the autumn colour is just now, which raises the issue of simplifying the foliage.

I wanted something with a definite outline and simple interlocking shapes. And, heavens to Betsy, what’s this, yep, the A5 art bag that I take everywhere with me.

mantaray bagI was drawing this in subdued light and picked up the purple crayon instead of the black, but I like the high colour key that gives the drawing.

mantaray bag
I’m  getting on with this new pen, a Uni-ball Signo Gel Grip, which is free flowing but, unlike the liquid ink pens that I normally prefer, it doesn’t bleed through the absorbent paper of my current sketchbook.

gel penEach of the bag drawings took between half an hour to an hour, drawn while Barbara was catching up on episodes The Great British Bake-off Masterclass, which makes reassuringly homely background viewing.

satchelA hour is about right for getting involved in drawing a bag. I didn’t have as long when I drew this green satchel the other day. But that’s not my bag.

Links; a larger version of a Mantaray bag, as sold by Debenhams. I like the idea that for each Mantaray bag sold a donation goes to the British Marine Conservation Society.

Uni-ball Signo Gel Grip by Mitsubishi

Bike-wreck

bikehandA wrecked bike, just the sort of thing I’d expect to come across on a walk through the woods on the edge of a city but this, I have to admit, was drawn from a photograph hanging in a corridor that I was waiting in.

The photographer wasn’t credited.

tree topsAt least I got the chance to draw these tree-tops from a third floor window the other day.

 scones and Danish pastriesMy glimpses of the natural world might be through photographs or through windows but I shouldn’t complain as I am getting to spend a lot of time in my other favourite habitats recently; cafes and coffee shops.
chair

Small Pleasures

costa coffee‘If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.’

John Cage

ficus leavesLife has been such a series of unfortunate events recently but I’ve so enjoyed a short pause drawing whatever object came to hand.

With no chance of getting out to draw the autumn colours, I settled for the evergreen branch of an artificial ficus mugbenjamina in a waiting room.

But I find it a fun to just draw my cup. Even the disposable cups in the hospital cafe have a certain charm when you stop to look at the them for John Cage’s suggested eight or sixteen minutes.

In a Nutshell

nutcrackers
walnutI’m getting better with the nutcrackers. The walnuts are from one of Clive Simms’ trees, from his orchard near Peterborough and they break open more easily than the rock-solid walnuts that I remember attempting before.

Clive, who I remember from school days, is something of an authority on growing fruit and nuts trees and he modelled his Nutshell guides (no longer in print) on my little local booklets and the bestselling Grandma’s Guide to the Internet which my sister and I put together inspired by my mum’s attempts to get online in the late 1990s (no longer in print either).

The ‘Squirrel-proof’ Nut Tree

walnuts‘I’m currently having my annual battle with the grey squirrels as to who gets the lion’s share of the walnuts from the tree in our garden.’ Clive tells me, ‘I ‘squirrel proofed’ the tree with old litho plates on the trunk (see Nutshell Guide for details) last week before leaving for a short holiday inYorkshire just as the nuts began to fall. I returned to a scene of carnage with broken shells and husks everywhere… the squirrels were certainly enjoying themselves and had even recruited the local crows to add to the mayhem.

‘Fortunately a neighbour who looks after the place when we’re away collected a lot of the fallen nuts and I’ve collected as many as I can since I returned. The recent stormy weather brings down most of the crop in one huge deluge of nuts and after collection I dry them on newspaper spread over the floor of the house. Having under-floor heating helps a lot!’

‘Fresh ‘wet’ walnuts taste very different to the more mature dried ones, being much lighter in colour and sweeter in taste. However, eating them too early, almost as they fall, isn’t always appreciated by everyone as they can be a little astringent.’

Fruit Bowl Sketches

bananas lemonA ballpoint pen wouldn’t be my first choice for a drawing but, as I’ve explained before, I’ve struggled to find something that doesn’t go through the absorbent paper of my current sketchbook.

orangeCataloging my old sketchbooks, I’ve been reminded that in the early 1980s, when I did a lot of travelling and commuting, I found a particular make of black ballpoint pen useful.

Link; Clive Simms, talks and courses

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Categorized as Drawing, Food