This polypody fern is growing as an epiphyte on a crooked old hawthorn on by the nature trail at the National Coal Mining Museum, Caphouse Colliery. Epiphyte is simply a plant that grows on another plant: the fern isn’t parasitic on the hawthorn. This reminds me of the mysterious Wistman’s Wood on Dartmoor where old stunted oaks grow up amongst massive tumbled slabs of granite and every surface, rock and tree, is covered with moss, lichen and fern. This is on a much smaller scale of course but it has the advantage for me that its just a couple of miles up the road.
As I shelter under an umbrella, I realise that to draw all the pinnate indentations on each leaf is going to take me a lot longer than the time that I’ve allowed, so I outline all the fronds and decide to come back another day to complete the drawing and add some colour.
From molehills to mountains: the moors on the tops of the Pennines are still covered with snow. We returned to Charlotte’s Ice Cream parlour at Whitely this morning, a regular coffee stop in the days when we had my mum in tow. It was often the one day of the week that she got out and, despite her deteriorating eyesight, she always appreciated the panorama . . . and of course the coffee and the scone.
At one time I always carried some kind of of fibre tip pen with me, such as a Pilot Drawing Pen, but these days it’s just my three Lamy fountain pens – an AL-Star, a Safari and a Vista – with fine, extra fine and broad nibs. Fibre tips offer a degree of precision and convenience, until they start to dry up, but I find that a fountain pen feels more natural.
Vista
Extra fine nib
For natural history drawing, I usually go for my Lamy Vista with an extra fine nib which I keep filled with Noodler’s brown ink. Noodler’s becomes waterproof on contact with the cellulose in paper so I can add a watercolour wash. This gives a similar effect to a dip pen and Indian ink plus watercolour but a fountain pen is easier to work with as there’s no bottle of ink to either hold on to or to risk knocking over.
Lamy Vista
The Vista is a transparent version of the Safari so it’s even easier to check that the filler in the pen has enough ink in it when I set off to draw. At the moment this pen is filled with a mixture of Noodler’s black and El Lawrence brown (a kind of khaki, desert brown, named in honour of Lawrence of Arabia), because I had two half empty bottles and it’s easier to fill the pen from a full bottle. The black/brown mix reminds me of Pelikan Special Brown indian ink which I used for many years.
AL-Star
I keep the AL-Star, the aluminium version of the Safari, filled with black Noodler’s ink. This pen is fitted with a fine nib.
Safari
Lamy Safari with Z24 converter and broad nib, filled with Noodler’s Black ink.
For bolder drawing I’ve got a bright yellow Safari (difficult to lose) with a broad nib. This is the freest flowing of the three pens and the larger, rounded tip, as seen in my photograph taken with a microscope, enables it to glide across the paper.
2.25 p.m., 43ºF, 8ºC, still and sunny: I spotted this ash stump growing on an old stone embankment wall when we visited the Go Outdoors store, Middlestown, yesterday. I’d gone looking for grippy gloves because the welt on the fingerless mittens that I’ve been using gets uncomfortable if you’re drawing for a while. My knuckles have been getting red and raw, drawing when it’s close to freezing.
I found the various gloves with gripper pads a bit cumbersome but we spotted some in pure silk which aren’t the warmest available as they’re mainly intended as lining gloves but they’re better than having exposed fingers. It’s easy to grip pen, water-brush and paintbox.
I found myself rushing to complete my drawing of Caphouse Beck yesterday so, today, when I sketch the rabbit which suddenly runs up the grassy bank and check my watch to record the time, I decide that I should allow myself more time so I’ll return tomorrow to finish off and add colour.
10.30 a.m., 44ºF, 6ºC: Robin and song thrush are singing in the wood; other than that the soundtrack as I’m drawing is the wind in the willows, the patter of rain on my umbrella and the rippling of water over a gravelly bend of Coxley beck. The shower passes so that I’m able to discard the umbrella when it comes to adding the watercolour. That makes the process a whole lot easier.
I call this bend in the beck Willow Island but it’s only after heavy rain that this overgrown side channel fills with water. Wellies are essential when I’m drawing here as I have to wade along a 20 yard stretch of the beck. I proceed with caution as on one constricted bend the stream has scoured out a channel that looks more than wellie deep.
4 p.m., 43ºF, 8ºC: Two herons touch down at the far side of the flood lagoon on the Strands. There’s an indignant ‘kirrack!’ from one of them. A cormorant flies high over the river. Cormorants prefer the river or the canal for fishing; perhaps the lagoon is too shallow for them to dive in. Three coots forage together on this side channel.
The low afternoon sun gives a warm glow to dry grasses and bare willows. When it drops behind a cloud, the glowing grasses instantly switch to dark silhouette and of course the reflections in the water change instantly too.
After forty minutes drawing I start striding back home along the towpath, timing myself as I go; just fifteen minutes from wilderness and wet to our front door.
A song thrush sings strikingly from the canal-side trees. Strikingly, but you couldn’t describe his varied, thrice-repeated improvisations as melodious.
I like the extra fine nib Lamy pen filled with brown ink for detailed natural history drawings but this afternoon, as I set off in a wintry shower to draw this willow by the canal, I find the bold nib and black ink more useful. Shower over, the tree goes into high contrast, backlit by the sun, so it’s useful to be able to quickly build up tone in the shadow areas, following the pattern of the bark with quick pen lines.
As you can see from my photograph, the bold nib (in the yellow pen on the left) has a rounded end which moves easily in any direction over the cartridge paper of my sketchbook. Being larger, it is freer flowing, giving an satisfyingly inky line.
‘the twisted gorse on the cliff edge, twigs, like snakes, lying on the path, the bare rock, worn and showing though the path, heath hits, gorse burnt and blackened, the high overhanging hedges by the steep roads, which pinch the setting sun, mantling clouds, and the thunder, the deep green valleys and the rounded hills – and the whole structure simple and complex.’
Graham Sutherland, Notes by the Artist, Tate Gallery, March 1953
On a walk alongside the hedge banks near the Pembrokeshire coast, Graham Sutherland came across a gap in the hedge that particularly appealed to him.
‘I may have noticed a certain juxtaposition of forms at the side of a road, but on passing the same place next time, I might look for them in vain. It was only at the original moment of seeing that they had significance for me.’
‘If at first I attempted to make pictures here on the spot,’ he recalled, ‘I soon gave this up . . . I found that I could express what I felt only by paraphrasing what I saw.’
3.30 p.m., 7ºC, 45ºF; For my hole in the hedge, on a showery afternoon, I go to the trouble of setting up my pop-up tent at the end of the garden. A robin hops into the hedge seven feet away from my and eyes me suspiciously. Perhaps because I’m so used to watching birds through the double-glazing of the patio doors, its colour seems more vivid at close range.
Also eyeing me suspiciously is the cock pheasant who strolls through the meadow, pauses at the hole in the hedge and decides that he’ll give me a wide berth.
Link: Paintings and Drawings by Graham Sutherland, Tate Gallery. In his statement, I wonder what Sutherland meant by ‘heath hits’. Perhaps a typo. In the context, I assumed that ‘steep rods’ should have read ‘steep roads’.
A walk around Newmillerdam Country Park Lake, Christmas Eve, 2015
Two years ago, as the run up to Christmas started, I decided that, however busy I was, I should be capable of doing a drawing from nature every day. Arming myself with a new Holly Green sketchbook, on some days I might give myself thirty minutes in the garden to draw, at other times I’d resort to drawing from a photograph that I’d taken on my travels. This minor daily challenge generated plenty of material when I came to write my monthly nature diary for the Dalesman magazine.
A year later, at the beginning of December 2015, having just reached the end of a sketchbook, I decided to try the same thing again and I started a new A5 landscape format Pink Pig spiral bound sketchbook with a grey cover. This time it hasn’t been so much of a success.
We’ve been out walking a lot but drawing from photographs taken on our travels can be a slow process, so I soon ended up with gaps that I intended to fill in later. There’s no way that I can now go back and fill in all the blank pages that I left in so I’ve loaded the bits and pieces of drawings and notes that I did manage to do in a couple of galleries for December and for January (see links below).
Texel Ewe
‘I do not seem to be able to go into the country for a long enough time to do a sufficient amount of sketching . . . ‘
That might sound like me moaning but it was Beatrix Potter writing to her friend Mrs Carr on New Year’s Day 1911. I thought of Beatrix Potter when I was drawing the Texel sheep at Cannon Hall Farm Park on 21 January. The ewes had been gathered together in a shelter prior to lambing which was due to start two or three weeks later.
Beatrix used the royalties from the sales of her children’s books to buy Hill Top Farm at Near Sawrey in the Lake District. She became something of an expert in keeping Herdwick sheep and impressed the local shepherds with her drawings of them. She once asked her shepherd to save her the head of a still-born lamb and to skin it for her. The shepherd found her drawing it, with the head propped on a wall.
Sun Spurge
I’m reading Linda Lear’s Beatrix Potter, A Life in Nature, which I came to because I’ve been reading a lot about botany, botanical illustration and, in particular, the history of Kew Gardens. As in previous years, I’m hoping to be up to speed on botany when spring arrives. During this mild winter that hasn’t presented much of a problem. I found two species of spurge growing as weeds in the greenhouse. Common ragwort has stayed in flower throughout the winter.
I wouldn’t abandon my tried and tested brown ink plus watercolour which I started using on a field trip in my student days, which I think was partly due to seeing an exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks in the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace. Sepia is dark enough to give definition without being as stark as a punchy black.
But I’m aware that I ought to keep varying my approach which is why there are pencil and watercolour drawings and, in a few cases, areas worked up in watercolour only, like the Texel sheep’s fleece.
I went for my Lamy Safari with the broad nib for these oak leaves and, although I originally intended to add colour to the olive branch, just for a change, I’ve left it as a line drawing.
I’ve tried all three of my Lamy Safari pens – fine, extra fine and broad – on the 200 gsm acid free paper of my new sketchbook, a pocket-sized Derwent Black Journal, and the one that works best is the Lamy AL-star with the fine nib.
With a Bijou box of Winsor & Newton professional watercolours and a Kuretake water-brush, that’s all I need for my everyday drawing.
This is the sketchbook that I’ll use when I have the odd few minutes, such as before the Nat’s meeting starts or as we’re waiting for the train to set off.
I started off feeling that I should be bold in my sketches but the broad nibbed pen seems out of scale for the size of the page and the absorbent texture of the paper.
I can struggle even when I’m drawing the simplest chair. I started on a small scale as I drew the back of the chair then when I got down to the detail of the legs I found that I couldn’t fit them in. With a finer pen I could have incorporated the detail into the space available.
After the Flood
In mid-January we spent a day in York, which was still in the early stages of recovering from the Boxing Day floods. Crossing the flood plain between Church Fenton and York was like sailing across a lake. Mute swans and ducks had gathered on the downstream bay of the temporary lagoon to the south of the railway.
We walked half the circuit of the medieval walls but decided to leave the full tour until the weather and the paving stones dry up a bit.
It’s the first time that we’ve had lunch at the Georgian Assembly Rooms, now an Ask Italian, where I briefly sketched the plaster bas relief of a harp-playing putto riding on a lion. It’s worth coming back in the evening to see the place candlelit, the waitress told us.
As we walked out of the double glass doors of the Fenwick’s department store, opposite the Merchant Venturer’s Hall, at the Coppergate Centre, we were able to help a woman shopper who was trying to persuade a dunnock to leave. Whichever of the doors she held open, it flew to the closed one and fluttered against the glass, so with Barbara on one door and the woman on the other, I acted as beater and stalked around the stairs to guide it out onto York’s Piccadilly.
Poinsettia
I drew the banana and poinsettia on a visit to Barbara’s brother’s. I decided that on this paper the brown Noodler’s ink didn’t seem crisp enough, probably because the paper is that bit more absorbent than the cartridge that I’m used to in my regular Pink Pig sketchbooks.
So I’ve come around to using my Lamy AL-Star with the fine nib, loaded with black Noodler’s ink. Whenever I have time, I like to add some suggestion of colour. I did have doubts that I’d be able to mix the grey of Barbara’s bag because of the way the colour picks up reflected light indoors but, when I got the sketch back into a good light, I found that I wasn’t so far out with my colour matching.
In daylight the bag takes on a neutral grey cast.
Crayons
On a walk through powdery snow at Langsett last week I didn’t bother taking my watercolours but, just in case, I put a credit card-sized wallet of children’s crayons in my pocket.
Not the ideal range of colours but better than nothing for giving a suggestion when I drew a bent-wood chair at the Bank View Cafe.
This polypody fern is growing as an epiphyte on a crooked old hawthorn on by the nature trail at the National Coal Mining Museum, Caphouse Colliery. Epiphyte is simply a plant that grows on another plant: the fern isn’t parasitic on the hawthorn. This reminds me of the mysterious Wistman’s Wood on Dartmoor where old stunted oaks grow up amongst massive tumbled slabs of granite and every surface, rock and tree, is covered with moss, lichen and fern. This is on a much smaller scale of course but it has the advantage for me that its just a couple of miles up the road.
3.30 p.m., 7ºC, 45ºF; For my hole in the hedge, on a showery afternoon, I go to the trouble of setting up my pop-up tent at the end of the garden. A robin hops into the hedge seven feet away from my and eyes me suspiciously. Perhaps because I’m so used to watching birds through the double-glazing of the patio doors, its colour seems more vivid at close range.
