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.
For today’s scene for Horbury Pageant Players’ production Sleeping Beauty we’re painting twin curtains to frame a star-cloth background. It reminds me of Spike Milligan’s sketch that begins: ‘The curtains were drawn, but the rest of the room was real . . .’
I grumble to Ken, a member of the cast who is a retired painter and decorator, that after 49 years painting scenery for the society, I still can’t paint a straight line. It always looks ragged when I paint it.
I make a mistake when I’m painting the pillar and end up with the line leaning slightly outwards at the top. I blot out my beige line with the background magnolia and the two colours blend into each other. I decide to use the technique to my advantage by blending the lines into shadows as I’m painting the pillar and the panelling. That way the raggedness of my line helps with shading.
I’ve visited Château d’Ussé in the Loire, the château that inspired Perrault to write The Sleeping Beauty, but for our pantomime version Wendy the producer wants something nearer to the Disney Castle. We haven’t got the headroom for anything so lofty so for my backdrop I’ve gone for an impressive entrance with a suggestion of a hexagonal shaped castle going back into the perspective.
We’ve got a great team with the girls from the chorus singing one of the numbers from the show as they rollered over last year’s village scene with magnolia emulsion. Once that had dried, I scaled up my rough onto the eight canvas-covered flats, using the cross pieces of the framework, just visible under the canvas, as my grid.
My team followed my outlines, paint by numbers fashion, and by the time I’d finished drawing out at the right hand side, I was able to go back to the now dried out tree silhouettes on the left to add a bit of comic strip style definition by painting black outlines and a few suggestions of foliage.
Snow settled yesterday evening, the first covering that we’ve had during a mild, wet winter. It brought more than the usual one or two siskins to the feeder this morning: six or more.
Snow is a strange thing to draw. In fact you hardly draw it at all, it’s mainly the white spaces that are left when you’ve drawn everything around it.
Nostell Priory Lake: A pair of mallards makes careful progress over an expanse of ice between two areas of open water. After a minute or so the female decides that it will be quicker to fly.
Focus on Teapots
We spot our friend Roger in the cafe, so naturally the conversation comes around to photography. Focussing on a teapot, I ask him how I can get over the problem that when I use my bridge camera, a Fujifilm FinePix S6800, on macro setting I have to get in so close that the proportions of my subject get distorted: the spout looks jumbo sized.
You need use a bit of zoom, suggests Roger. That works, the spout is now in proportion with the teapot, but, with my shaky hands, I’ve got a problem: the zoom magnifies any camera shake and the smaller aperture of the lens means that the camera will be selecting a longer shutter speed, again increasing the risk of blur.
I tell Roger that I’m considering upgrading to a camera with image stabilisation and he tells me that my camera probably has that as an option. He drills down through the menus and sets it to always use sensor shift image stabilisation. It’s a well hidden option and looking back through the settings menu, I can’t now see where he found it.
Depth of Field
But it works. I hand-held the camera for this shot of rosemary in a stone trough in the courtyard. Introducing a bit of telephoto to a macro shot results in a smaller depth of field than I’d get at the wide angle end of my zoom lens, throwing the background out of focus and giving more emphasis to the subject.
I use the photograph of the sage as reference for my sketchbook page for today. I’m reading a couple of books on botanical art so I decide to try drawing in 4H and then HB pencil before adding the watercolour, lightest shades first, which in this case is the pale yellow of the stipples on the leaves.
I’ve just replaced the Winsor lemon in my pocket watercolour box. As Winsor lemon is no longer available I went for cadmium lemon.
This green-leaved herb looks like marjoram or oregano. I cropped my original photograph to show this detail because I couldn’t get in this close with the macro. There’s a limit to how far you can zoom in before the auto-focus ceases to work. A red box marked ‘AF’ appears centre screen. I found that I had to zoom back out a little before the auto focus would work successfully.
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.
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.
