Category: Art

Inner Eye

TillyvanI HAVEN’T USED my smallest sketchbook, the little Moleskin, for almost two months but as I tie up one loose end after another I’m getting into drawing mood again.

Tilly has also appeared in my notebook. She pops up all over the place.
Tilly has also appeared in my notebook. She pops up all over the place.

OCT Scan

gableI had my first OCT scan at the opticians this morning. The infra-red scan mapped out a small area at the back of my eye and rendered it in 3D, reminding me of the 3D modelling I’ve experimented with in programs like Bryce and Vue.

She's a restless sitter.
She’s a restless sitter.

A shallow crater is where the cone cells for daylight vision are concentrated. These are particularly sensitive to movement but they’re useless in the dark so as the iris opens to let in more light a wider spread of rod cells takes over, with the crater of cone cells becoming a bit of a blind spot.

This explains why when observing a faint object in the night sky, such at the Andromeda Galaxy you have to do that trick of looking slightly to one side of it. It’s too faint to register on your array of cone cells.

blind spot

My true blind spot, the spot where blood vessels and nerves enter the eye, looks less like a crater and more like a corrie surrounded by glaciated peaks.

 

Clearing the Desk

FinePix S6800
AFTER THREE WEEKENDS away and another catching up, I’m finally getting back to ordinary life. I’ve just sent my latest article off so it’s time to clear my desk and get started on the backlog of drawing and writing that I’ve got in mind to do. But first, to draw a line in the sand after all that frantic activity, I decide to draw my cluttered desktop.

I feel that random compositions are often the best so I don’t rearrange a thing before starting. As a change from fountain pen I decide to give myself the challenge of working with a dip pen and Indian ink, starting again from scratch as it were, and this nib certainly gives a scratchy effect compared with the rounded nib of my fountain pen.

desktopI’m amazed how badly I flounder on proportions and positioning with a captive subject like this. My struggles are most obvious on the one of the few diagonals in the drawing, the handle of the tripod, but books and magazines also get out of proportion, probably because I’m not allowing enough for the effects of perspective which are an important factor when you’re so close to a subject, about four feet from the nearest pile of papers in this case.

Also I’m happily listening to Radio 3 as I work so I might have been better giving my full attention to my drawing.

But at least I’ve made the attempt and I’m hoping that now we’ve settled down I’ll be able to take the odd hour off to draw again.

High Street Windows

cat in a windowTHAT’S JUST what you need; a cat wondering around your gallery, knocking the paintings over. The lady who exhibits in the window of her house on Horbury High Street tells me that the cat insisted that she leave a space for him to sit in the windowsill so she had to remove one of the paintings.

Nuzzling the edges of the paintings as he wove its way through the exhibits, the cat succeeded in knocking over the watercolour of badgers. Other subjects in this unique little cottage window gallery include sketches of the characters who can often be seen sitting on the benches opposite.

Mackay and PeasonAcross the road, Mackay and Pearson, jewellery makers, have installed a suitably summery seaside window based on a 1970s public information film about HM Coastguards. This film was shown so often on television that I can almost remember the dialogue:

‘Ooh look Doris! That man in the dinge-y is waving to us!’

Waterbirds and Fungi

greylag goose

I LOVE the 30x zoom on my new camera. There’s an element of luck in what the autofocus chooses to latch on to but you can take several shots and hopefully one will catch something. The 4600 pixel wide images give plenty of scope for cropping in to find some suitable composition, like this Greylag keeping a wary eye on me.

canadas

tufted duckblack-headed gull divingI knew the Canada Geese would head for the water if I got too near. Having the zoom on maximum flattened the perspective and emphasised the pattern of black and white, like musical notes on a stave.

If I can get such close ups as this in a few minutes just ambling along the lakeside path imagine what I might be able to do if I spent a morning in one of the hides at a wetland reserve.

black-headed gull diving

crow in willowIt would be interesting to try a catch bird behaviour on film – like this juvenile Black-headed Gull diving into the lake, possibly to catch fish or perhaps even small freshwater mussels. A series of images might provide some clues. The camera has a continuous mode for capturing movement.

Water birds are good subjects to experiment with as they’re large and usually not hidden by foliage so when we saw a Carrion Crow in a waterside willow I tried photographing it.

Grey Heron

grey herongrey heronI was struggling to keep the camera steady when I tried to photograph the Grey Heron preening itself in a willow at the other side of the lake. The image is rather blocky but it would be useful if I was gathering reference for an illustration.

It’s good to see a heron engaged in some kind of activity rather than standing at rest.

Fungi

agaricagaricNot surprisingly after the warm humid weather that we’ve been having there were one or two fungi about. The toadstool with the scaly cap is a relative of the Fly Agaric while the purplish, smooth capped  and much eaten into toadstool (below, right) looks to me like one of the Russulas.

russulaBut today I’m content to get to know my camera. I’m looking forward to using it to get to know the names of a few more fungi in the autumn.

Publish 2013 Online

Publish 2013 Online

imspeakingatpublish2013v1

On Friday I’m looking forward to taking part in Publish 2013;

‘This online conference is for inspiring and equipping both children and adults to discover how writing works in the real world. See how your life experiences, passions, and creativity can become a springboard for becoming a published author or artist!’

My session will be on nature journalling. For more information and to book tickets or to sample the three free preview sessions please follow the link above.

Pentax Prints

shoe on the beach 1973

Pentax Spotmatic 1000Rummaging through my file drawer for some photographs for an article I was surprised to find that I still have the negatives from a three week course that I took at the Royal College of Art in early spring, 1974 including this old shoe on the strandline taken on a day trip to the south coast.

contact prints

Looking through them brings back vivid memories of that period, for instance, these contact prints from the still life session include long forgotten details of my everyday life; keyring, pens, bus ticket and anorak label.

Read more in my article Just handle a Pentax in the Retro Tech series in the Currys photography blog.

High Street

high streetI HAVE A HABIT of editing out the buses, vans and cars as I draw and I realise that for Horbury High Street I’m giving the wrong impression so, as I draw the Beauty Spa (originally a butcher’s shop) on the right, I add whatever figures happen to be passing at the time. The lad standing with his scooter adds a useful spot of contrast with his red T-shirt.

This is the view from Horbury’s newest café, the Caffé Capri, which the only one where you can sit out watching the world go by. It might just be Horbury on our weekly date with my mum’s shopping but in this weather it feels like being on holiday. Especially when accompanied by a small potato tortilla and a glass of chilled pinot grigio.

Boulder

boulderTHIS MUCH-INITIALLED gritstone boulder sits on top of the Cow at the Cow and Calf Rocks above Ilkley. To get this view I had to perch on another boulder, which wasn’t comfortable enough to encourage me to sit and draw it there and then so I took a photograph and today I’ve been working from that.

When I’m working from photographs I tend to get hooked into drawing every detail. In the real world the level of detail is so overwhelming that a natural editing process inevitably kicks in, enabling me to take more liberties with a scene and to be less literal than I am with the photograph.

A simple solution would have been to include exactly the same amount of detail but to draw the background with a finer pen which might have given more of an impression of aerial perspective. To a certain extent I thickened up the lines around the boulder by reworking them but I didn’t want to overdo that.

Hopefully when I add the watercolour there’ll be more depth in the illustration.

Back in the Flow

Ilkley Moor
Ilkley Moor; I’m starting this in pen and scanning that version before adding colour for the final illustration. Keeping my options open.

LIKE ME, my pen is a bit of a slow starter after a break. I draw a series of loops to get the ink flowing again.

loopsIt’s a cool rainy day, not the sort to encourage me to go out on a research or sketching trip, and it’s a pleasure to be sitting at my desk in my airy studio with the prospect of a whole day devoted to drawing. A rare chance to listen to the radio.

The excuse to draw all day is the main thing that attracted me to illustration as a career, so it’s a shame that so much of my time gets taken up with other tasks.

doodleMaking marks with a pen is such a pleasure and after getting the ink back in circulation I start writing ‘The quick brown fox . . .’ then go on to drawing circles, dots, rectangles and crosshatching.

This doodle (right) starts by looking like frogspawn and ends up looking like a multi-cored cable. I’ve scanned it here half as big again so that you can see the inky wobbliness. I think that both those qualities, the inkiness and the wobbly line, are important to me, hopefully giving a softer friendlier feel to my drawings rather than technically brilliant panache. I must be succeeding to the extent that no-one has ever described my work as technically brilliant.

These are all drawn with my ArtPen with the F, fine, drawing nib, filled with Noodler’s El Lawrence (brown) ink.

The Wide Open Spaces

View from Charlotte'sWE’RE A BIT limited as to where we can take my mum for a coffee now that she’s not as mobile but the ice cream parlour at Whitley has a lot going for it. Yes, it might be the same place that we brought her last week and the week before but the panorama, looking up the Calder valley to the tops of the Pennines is different each time we visit. It has greened up a lot since we were last here.  But it changes every few minutes as shadows of clouds move across pasture, wood and moor.

It’s so good to have a short burst of the wide open spaces.

I like watercolours where forms are simplified so why do I find it impossible not to make some attempt to blob in every tree when I’m painting this view? The problem is that I’m so fascinated by detail. As I painted this I could see the blades of the wind turbines turning on the horizon, traffic passing on the motorway 6 miles away, crows bursting from the wood beyond the reservoir as a buzzard flew over . . .

It’s so difficult not to get hooked on the detail!