Beech at Newmillerdam, drawn this morning with the constant accompaniment of cooing wood pigeons and the occasional clatter of a beech nut dropping from the still-green canopy.
Trees are their Roots
Category: Art
Deeper in the Wood
Deep amongst the rhododendrons.
Rhododendron
Old Rhododendron at Temple Newsam this morning.
King Henry VII Chapel
In June 1977 the Silver Jubilee Days on the Queen’s Official Birthday marked the 25th anniversary of the accession of Queen Elizabeth II on 6 February 1952. Architect and designer Margaret Casson organised a small exhibit ‘The Graven Image’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum and invited me to take part.
In the April of that year I headed to London and decided to give myself a bit of a challenge and I drew the interior of the Chapel of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey.
I found a corner stall and settled down for a long session drawing with dip pen and Pelikan ink (the original drawing is in Pelikan Special Brown).
I hadn’t realised the significance of the rather elaborate end-of-the-row stall that I’d set myself up in.
Guides would come in and point to the ceiling, and their group would look up, suitably impressed; then the tomb of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York (the couple who effectively brought the Middle Ages to a close by uniting the Houses of York and Lancaster) and finally, to bring things up to date, the guide would point to Prince Charles’ seat in the corner . . . the stall where I was sitting, scribbling away. I got some curious looks.
I’m struggling to remember the other items in the ‘Graven Image’ show which was in a corner of the entrance hall to the V&A but as I brought in my framed sketchbook spread, a stone carver staggered in with a large block with a beautifully carved inscription, a suitably graven image.
Snatched Sketches
A couple of quick sketches from this weeks errands and appointments.
Summer Sketchbook
Page layouts for my Summer eBook using a three-column grid in InDesign.
Barcode Safari
Happy birthday to Florence.
Barcode 5018 4453 isn’t as fierce as depicted; it’s from the top of a jar of Marmite.
Wookiees
Great Star Wars party at the weekend. Happy birthday today to Ruby. Or, as they’d say in Wookieespeak . . .
Golden Spire
Golden Spire cooking apple drawn in Pro Create on an iPad Pro using, you guessed it, an Apple Pencil. Music by Peter Ellis.
Summer
The last day of meteorological summer and I’m gathering my sketchbook drawings from the last three months together for an eBook.
I’m experimenting with the eBook option in Adobe InDesign, going for an iPad format. This gives me a more control over the way words and images are presented than I get with my regular blog.
Rather than use a regular typeface, I decided to use the carved lettering on one of the tombstones in Brodsworth Church as my starting point for a title logo.
In true Roman fashion the stone mason used the chiselled ‘V’ that you’d find on a Roman inscription to represent an upper case ‘U’, so I patched one together from the lower half of an ‘O’ and two different capital ‘I’s, keeping the slant he’d used one to fit it into the word ‘AETATIS’ (‘age’).
I imported my title logo into Adobe Illustrator and converted it into three tones using Image Trace, then took that back into Photoshop and replaced the three tones with colours derived from my cover image.