Out of the goose feather quills that I’ve cut, my favourite is the thinnest and most flexible, so it’s quite suited to the curvy shapes of ducks, willow branches and alder leaves, drawn this from a fishing platform at Newmillerdam.
But it isn’t practical for field work because the ink goes on so thickly that I can’t close the sketchbook. Over three hours later I’ve put it on the scanner and blots of ink have stuck to the glass.
Even carrying back my open sketchbook I managed to leave my thumbprint on the wet ink of the drawing. It’s part of what makes drawing with a quill more spontaneous than drawing with my usual fountain pen, but for field sketches, that’s what I’ll be going back to.
Just harvested half a row – that’s two or three feet across our raised beds – of Maris Peer second early potatoes and decided they’d be a suitable subject for attempting to draw with a Canada goose quill.
I tried using the feathered end of one of the quills to add the wash. This is Noodler’s Black Ink.
I’ve been reading books on Hokusai and Quentin Blake, who was one of the tutors during my time on the Illustration course at the Royal College of Art. Birds feature a lot in Blake’s work and he’ll sometimes use a feather to draw and paint with.
Small white butterflies fluttering around a patch of lavender. Small whites have two spots on each forewing but in males, as in my sketch, the second spot can be indistinct.
After my woodcut experiment in Adobe Illustrator, l’ve gone for more of a lithographic effect for these portraits, simplifying the tones in my original pen and wash drawings into ragged-edged blocks. You don’t get the texture of the original watercolour wash but it’s implied in those irregular edges.
This is Liz White in character as Fiona Grayson in Chris Lang’s ITV crime drama Unforgotten, drawn from a photograph in the Radio Times in March.
George Stephenson
It can be disappointing if you’ve painted a subtle watercolour and the nuances are lost on the printed page. A reduced tonal range might make for a more successful printed image. I’ll have to try it.
George Stephenson was all set to have a walk-on part in my current Addingford show at the Redbox Gallery, Horbury, but he was upstaged by Stan Barstow’s Joby, so perhaps I can use him in a print publication, looking suitably robust in the Image Trace treatment that I’ve given him in Illustrator.
Hepworth
I’m considering printing the series I drew of Wakefield Women in History and the graphic feel would work well as I’m trying to keep the subject brisk and lively, rather than making it archival and authoritative, like an illustrated Dictionary of National Biography.
Dame Mary Bolles
Another Wakefield Woman in History, Dame Mary Bolles, the formidable Stuart-era lady of Heath Old Hall, also lends herself to this treatment. It’s easy for me to go for too much detail in a historical costume but what I want in this series is to sum up remarkable lives in broad brushstrokes.
These are my sketches from the weekend given the Image Trace treatment in the desktop version of Adobe Illustrator as I was after a lino-cut or woodcut effect. It gives my pen and watercolour natural form a graphic chunkiness.
So how about the grapevine I drew yesterday? Would lend itself to the sort of woodcut-inspired design that you see on a wine label? No, it doesn’t have the graphic presence of the bluebell stem, I’d need to draw it again with the context of the design in mind and make it a bit bolder.
This wood pigeon feather works better as it’s a simpler form. I could imagine using it for a logo.
Newmillerdam lake, 10.15 a.m., 62℉, 16℃, 90% alto-cumulus: Looking in the net after a sweep beneath the nettles and alder, I appeared to have caught nothing but debris and a single pond skater but when I transferred my catch to the old washing-up bowl that I’d brought with me, I saw a tiny black water beetle swimming around and an equally small water mite, trundling around like a character from a speeded-up silent film.
Most intriguing was an irregular fleck of plant debris crawling determinedly towards the edges of the bowl: a caddis larva in its protective case, just over a centimetre long. With this cumbersome camouflage, to change direction it had to do a three-point turn.
Skaters
Pond skater’s eye-view.
There’s a slight anticlockwise current swirling around the bowl, and I’ve noticed that the skater has decided on a favourite spot and is making little hops to stay in position. Looking closely, this little pond skater is accompanied by four even smaller companions. All of them favour this side of the bowl.
The largest skater pauses to groom its longest limb, brushing it with its shorter back leg. Its two short front legs resemble antennae and it keeps them in contact with the water surface to detect the vibrations of potential prey items, such as a small insect trapped on the surface film. It also keeps tabs on its companions, zipping forward to chase a smaller rival away, the pond skater equivalent of the dodgems.
On the opposite side of the bowl I notice a little group of water fleas, each smaller than a printed full stop. They bob up and down individually but seem to favour keeping together in a in an irregular cluster.
My sketchbook spread of found objects picked up on a lawn has an autumnal feel. We’re not quite there but on a dull August day there’s a feeling that the end of summer is looming.
Fine rain this morning picked out orb webs with glistening droplets.
I started this page at a family get-together yesterday afternoon in West Melton, near Rotherham, in a garden with several lime trees, planted in Victorian times. There were hundreds, probably thousands, of the limes’ helicopter seeds strewn over the lawn but so far not many leaves. This green heart-shaped leaf may have been torn off the tree in recent high winds but, because of the prominent damage, I wonder if the tree deliberately jettisoned it in an attempt to rid itself of whatever herbivore was starting to nibble holes in it.
The robust bluebell stem with upward-facing seedpods is probably Spanish bluebell, which was often planted in gardens but which has naturalised and in some places threatens to oust our native species.
It’s our British summer and people are wrapped up against the wind and the rain in Ossett. I used a man in blue from my sketches as the walking character in my Clip Studio Paint animation, drawn on my iPad Pro.
It’s a very basic animation and I can see plenty of bits that I need to improve on but it’s a way to get familiar with the process so that I can go on to something a bit more expressive.
As the lockdown eased at the beginning of February, I couldn’t resist buying a packet of Spencer Mixed sweet pea seeds to sow indoors on my desk in the studio. I set them off in toilet roll tubes but as I was using garden soil from the greenhouse they had a bit of competition from seedlings of chickweed and sowthistle growing up amongst them.
The sweet peas were drawn with an Apple Pencil on my iPad in Clip Studio Paint, using the ‘Wet Blotting Ink’ brush for adding the colour. The brothers above (one morphing in a Pokemon character) were drawn in the iPhone version of Fresco, using a Bamboo stylus, as, so far, you can’t used the Apple Pencil on an iPhone screen.
The house across the road is another iPhone Fresco drawing, this time using Fresco’s appropriately named ‘Grungy Inker’ pen. I wonder if a matt-surfaced screen protector would make drawing with a stylus on an iPhone more controllable.
