I promise this is the final instalment in my vegetable trilogy: vine-ripened tomatoes. And these were supermarket grown, although I’m hoping we’ll still have some ripening in the greenhouse into next month.
Tomatoes
Category: Art
Red Peppers
Back to the veg rack for my subject today, red peppers. I did try growing them this year but in our unheated greenhouse they never ripened and we ate them green.
Sweet Potato
Looking rather like grey seals resting on a beach, two sweet potatoes from the veg rack.
Preening Canada Geese
The preening routine of a Canada goose involves Pilates-style stretching and twisting.
Dinobirds
When birds revert to their dinosaur origins . . .
Duck Feeders
There isn’t time to add colour when drawing passers-by and when I start writing notes it soon gets a bit complicated. ‘B’, for instance, could stand for blue, black or brown.
I’ve used the colour printer’s CMYK – cyan, magenta, yellow and ‘key’ colour, which is usually black.
A capital letter indicates a strong or darker colour, lower case a paler version, so my ‘gB’ is supposed to indicate blue with a touch of green in it.
I’ve drawn ducks, pond life, trees and flowers at Newmillerdam, so I thought that it was about time that I turned my attention to the people visiting the country park.
Green Pepper
I’m drawing this with a scratchy dip pen with an F. Collins & Co. Tower Pen brass nib, made in Manchester. The elegant pen holder, which I bought in France, has a satisfyingly robust brass ferule at the business end and a dangerously sharp point at the end that is nearest your eye.
I’m using Rohrer’s Black which, of course, isn’t as free-flowing as the inks that I use in my Lamy fountain pens but it has a dense ‘inky blackness’.
It felt awkward drawing the pepper, as if I was drawing everything overhand. Perhaps if I’d been drawing it facing the other way, the curves would have felt more natural to draw: they might have sloped more naturally, like the slope of cursive handwriting.
Home-grown
But the scratchy line suited the wayward growth of the plant. I grew it from the seeds of a pepper from the supermarket, using our own home-made compost.
We’ve had only two peppers and we’ve used them green as they were showing no sign of turning yellow or red. They’re not as fleshy as the supermarket variety, but they’ve got more of a fresh crunch to them.
We grew peppers last year from seeds that a neighbour gave us. This year’s have a better flavour: last year’s were rather bitter, perhaps because of the weather or the variety.
Back to Bash Street
Florence celebrated her birthday and moved up from Woodland School to Primary a few weeks ago, so my card was a tribute to Leo Baxendale and David Sutherland of the Bash Street Kids comic strip in the Beano. One of the highlights for me of V&A at Dundee was the original artwork for a Bash Street spread.
Florence moved up schools but sadly that’s not the case for schoolgirls in Afghanistan as secondary schools are not strictly male pupils and staff only.
“I am so worried about my future,” said one Afghan schoolgirl who had hoped to be a lawyer.
“Everything looks very dark. Every day I wake up and ask myself why I am alive? Should I stay at home and wait for someone to knock on the door and ask me to marry him? Is this the purpose of being a woman?”
Speaking to the BBC, her father said: “My mother was illiterate, and my father constantly bullied her and called her an idiot. I didn’t want my daughter to become like my mum.”
The Whodunnit Reader
Sketches from our lunch stop at the Rose Cottage Tea Rooms, Castleton, yesterday.
Hope Valley Swatches
Colour swatches from our regular Hope Valley circular walk from Hope to Castleton.