As the name suggests, our Stuggart Giant sets gave us plenty of onions from a 4×6 foot section of our raised beds. Unfortunately because of the unpredictable weather last summer we weren’t able to gather the whole crop in to dry them in the greenhouse – there wasn’t room on the staging for the whole crop – so a lot of them stayed out in heavy rain. Probably because of this we found that a lot of them had gone soft before we got the chance to use them – including most of those in my drawing; they’ll be going straight to the compost bin.
This wouldn’t put me off growing the variety again, they’re a mild onion, which we like. We’d just make sure that we started early drying them off.
On an online course I’m doing, Become a Better Presenter, a free FutureLearn course from The Royal Observatory, Greenwich, we’ve been asked to write a script for an imagined talk about making a sandwich pitched to a specific audience. I’m going for our local naturalists’ society:
So, you’re heading for the Peak District: what are the essentials for fieldwork?
OPENS HAVERSACK
Notebook? yes, got that . . . binoculars? Check! . . . waterproofs . . And, yes, thought someone would suggest it: lunch! But this is no ordinary packed lunch . . .
OPENS BOX
. . . this sandwich was developed by survival expert Ray Mears, who says he always takes one with him whenever he heads for the hills.
GETS OUT INGREDIENTS
And it’s simple to make:
The bread, I’m going for wholemeal and actually this is homemade and in this case the flour was ground at a centuries-old watermill at Worsborough.
Butter? To give us a protein boost we’re going for peanut butter, organic of course, and – controversially – I’m a chunky man.
Instant energy? This is pure Peak District heather honey from last August, which was exceptional for heather, hope you managed to get out there, it was a sea of purple over The Strines. One teaspoon, so that’s 1,500 bee miles across the moors . . . but it’s going to be a tough hike so let’s make it two: that’s 3,000 miles!
Finally the main event: a superfood developed in the greenhouses at Chatsworth by Joseph Paxton: the Cavendish banana!
Link
Become a Better Presenter : Improve Your Public Speaking Skills, a free FutureLearn course. Learn how to improve your presentation skills and add personality into your presentation style on this three-week course. Learn from The Presenter Network at the Royal Observatory Greenwich.
We haven’t grown peppers for years but one of our neighbours offered us seeds so we thought we’d give it another try. Like our tomatoes, they’re taking their time to ripen.
These wrinkled Bards with their spiky topknots remind me of a line from a Simon & Garfunkel song:
“Talking to a raisin that occasionally plays L.A., Casually glancing at his toupee.”
I’ve just finished reading Walt Stanchfield’sDrawn to Life, so I was thinking of his advice, when drawing figures to draw gestures rather than anatomy, so in this case I went for the laid-back poses of this little group, rather than the botanical detail.
Last year we nearly forgot what kind of potato we’d planted, so for the two varieties that we’ve gone for this year, I’ve cut labels from margarine cartons and written the nameS with a Sharpie. That should last for the two or three months until the potatoes are ready for harvest.
It’s day five for my ginger beer plant and by now the naturally-occurring yeast and the bacteria that I added on the skins of the sultanas should have started bubbling away. There were just one or two bubbles yesterday morning, so I decided to leave it until today before adding the first additional feed of two teaspoons of sugar and one of ground ginger.
There’s definitely been a lot of activity as there’s what looks like a microbial mat a centimetre deep at the bottom of the jar but at the top, those little islands look as if they’re going mouldy so I wonder if the mixture has died and turned ‘sour’.
Hopefully, now that its been fed, it will start bubbling away. The mixture so far smells exactly like old-fashioned ginger beer.
I’ve started a Futurelearn online course about ‘Bugs, Brains and Beasts’ and, as our practical work for week one, we’ve been asked to conduct an experiment in microbiology: to start brewing a batch of ginger beer.
We’ve put five ingredients into the ginger beer ‘plant’: lemon juice, lemon zest, sugar, ground ginger and, to provide the yeast for the fermentation process, five sultanas. The yeast and bacterium needed for the process occur naturally on the skin of grapes. If all goes well, the yeast Saccharomyces florentinus and the bacterium Lactobacillus higardii should start bubbling away during the next seven days. I’ll feed them daily on ground ginger and sugar.
Can I ever draw bottles without thinking of Morandi? Certainly not when I’m drawing the stoneware bottles they keep lined up on the window sills at Filmore & Union in the Redbrick Mill in Batley.
My first commission after leaving college was to spend a weekend drawing at a house, a Victorian vicarage, not far from Oxford. I took down my Natural History Illustration degree show at the Royal College of Art, got on the train to Oxford and enjoyed drawing for a long weekend. My favourite subject was the interior of the potting shed, which included a wooden wheelbarrow, tools, a trug and, of course, stacks of assorted terra cotta plant pots. That pen drawing became the centre spread of the small sketchbook that I produced, which consisted of eight or perhaps as many as a dozen pages, carefully extracted from my Bushey foolscap sketchbook, which they had bound as a slim hardback.
I remember thinking that if this was life after college, I could get used to it, as it was basically a continuation of what I’d done at college, just draw, draw, draw, day in day out, except that now someone was willing to pay me to do it!
Morandi Sketchbook
The man who I was working for had been in the British Army in Bologna during World War II, and had befriended Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) and, I think, helped him out during a difficult time. Morandi presented him with (or more probably, he bought from Morandi) a small sketchbook of drawings – of bottles, naturally. Morandi had used whatever had come to hand and my memory is that at least some of the drawings were in ballpoint pen on cheap paper.
Earlier this month, on a previous visit to Filmore & Union.
Morandi’s bottles were never as standoffish as the bottles in Filmore & Union, but I guess that’s the reserved character of British bottles compared with Morandi’s highly sociable Italian bottiglie, which were always getting together with boxes, jars, jugs and vases.
When I was a student, my favourite painting in the National Gallery was Vuillard’s La Cheminée but probably, if I had the choice today, the painting that I’d most like to live with would be a small Morandi.
Reviewing my A6 postcard-sized Pink Pig landscape format sketchbook for this winter, you might think that my life has been dominated by a search for the perfect scone. It has, and we’ve got our visits to Nostell timed to coincide with when the scones emerge from the oven, however these freshly-baked scones, were at the Rich & Fancy Cafe on Queen Street, Horbury.
Woman in audience at Wakefield Naturalists’ Society.
But I don’t insist on Bake Off standard cakes to draw; I equally enjoyed drawing the salt and pepper pots and the sauce and vinegar bottles on my brother-in-law’s dining table. These drawings are all larger than they appear in my sketchbook because I like the texture of pen on cartridge paper, which I lose at screen resolution. Drawn with my favourite pen, a Lamy Safari with an extra fine nib filled with brown Noodler’s ink.
I’ve got another Lamy Safari filled with a cartridge of Lamy black ink, which I blotted with a water-brush to get this wash effect on a brooding morning at Charlottes. Again during a coffee and scone break. A pattern is emerging.
‘Do you do all your drawings from cafes?!’ asks Chris Wildman as I show him my latest lunchtime sketch, drawn as I waited for my quesadilla filled with cheese and Town End farm shop’s original chorizo. I must admit that I’ve ended up with three little sketches from cafe tables on this spread but all that’s going to change because we’re heading off for a week at Nethergill Farm in Langstrothdale, which is about as tucked away as you can get in the Yorkshire Dales. At last, I’ll be working in my 8 x 8 inch wildlife sketchbook again.
Link;Town End Farm Shop, the only place in the Yorkshire Dales where you can buy my little Malham Magic guide! Thank you for stocking it Chris.
If you’re unable to get there, I can send you a copy, price £2.95, post free in the UK; Malham Magic.
Today’s still life sketch is my mum’s maple syrup. This Waitrose Organic Canadian Maple Syrup, No. 1 Medium, is from Beauce in the south-east of Quebec Province ‘on the Chaudière River where there is a naturally large concentration of sugar maple trees’.
It takes forty litres of sap, harvested in the first few weeks of spring, to produce one litre of syrup after evaporation.
Today’s still life sketch is my mum’s maple syrup. This Waitrose Organic Canadian Maple Syrup, No. 1 Medium, is from Beauce in the south-east of Quebec Province ‘on the Chaudière River where there is a naturally large concentration of sugar maple trees’.