I picked up this pod razor shell, Ensis siliqua, on the strandline at Bridlington last month. The valves, still hinged to each other, are so brittle that they broke as I carried it, yet they’re are tough enough for this clam to burrow deeply into sand, extending a muscular foot to excavate its burrow. It extends a siphon to the surface for filter feeding and respiration.
I’ve identified it as the pod razor shell because it seems to be broader a straighter than the other species of razor shell found on British beaches.
This is my first drawing on my new iPad Pro, using the vintage pen in Adobe Fresco and the natural brush 1. It doesn’t feel as natural as real pen and watercolour but the updated iPad is about as good as it gets for digital drawing.
The shell of this common mussel is encrusted with the calcareous tubes of keelworms, which have a prominent ridge, so that they’re triangular in cross section.
The carapace of this shore crab is encrusted with barnacles, these are the barnacle Semibalanus balanoides, which have a diamond-shaped aperture. Between the barnacles at the front of the crab’s shell there’s a flat, pockmarked whitish crust, which looks like sea mat, a marine bryozoan, a colonial animal, filter-feeding from tiny individual cells, like coral.
Like this small frond of bladderwrack seaweed, I picked these up on the beach near the harbour at Bridlington when we spent the day there last month.
It was too windy to safely draw on the cliff top on our day trip to Flamborough on Tuesday, so these are puffins from our last month’s visit. A few were sitting together on a steep grassy slope in an inlet overlooking North Landing. When we visited on Tuesday there was just one, sitting tightly on a rocky ledge nearby.
This marginal illustration for one of my Dalesman diaries isn’t meant to be a trail map but you couldn’t go far wrong in finding your way to Danes Dyke Nature Reserve than starting at the harbour and keeping the sea on your right. Look forward to walking it again some time. And, when they come out of lockdown, there’s always the option of catching the Land Train at Sewerby Hall to get back to the harbour in time for fish and chips.
Another page from my Skokholm Island sketchbook, drawn on Thursday, 10th April, 1980, watching razorbills, wheatear, and grey seals. My drawing of the rocks didn’t get finished because:
“The puffins were enjoying the evening sun, standing in pairs outside their burrows, when I came back from a tea-break so I decided to leave them in peace”
Probably a first even for me, blaming the puffins for an unfinished sketch!
With an onshore wind blowing, it seemed as if the high tide lasted all day. Turnstones seemed resigned to sitting it out on the promenade.
Barbara spotted the blue and orange of a kingfisher on a parapet below the Spa but it flew down before I saw it, so we walked down a slipway for a better view. In the dull afternoon light, the streak of electric blue looked incongruous amongst the duller dunlins and turnstones, like a wisp of plastic litter.
As it perched on a seaweed-covered rock, it got caught in the overspray when a wave came in, forcing the waders to move.
This weekend’s homework in the University of Southampton’s ‘Exploring Our Ocean’ FutureLearn course. Some of the figures we had to work out for ourselves, so please let me know if I’ve gone wrong with them. For instance, the figure that I found on the internet for tons of rubbish going to landfill was 1.3 billion tons per year.
Comic strip designed on my desktop in Clip Studio Paint and drawn with an Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro in Procreate.
I’ve got to thank another FutureLearn course, the University of Dundee’s ‘Making and Understanding Web Comics’ for a few useful tips that I’ve used here: I’ve hand-lettered the strip but based on free fonts from the Blambot Comic Fonts and Lettering website. I set up the captions using two fonts from the site: Anime Ace 2.0 BB Italic and Noteworthy then used this as a guide, tracing the letters freehand, using the same pen tool in Procreate that I used for the drawings.
The sea is fed by the rivers which run into it. These rivers by gradually wearing away all kinds of soft rocks which contain salt and limestone, carry the salt to the sea. Owing to the action of the sun, the sea is continually evaporating. The sea becomes more and more salty by this process of gradual evaporation by the sun and the continual deposits of salt from rivers
Card no.22 in the ‘What do You Know?’ series of tea cards published by Lyons, 1957.
Apologies for the state of these tea cards but they got a lot of handling when my brother and sister and I collected them in 1957.
I remembered the image on the tea card when I got to the section on salinity in the University of Southampton’s FutureLearn course Exploring Our Oceans.
We had a couple of nights at the Raven Hall Hotel, Ravenscar, earlier this month. This is the view through the fanlight window of our third floor room, room 303, which is the one up in the pediment of the Georgian facade, looking out across Robin Hood’s Bay.
Grey Seals
4 p.m., Wednesday, 4th October: From the ramparts of the cliff-top gardens of the hotel, we had some difficulty spotting the seals below because, from six hundred feet above the grey sea, it was the similar-looking bobbing knots of seaweed and diving sea-birds that caught our eyes.
But we did see one grey seal which appeared to be relaxing, floating on its back, while another seal bobbed up its head nearby . . . or was that another knot of seaweed?
At the time that it was built, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Raven Hall overlooked a scene of industry; we looked down over the hotel’s golf course to the preserved ruins of an Alum Works that stood on the cliff top.
Bay Ness
5 p.m., Wednesday, 4th October: The promontory of Bay Ness, beyond Robin Hood’s Bay village, vanished as the mist rolled down the slope and out across the headland.
Next day, in complete contrast, we sat out in the sun at Swell’s Café in Robin Hood’s Bay village. As I drew the cliffs of Ness Point, the tide came in surprisingly quickly, covering the black rocks that I’d been drawing before I could add a watercolour wash. Six or seven holidaymakers and dog-walkers were caught out and had to pick their way over the sea defence boulders to get back to the village from the cut-off bay.
Hackness Valley
The sides of the Hackness Valley, which I drew from the Everley Country House Café, are topped with conifer plantations, with broadleaved hedgerows and sheep pasture on the slopes below. The flat valley floor is given over the arable farming.
The land use corresponds to the underlying rock: the conifers are planted on poor soils on the steep upper slopes of Jurassic gritstone while the gentler lower slopes and the flat valley floor have been cut into the underlying Oxford Clay.
