Category: Habitats

Leaf Skeletons

poplar leaffirst celandineThe poplar leaves by the lock on the Leeds Liverpool canal at Gargrave have all but turned to leaf mould, leaving fragmentary leaf skeletons.

On a south-facing bank by the road I see my first celandines of the year bursting into flower, pushing up amongst their dark green heart-shaped leaves and the dried stems of last year’s growth.

wall

garden snailsAt the foot of this gritstone wall I pick up a couple of garden snail shells to draw. Inside a third shell I find another species of snail sheltering. Compared to the garden snail this one has a more flattened spiral, rather like an ammonite.

snail shell

Poplar twig

Town End Farm Shop

View from Town End Farm shop cafeTown End Farm Shop, Airton, Malhamdale, 12 noon; Looking north north-west, over pastures, drystone walls, an ash wood and a field barn.

A flock of fifty to a hundred gulls sits on a low-lying pasture by a bend in the headwaters of the River Aire. A few crows head off up the valley with more purpose than the drifting gulls.

Link; Town End Farm Shop

Gable End

gable endAt first sight the gable end of a house might not seem the most inspiring of subjects but it’s surprising how absorbing such a common sight can be if you keep looking at it for half and hour or more.

gable ends

Walking down into Horbury to buy sandwiches I get the chance to draw more gable ends as I sit in the Caffe Capri waiting for my order. I make a mental note of the colours. Later, as I add the watercolour, I make an informed guess about where the shadows were falling.

It’s a change for me to use a bit of imagination in reconstructing a scene after the even. I think about Cezanne’s studies of the huddle of red roofs of the village of Gardanne which seem like a starting point for Cubism.

gable

I rejoin Barbara at her sister’s and get a slightly different view of the house beyond the boundary wall.

The paper in my Moleskine sketchbook is buff which isn’t ideal for scanning but I’m enjoying the mellow tone it gives my drawings. This my out and about sketchbook, so why not indulge myself with its gentle warmth.

First Warbler

cormorantChurch by Trinity Walk centrewarblerFollowing the Aire into Leeds, we walk through a snow shower but as it clears and the sun returns we see our first warbler (chiff chaff or willow), just flown in from Africa, checking out the branches and twigs of a riverside willow.

A cormorant laboriously takes off flying upstream, into the icy wind before veering around and heading off down the valley.

manThe goosanders are diving so close and in such a good light that we can see the bottle-green iridescence on the drake’s head.

One more colourful item bobbing along on the Aire; Barbara’s wooly hat which blows off as we come to a wind-gap between the riverside blocks of flats. It’s close to the bottom of the eight foot stone embankment but as the nearest available branch is just three feet long we have to leave it, blown downstream by the icy wind.goosanders

Red Deadnettle

red deadnettlesketchbook pageAfter this winter, I’m right out of practice with botanical subjects so, determined to make a new start, on the first of March I dug this weed up from one of the veg beds and put it into a three inch pot to draw in close-up.

I tried going for a looser approach with pencil and watercolour but felt that I was losing my grip on its appearance.

red deadnettlered deadnettleThe pen and ink study made through the magnifying lens of a desk-lamp gave me definition but became too tight.

This last, loose drawing with an ArtPen is less of a botanical study but is in the sketching from life style that I feel more at home with.

Ash Trees

ash treesToday’s snow showers have been punctuated by brighter intervals but it doesn’t seem worth going out and clearing the driveway as the thin slushy layer that has accumulated here is likely to melt away in rain showers and warmer temperatures tomorrow. I hope that the forecast is right and that it won’t freeze solid and need scraping off laboriously.
pheasantThe snow brings a cock pheasant to our bird feeders and I guess that, now he’s discovered us, he’ll become a regular. Other colourful visitors today have included bullfinch, chaffinch, goldfinch and greenfinch.
I enjoyed drawing with my dip pen with the Tower Pen nib so much yesterday evening that I wanted to try it on a landscape and, as it would have been an uncomfortable business to set myself up outdoors I goldfinchdrew the view from my studio window. I’d hoped to include the snow-covered meadow but the sun was soon masked by the next bank of cloud approaching from the northwest and it was getting late in the afternoon anyway so I confined myself to the silhouette of the ash trees against the eastern sky.

Giardiniera

Pizza ExpressIt’s a tough life, delivering books all over the landscape and on the return trip from my book suppliers I’m starving so, with a voucher in my wallet, how can I resist calling at Pizza Express, Meadowhall Centre, Sheffield, for a Giadriniera (veggie) classic pizza and a Caffe Reale (cappuccino plus figs and marscapone).

It’s also an excuse to call at the Apple store and marvel at the Retina display iMac!

Slush and Showers

beechJust what you’d expect for mid-January; grey slush underfoot and sleety showers drifting through every twenty or thirty minutes. Not a day to go out drawing, so this multi-trunked beech was drawn in centrally heated comfort, when we visited my mum. It was easier to draw during the gloomier periods; once the low midday winter sun came through, tree and shrubbery disappeared into a formless mass of twiggy darkness with the glistening highlights of drooping boughs etched across it.

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Categorized as Trees Tagged

Atlas Cedar

scale of cone‘Mature cones of the blue Atlantic cedar are plump and pink-brown, sitting up like over-fed skittles on the boughs of brush-like blue foliage’cedar cone

Hugh Johnson, The International Book of Trees, 1973

kew gardens kew urnApart from starting to sketch one of the urns on Victoria Gate at Kew Gardens, I didn’t get to do any drawing. We met up with friends and, as it was so cold, we kept on the move, popping into the greenhouses to warm up. My glasses steamed up instantly as we entered the palm house!

I picked up these pieces of the cones of the Atlas cedar, Cedrus atlantica, to draw back in our hotel room. The scalecones are described as dehiscent, meaning that they burst or gape open, scattering these scales on the ground below.

Atlas cedar grows on the northern flanks of the Atlas and Riff mountains of Morocco and Algeria. They can grow to forty metres.

cone‘In Morocco’s Atlas mountains, macaque monkeys clamber among the cedars and scamper across the ground in search of roots.’scale

David Attenborough, The First Eden,  The Mediterranean World and Man, 1987.

The first photograph in Attenborough’s book shows an Atlas cedar with macaques resting on its boughs, a surprising contrast of conifer – which I’d associate with temperate or northern boreal climate zones – and African animal.

The Cat and the Rat

cat in the hedgeA neighbour’s cat watches intently through the hawthorn hedge from its vantage point on next door’s concrete coal bunker.

It pounces and chases a brown rat, coming close to catching it. The rat looks healthy enough but it has been behaving strangely, roaming about in the afternoon sunshine, showing little concern for danger. For a while it stopped and was nibbling at the edge of the frosty, still mainly snow-covered lawn. brown ratPerhaps it has eaten poison bait put out by one of our neighbours and it’s now feeling thirsty, which seems to be one of the symptoms of rat poison. Ponds are currently deep frozen so perhaps it was quenching its thirst with ice crystals.