Category: Habitats

Frogfest

frogfestI looked out the other day and there were at least twelve frogs in the pond. Today I counted nine clumps of frogspawn. Usually the spawn is laid at the shallow, sunnier end of the pond. This year it’s all at the overgrown, deeper end, partially shaded by the shed.

Since I wrote this, my neighbour frogspawnJack across the road has offered me a bucket of spawn which he always clears from his tiny pond. I don’t really need any more but I’d rather take it because otherwise he’d put it in the stream, which is fast flowing so it would just get flushed away into the river. I’m trying to work out if I can fit in a mini-pond or two into the odd corner of my garden as I know ponds have been filled in in adjacent gardens and the frog population will soon start struggling.

cafitiereHedgehog Dropping

hedgehog droppingOn a mossy patch of back lawn near the pond there’s a single hedgehog dropping and, a foot or so from that, a clayey fox scat with the typical pointed end.

School Chair

school chair This school chair is less than three feet high. I like the way the back legs taper together towards the floor, giving a wider back at the top, while the front legs splay outwards to give stability. The change from the square section at the back to round at the front gives it an organic charm, as if it had grown rather than being popped out of a mould in a factory, like a modular 21st century stacking school chair.school chair

Uniglaze

uniglazeI enjoy drawing bits of buildings, often the side that the architect didn’t intend us to see. This window showroom at the top end of Cluntergate, Horbury, was drawn with a fine Faber-Castell Pitt artist pen as we sat in the Caffe Capri opposite.

The watercolour was added later using a photograph I took on my Olympus Tough as reference.

Janet’s Foss

I tried out my new Leki monopod/walking pole on Sunday, attaching my Olympus Tough to it to film Janet’s Foss, near Malham. Even with this small camera mounted on it, the pole was useful when stepping over damp limestone boulders to get nearer to the waterfall.

Although a lot steadier than handheld, I found that it swayed slightly as I clung to it, so I used the camera shake adjustment in iMovie to reduce this effect.

The image quality of the Tough isn’t as sparkly as my regular camera (plus I still had it on the macro setting, which can’t have helped) so I tried using iMovie’s ‘romantic’ filter to soften the pixelated effect. This filter adds a soft vignette to the frame. The gradual zoom-in was also added in iMovie, using the ‘Ken Burns’ effect in the cropping tools section.

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.