Category: Habitats

Lunch Break

Artichoke gall, also known as Hop Gall, on Sessile Oak.

THIS MAKES A CHANGE; sitting with my sandwich, leaning against the trunk of an oak, the tree canopy above me and birches and bracken stretching down to the stream below. I’m deep in the wood yet only 15 minutes walk from my front door. I timed it because yesterday, when I first tried a lunchtime mini-adventure, I had assumed that I would have time to walk the full circuit of the valley but I hadn’t factored in the number of times that I’d stop to photograph fungi so I ended up rushing to get back home on time.

It’s better to have more time to stop and enjoy my surroundings. Even half an hour of brisk walking is better than none.

My habitual lunch break, when I’m on my own and Barbara is working at the bookshop, would be something on toast then to slump on the sofa with a mug of tea and listen to The World at One. But we’re in the middle of the party conference season so what better time for a change!

Of course, I’d love to have time to draw too but these photographs give an impression of what you can see in the wood, even during a one hour lunch break.

Stress proof your life

I can’t make a case for my life being particularly stressful but I couldn’t resist picking up Stress proof your life; 52 brilliant ideas for taking control by Elisabeth Wilson when I saw it in the library.

I had to work away one day last week, doing some lettering on boards, which gave me an opportunity to observe how someone else ran her business. Although she ran a much bigger, more involved business than mine, it got me reassessing my working habits.

As a freelance illustrator, I can choose what I do and who I work for, so why, so often, do I feel frustrated at not being able to settle to my work?

Self-help books are something that you have to read when you’re in a suitably open-minded mood otherwise the content washes over you and you think ‘that would be a good idea, if I ever have the time to put it into practice’. But things are settling down for me this autumn. I’ve cleared the decks by completing the illustrations for the museum and my article for the Coxley newsletter so I’m more than ready to settle down to my own work.

10, 20, 30

In this situation, chapter 4 in Stress proof your life, ‘Never procrastinate again’ seems especially appealing. Wilson explains the ‘rotation method’ devised by Mark Forster, featured in his time management book, Get Everything Done.

You divide your working session into segments;

Working down each column from left to right, I spent ten minutes on each of the activities, half an hour in total, then twenty minutes on each, finishing with three half hour sessions. I used a kitchen timer to keep track.

Coffee breaks are taken in between. There’s nothing magical about the 10, 20, 30 – you can change those times to suit yourself – and you needn’t limit it to three activities but those three reflect the three strands of my work.

One of the big advantages of being freelance is the unbroken blocks of time you can sometimes find yourself with, so why should I want to break up my day like this?

Writer’s Block

Three reasons:

  1. Book: I’m suffering from a case of writer’s block with my ‘Book’ (title omitted to save my embarrassment at having spent eight years researching it!). When I sit down to start, the task always seems too daunting. But even I can get motivated and compose myself sufficiently to spend 10 minutes on it. Then, having broken the ice and taken a break with the two other, less demanding, activities, I’m happy to put in a further 20 minutes and so on.
  2. InDesign: I always have something that I’m trying to learn; at the moment it’s the desk-top publishing program, InDesign but if I leave it until I have a free half day to devote to the subject, I can go a month or more without settling down to it. Then when I do spend several hours on one subject it can be too much. You can learn more in three twenty minute sessions than in a single one hour session.
  3. Fungi: for ‘Fungi’ read any kind of natural history drawing or writing notes for this online diary. Typically I’ll leave this until about 4.30 in the afternoon when I’ve put in a good session on my work proper (my current book or freelance work). But my natural history drawing and writing form the basis of my work. If I’m to keep things fresh, broaden my knowledge of my specialist subject and keep myself interested, I should factor it into my day.

During the couple of days that I’ve tried this regime, it’s worked well. I’m keen to keep escaping to the natural world during my lunch break. If my morning and afternoon sessions are suitably productive thanks to a spot of time management, I should be able to justify an hour’s break each day – a little over an hour as I have to fill a flask and make a sandwich (peanut butter and local honey in homemade granary, based on Ray Mears’ suggestion for his favourite fellwalking sandwich!).

Oh, and in autumn woodland, there’s more essential; a folding foam mat to sit on.

Love the job you’ve got

I think you’d get more stressed if you attempted to sample every single one of the 52 stress busting techniques in Elisabeth Wilson’s book, but I like what she says about work in the chapter on ‘How to love the job you’ve got’;

‘ask yourself how you can make it special, imbue it with your own uniqueness, breathe creativity and a little bit of love into it.’

Not a bad mission statement for me to have in mind as I work on my book.

Link: Mark Forster’s Get Everything Done. His latest is book is intriguingly titled Do It Tomorrow, which sounds like a time wasting technique but Forster has a knack of offering a fresh approach to people like me who’ve got themselves in a bit of a rut.
I can’t find a website for Elisabeth Wilson.

Queues Ahead

WHEN WE saw the flashing warnings for a queues ahead we thought that it was just the normal morning rush but unfortunately there had been an accident involving seven cars on the approach to junction 35 (the Rotherham junction of the M1, heading south). As we waited, drivers were strolling about chatting to each other while police cars, fire engines and ambulances hurtled along the hard shoulder to reach the scene.

My way of dealing with an unspecified period of waiting would normally be to draw anything from the natural world, a way of escaping from the situation, but although there is a belt of woodland along this stretch of the motorway I felt the need to keep looking ahead, just in case the traffic started moving again, which it did after an hour and half, giving me plenty of time to draw what I find a difficult subject, the cars ahead.

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To Mow a Meadow

The meadow area this afternoon, before cutting.

THE END of summer; I think that the time’s right for cutting back the small meadow area at the end of the garden. There are a few scarlet poppies but most of the flowers are over now and should have set seed.

As I empty the trimmings on the compost heap, a Robin comes so close to me that I could reach out and touch it. There are two of them, equally tame, one hopping around where I’ve mown, the other near the shed. For the moment they seem to be sharing the garden in peace.

But inevitably cutting back this grassroot jungle has left one or two creatures homeless.

I try to mow the grass in sequence of swathes that will allow frogs and toads to gradually retreat towards the hedge as I progress. I get a brief glimpse of something hopping away near the log pile but I’m afraid that a couple of large slugs aren’t so lucky. I know they’re a traditional gardener’s ‘enemy’ but I’d have rescued them if I’d spotted them first.

I can see what appear to be vole runs in the turf and I notice two tiny newts, wriggling through the debris looking for cover in crevices in the damp earth. I manage to carefully rescue one and release it under the cover of the hedge, near next door’s pond.

Hope the Robin doesn’t spot it as it hops around under the hedge.

Sketches

Tuesday: The corn on the cob has swollen a little since I last drew this sweet corn in a veg bed in the library garden a week ago.

IT’S STARTING to spot with rain as I sit on a bench waiting for the bus and sketch Ingham’s Handyman Shop at the bottom end of Queen Street, Horbury. Using a folded scrap of laser printer paper resting on my knee isn’t going to give the best results, but it’s a drawing that I wouldn’t otherwise have done.

It’s been a scrappy week altogether for drawing. This sketch of Tilly the bookshop border collie was drawn with a Q-Connect Fineliner, a 0.4mm fibre tip pen which is designed to give you 1,800 metres of writing, ruling or stencilling.

 It isn’t 100% waterproof, so I tend to use other pens, but it works well enough for quick sketches as it flows so freely, at least it does until the tip gets worn down, which happens long before it reaches the 1,800 metre mark the way I use it.

I inadvertently scanned this lightning sketch of Tilly (below) curling around in her grooming routine at a higher resolution than I intended but I like the way you can see the variety in the lines when you see it at this scale, about four times the original size:

Like all my drawings this week, it’s a bit on the scrappy side but as Tilly was moving so continuously during her grooming session there wasn’t an option for a measured drawing.

I can see that I’ve reverted to a kind of scribbly nonsense writing to represent her curly black hair on her back. You could almost read it as ‘lattélllls’.

And we have had a lot of lattés this week. After so many pen sketches, this morning at the Waterside Kitchen at Newmillerdam as we waited for our lattés I went straight into watercolour – no initial drawing, not even in pencil – sky first then, after letting that dry, the trees.

Deep in the Pond

Identifying a water beetle; this one didn’t have an English name.

I’VE HAD my Olympus Tough for a few years and it’s proved as reliable as the name suggests so on a Wakefield Naturalists’ field meeting today, when we were looking at leeches and efts (young newts) in a pond at Potteric Carr, I decided to be brave and reach down into the water to see how it would turn out.

Eft; a young newt

Hidden Depths

Leech, this one was about six inches long at full stretch!

My wildlife photographer friend John Gardner suggested using a flash. I normally prefer natural light but, in the murky depths below the pondweeds, the flash works well.

Leaning out and reaching into the water with one hand I found it difficult to avoid camera shake but at least I know that in principle the camera works underwater. Perhaps a rockpool would make a better subject.

Storrs Hill; Yorkshire Gold

OLYMPIC GOLD medallist Alistair Brownlee loves to run on the hills of West Yorkshire: “You want to be inspired by your surroundings, and you want to go out and be motivated training in nice places. I like to run anywhere around Otley Chevin.”

Horbury and Ossett have a mini-Chevin, Storrs Hill; and anyone who has struggled up to it at the end of a school cross country deserves some kind of a medal! An acre of golden gorse overlooking the Calder Valley, in Victorian times it was ‘a favourite spot for Sunday afternoon strolls’.

Storrs Hill c.1890 by Frank C.J. Cockburn, from ‘Cockburn’s Ossett Alamanac’.

Unfortunately the free access that we’ve enjoyed for over a century has been very badly abused and there’s been so much vandalism that I’m not surprised that drastic action has been taken to protect the boundary with Rock House.

The panorama path was recently restored but I was sorry to see the once grassy lumps and bumps being levelled, not only because they were part of the landscape but also because in the process I guess that the hill’s colony of Grayling butterflies has been obliterated. Graylings, which aren’t as dull as they sound, are rare and in July 2002 this was the first colony to be discovered in West Yorkshire.

In the Olympic opening ceremony a grassy mound with a stunted thorn on top was used to represent Britain. Wouldn’t it be great if Storrs Hill could remain open to public access; a place for strolls and, for those more energetic than me, for running?

Groundwork

I HAD a little longer than usual for this drawing of a gardener’s truck parked on a roundabout. It seems a long time since I did an elaborate drawing. Perhaps the time is coming when I’ll take a day off and go somewhere to draw just for fun.

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Heron and Wagtail

7.30 am; I SAW a Grey Heron flying unusually low over the roof tops and it was only 5 or 10 minutes later that I realised that it was flying so low because it was coming in to land at the edge of our garden pond; a juvenile, still in streaky grey plumage.

It soon flew off when it saw use looking at it. Hope it didn’t eat too many of our frogs and newts during its visit.

A minute later an equally infrequent visitor to our garden had taken its place by the pond; a Grey Wagtail bobbed and pecked around the pond edge.

Oak

I THINK of English Oaks like this as being great galleons of trees with masses of dense dark foliage but as I sketched this one in wet-on-wet watercolour I realised that there’s a lot of empty space in that canopy.

This is the last page in my little travel booklet sketchbook and I’m now going to make myself a European passport-sized sketchbook, which is one centimetre shorter than the traditional Moleskine notebook. That should fit snugly into my mini-art-bag, which is intended as a passport wallet.

I’ll be using a whiter paper than this, which will make it easier to scan but I’ve enjoyed using this Hahnemuehle sketch paper. It’s more absorbent than the cartridge that I’m used to so watercolour washes soak in almost instantly, instead of lying on the surface. It gives a mat granular quality to the watercolour. This isn’t all that obvious in my same size scans but you can get an idea from this close up of a part of my drawing just 18 millimetres across in which you can see the individual fibres of the paper.

Newmillerdam from the Lakeside Kitchen.

Cool Wet Summer

I DON’T FEEL so bad about the lacklustre performance of the vegetables in our garden when I hear that farmers and growers are having exactly the same problems; cool, waterlogged soils and, even for those growing under glass, low levels of light. Supermarkets are having to order vegetables from abroad to make up for the lack of homegrown product.

But whatever the weather there’s going to be some vegetable that finds the weather suits it. Our leeks and onions which would have suffered in a drought are doing reasonably well but our beans and courgettes are taking their time to get established. Hopefully they’ll catch up as the season progresses.

Ironically this year I decided to try installing a watering system for the greenhouse so that when we go away our neighbour won’t need to come around to water. I didn’t manage to set it up, being short of a particular type of hose connector but, as it happened, I wouldn’t have needed it as when we were away in the Lake District last week the sun probably appeared for only a few hours during the whole 5 day period then the day after we returned their was a month’s worth of rain in a day.

The sunken path in the greenhouse filled up with water and the watering cans ended up floating around. Even the raised bed which the buckets of tomatoes stand on was an inch or two deep in water.