Category: Trees

Willow Island Logo

logo sketch

As I walk up Coxley Valley on a misty morning, I’m surrounded autumn leaves so, thinking about a new logo for Willow Island Editions, I decide that leaves might have more graphic impact than the tree-on-an-island logo that I currently use.

I pick up four crack willow leaves from alongside where the beck splits, creating the willow island that I used as a name for my self-publishing imprint.

A windswept version might have a lively look but the logo also needs a solid hint of authority as I want readers to feel that they can trust the instructions in my walks booklets.

“In nature you’re surrounded simple but stunning copyright-free design”

tree canop
Willow Island Logo: Willow Island Logo

As I sat with a latte and flapjack by the The Little Acorn, the coffee cabin at the top end of the wood, I felt that their pun of a logo shows that simpler can be better.

A woodcut-style ink drawing of the willow-leaf ‘W’ would be more punchy than using the soft autumn colours of the leaves themselves. It would also hint at my hand-drawn approach.

path amongst larches

The reason that I’m rethinking the look of Willow Island Editions is because I’m transferring my 27-year old website, www.willowisland.co.uk, from regular HTML to WordPress.

woodland path

I find that a quiet walk in the woods in the perfect way to clear my mind a bit and focus on design. In nature you’re surrounded simple but stunning copyright-free design.

Eucalyptus

A eucalyptus with long strips of sloughed bark in a plantation of eucalyptus close to the former Woodhorn Colliery, Ashington, Northumberland.

I find it hard to believe that this is the regular way a eucalyptus would shed its bark, has this tree been struck by a lightning?

Upper Midgley

belt of trees

At the top end of Coxley Valley this belt of trees runs close to the 130 metre, 425 feet, contour. I’m told that if you’re here early in the morning you’ll see roe deer.

Birch

birch

New Hall Wood, Midgley, 40℉, 5℃: The holly sapling next to this twin trunk of silver birch already has a stem of honeysuckle climbing up it, twisting loosely anti-clockwise as seen from above. As you’d expect, the patch of moss is on the shady north-facing side of the tree.

Great to be back drawing on location. Robin singing from a holly bush, crows cawing. As I attach my sketchbook to my drawing board it drops onto damp moss, leaving a greenish smear across the page, providing a patina for my drawing.

Golden Hornet

While pruning the Golden Hornet crab apple I became aware that someone was watching me. Directly overhead a buzzard was hanging in the air, about 100 feet above me.

At the top of the stepladder in the crown of the tree, I had a wood pigeon’s eye-view of our newly-built raised beds.

The Weeping Birch

sketchbook page

Stan Barstow Memorial Garden, Queen Street, Horbury, 2.30 pm, 65℉, 17℃: As soon as I sit on a bench beneath a weeping silver birch, aphids and plant bugs start trundling about on my knee and over my sketchbook page.

Maple, Ash and Sumac

ash

After recent wind, rain and the first overnight frost, next door’s maple is going down in a blaze of ochre yellow and one of the ash trees in the wood is now devoid of leaves.

blackbird

This morning two blackbirds were fighting it out over the ever-diminishing supply of sumac berries. When a song thrush flies in the spray of berries it lands on instantly detaches, plummeting to the ground and, for a moment, taking the startled thrush with it.

sparrowhawk

The small male sparrowhawk is back, again swooping down by the feeders and then pausing to perch on the hedge and again failing to catch any prey.

geese

This morning a distant chevron of geese headed down the Calder Valley but at the weekend a skein of twenty plus was heading in the opposite direction.