Trees at the Hospice today and the Showcase Cinema at Birstall yesterday.
Trees in March
Category: Trees
Hospice Cherry Trees
Flowering cherry (or some other kind of Prunus?) at the hospice this morning.
Blackbirds are singing, wood pigeons occasionally perch in the branches but the most remarkable bird was a red kite, seen from the car park.
Crystal Dendrite
In a flagstone just outside John’s patio windows, these dendritic crystals look like the fossil of a tree but they’re actually crystals – perhaps of manganese as they’re black – that have grow across the layers of this flagstone, in a similar from to the ice crystals in a snowflake.
Cherries and Hawthorn
Cherries and hawthorn boughs at the Hospice this morning.
Ficus
My thanks to Beth and Ian who ran the Art Tour: Drawing from Observation at the Apple Store in Leeds on Thursday morning. We headed for Trinity Kitchen and settled down to draw using Procreate on the latest version of the iPad Pro. This was the central tree, I think that it’s a weeping fig, Ficus benjamina, with a ‘trunk’ of intertwined stems.
Cherry at the Hospice
The cherry trees surrounding the Hospice are all the same age and currently they’re being lopped back. Hopefully they’ll burst into blossom again, but we might have to wait until next year until they’ve fully recovered.
Trees at the Hospice
Trees and shrubs at the Prince of Wales Hospice: hawthorn, sycamore (?) and elder.
Oak Leaves
Oak, white deadnettle and so far unidentified leaf (cherry?) by the canal near the Navigation Inn yesterday.
Maple
Maple keys, botanically samaras, and leaves. Each winged seed was connected to the stem by a thin tube. You can see remnants of these tubes in my drawing, one on the seed end of the maple key on the right and the stub of one on the nearest stem.
Lightning Sketches
Lightning sketches from an engagement party, Normanton Market and a lightning-struck birch tree by the car park at the Seed Room, Overton. You can see the split running the full length of the trunk of one of these trees.
Screen Mirroring
Clip Studio Paint on the iPad: experimenting with adding colour.
I’m also trying screen mirroring so that if I’m working in, for example, Photoshop on my iMac, and I’ve got something intricate to do, like erasing background texture on a scan of a sketchbook page, I can switch over to working with the Apple Pencil on my iPad.
It would be possible to do a whole drawing this way but with Adobe Fresco, Clip Studio Paint and even a version of Photoshop on the iPad there’s no need to, I can draw directly.
I haven’t noticed any delay when I’m drawing using screen mirroring; the marks appear in real time.
Graphics Pad
For years I’ve used as Wacom Intuos 4 graphics pad for erasing or drawing in Photoshop on the iMac but with the latest Apple operating system, Monterey, Wacom no longer support that model. Working on the iPad should be more flexible, once I’ve learned the ins and outs of it, as I can see the iMac screen on the iPad. The graphics pad was blank, so I got used to drawing on the desktop and seeing the results appear on the iMac.