4.55 pm; Blackbirds are alarming as the gloom of sunset fades out the remaining colour in our back garden. Not that we can see the sun setting; it’s remained cloudy with varying degrees of gloom all day.
In contrast to the twilight mood, the golden hornet crab apple by the pond is bubbling with pale yellow fruits, festooned with golden baubles.
In movement and dance, school children are asked to be a tree. What kind of tree would you be if you decided to be an autumnal golden hornet?
Although it is stretching to the skies in classic tree-mime fashion, those awkwardly bent limbs suggest that it might be attempting to support the firmament – like the Viking cosmic tree – rather than reaching for the sky in hopeful supplication.
A couple of broken paving slabs that I’ve leant against the raised bed give the impression in my sketch that the crab might have used those scraggly limbs to scrabble and scrooge up from an underground lair, like Mole in The Wind in the Willows.
Dripped in Ink
Drawn, or rather dripped, in bamboo pen using Daler-Rowney Calli waterproof ink, the drawing is so blotty that it will take days to dry, so I’m photographing it rather than laying it on the scanner. And thank goodness I didn’t use my regular sketchbook and put that out of action.
As I got inky fingers opening the bottle, I thumbprinted the basic shape of the main stem on the blank page before I started the drawing. I decided that might take away the some of the scariness of the blank white sheet while working against the clock.
I started at at five to four and called it a day after fifteen minutes.
I’ve got a chance to linger over coffee at a table overlooking the cathedral precinct listening to a song I’ve never heard before, but which could provide a theme-tune for the urban sketcher;
‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag And bury them in the sea . . .’
Sung by Lloyd Wade in the song by Eliza Doolittle. In my case, I can pack up my troubles in my A5 art-bag.
A friend spots me and tells me that she’s finding watercolour painting a wonderful escape from some ongoing medical problems in her family that she’s been coping with for years.
Nothing could be more therapeutic than sitting here with a latte, a toasted teacake and a sketchbook.
Maple syrup pancakes, a mocha and a maple tree. A suitably leafy outlook for my morning break. The man with the blue gloves is about to shampoo the driveway of McDonald’s, here at the Cathedral Retail Park, Wakefield.
I added the red sign as a spot of colour contrast then realised that it’s in the wrong place; Staples office supplies store is over to the right but they’ve just put up their sign on the store that was left empty following the collapse of electrical retailer Comet a year ago.
Rather than abandon the Wainwright sketchbook with the absorbent paper, I’ve been looking through my pens, trying a Mitsubishi Uni Power Tank ballpoint for these tree tops and a Sharpie Liquid Pencil for the Mac’s maple.
I’m longing to settle down to some real drawing with more sympathetic drawing materials but at the moment I’ve got a lot of waiting rooms and wards to visit so it’s a good opportunity to finish off my current so-so sketchbook.
9.47 a.m.; A skein of forty Canada geese approach, honking as they go, from the north-west. The lead bird, followed by the rest of the chevron, has to make a considerable effort to climb to clear the power lines above me.
Grey willow, Salix cinerea, grows in damp acid soils, often, has here near ponds. It has a low spreading habit. A typical grey willow leaf tapers gradually from near the tip towards the base. The goat willow which you can find in similar habitats typically has a more rounded leaf.
I’d been presented with a blue ballpoint pen at Horbury Street Fair so I used it to add a tone to represent the foliage of the Turkey oak in Barbara’s sister’s front garden.
It was something of a family day as I’d drawn this when we called on her brother this morning. In between I was keen to head for the creperie stall at the Street Fair but, you know what these events are like, we kept getting held up by friends we hadn’t seen for months!
But the banana and Nutella crepe was worth waiting for.
Ten years ago Danny Gregory was with us for the weekend and we sat and drew at Horbury Street Fair.
WE SAW two great-crested grebes the last time we walked by the lake at Newmillerdam but I’m sorry not to spot them today. I hope they’re nesting in some hidden backwater. Much in evidence are the black-headed gulls, every one of them now in breeding plumage.
In our back garden this afternoon the grey male sparrowhawk zooms into the bottom of the hedge. Twenty or thirty seconds later he pops up again from our neighbour’s side arcing over so swiftly that for a moment he’s flying upside down.
Emerging unsuccessfully again from our neighbour’s side he leaves the hedge with nothing, sitting for a few minutes on next door’s sumac. If it wasn’t being anthropomorphic, I’d say that there was distinct look of grumpiness in his hunched silhouette.
He flies over the corner of the meadow to the wood, putting up a flock of goldfinches and sending the wood pigeons into clattering panic from the ivy-covered ash trees.
The ivy berries on next door’s front garden fence must be at their best because for much of the day a wood pigeon is contentedly eating them.
The blue tits are showing an interest again in the nestbox on the back of house.
With the snow gone and the pheasants and wood pigeons trampling the border beneath the bird feeder I was beginning to think that all mole activity had ceased. Late this afternoon the mole started re-excavating its tunnel system and we watched as it piled up the earth by the edge of the lawn, obviously coming very near the surface but never once showing itself.
IT’S NOT LOOKING good for our Ash trees. The fungus, Chalara fraxinea, that has killed around 90% of Ash trees in Denmark and in other parts of Europe has spread here, with cases reported from several locations in Yorkshire. It’s hard to think of this familiar view from my studio without those two tall Ashes on the edge of the wood, the one on the right thickly covered in ivy. As I type this two Magpies have flown into its top branches.
But two large Ashes at the entrance to the woods have blown down since we moved here in the 1980s and a third was felled before it got a chance to fall on the newly built houses but the wood doesn’t take long to rejuvenate itself and fill in the gaps.
Ash saplings soon colonised a rock fall in the old quarry in the wood; they prefer well drained, even rubbly soils, for example the steep little roadside embankment leading to the bridge over the railway at the bottom of Quarry Hill.
On damper ground by the stream that runs through the wood, Crack Willows are the dominant tree although a level meadow area, long neglected, has been transformed to Alder woodland in the few decades that we’ve been here. Horse riders used to break into a canter on this short stretch of open level ground but now what’s left of what was once a conspicuous path has almost disappeared in the thicket of new trees.
It’s hard to imagine the West Yorkshire countryside without Ash trees – they grow like weeds in the right habitat, and their wavy limbs are a wayward contrast to the dominant sturdy but rather dour Sessile Oak. I feel that they’ve got a central role in north country folklore because of their place in Viking mythology.
My guess would be that if they go Sycamores would move in to replace them in most situations. Sycamores have similar ‘helicopter’ seeds; samara is the exotic sounding botanical name for this kind of winged nut. Perhaps in more open areas Silver Birch would take the place of Ash as a coloniser.
WHEN I collected this Sweet Chestnut at Newmillerdam a few weeks ago, the spiky case was still green and the nuts, barely ripe, were just starting to peep out as the fruit started to split.
The little necks sticking up from each nut are the remains of the stigma and style – the female parts of the Sweet Chestnut flower. The male part of the flower, a small bobbly ‘catkin’ usually gests detached from the ripening fruit.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
4.55 pm; Blackbirds are alarming as the gloom of sunset fades out the remaining colour in our back garden. Not that we can see the sun setting; it’s remained cloudy with varying degrees of gloom all day.
Drawn, or rather dripped, in bamboo pen using Daler-Rowney Calli waterproof ink, the drawing is so blotty that it will take days to dry, so I’m photographing it rather than laying it on the scanner. And thank goodness I didn’t use my regular sketchbook and put that out of action.
