Meadow Brown

meadow brown

A slightly battered meadow brown feeds on creeping thistle flowers at the edge of the meadow in The Pinewoods between Harlow Carr and the Valley Gardens, Harrogate. They’ve been mowing the meadow this morning, leaving the hay in rows to dry in the sun.

Valley Gardens

Management in The Pinewoods and at the top end of Valley Gardens aims to increase the biodiversity of woodland, meadow and parkland but as you get nearer the town there’s a Victorian formality to the carefully tended carpet bedding.

coleus
Coleus

The displays of scarlet geraniums and variegated coleus aren’t going to win any prizes for subtlety, but, along with the restored pavilions, park shelters and the Old Magnesia Well Pump Room, they’re a nostalgic delight.

coffee and scone at the Palm Court Cafe

Not surprisingly, as we’re into the summer holidays, there’s a one-hour queue at Betty’s Tearooms (both in town and up at RHS Harlow Carr) so, following a tip-off from our friends Roger and Sue, teashop connoisseurs, we headed to the Palm Court Cafe, above Farrah’s Olde Sweet Shop, for a latte and apricot-and-almond scone, and I drew the White Hart Hotel across the road.

White Hart Hotel, Harrogate

Goose Feather

Out of the goose feather quills that I’ve cut, my favourite is the thinnest and most flexible, so it’s quite suited to the curvy shapes of ducks, willow branches and alder leaves, drawn this from a fishing platform at Newmillerdam.

duck

But it isn’t practical for field work because the ink goes on so thickly that I can’t close the sketchbook. Over three hours later I’ve put it on the scanner and blots of ink have stuck to the glass.

alder

Even carrying back my open sketchbook I managed to leave my thumbprint on the wet ink of the drawing. It’s part of what makes drawing with a quill more spontaneous than drawing with my usual fountain pen, but for field sketches, that’s what I’ll be going back to.

Maris Peer

drawing potatoes

Just harvested half a row – that’s two or three feet across our raised beds – of Maris Peer second early potatoes and decided they’d be a suitable subject for attempting to draw with a Canada goose quill.

quill and feather ink and wash drawing of Maris Peer potatoes.

I tried using the feathered end of one of the quills to add the wash. This is Noodler’s Black Ink.

I’ve been reading books on Hokusai and Quentin Blake, who was one of the tutors during my time on the Illustration course at the Royal College of Art. Birds feature a lot in Blake’s work and he’ll sometimes use a feather to draw and paint with.

Red-tailed Bumblebee

Red-tailed bumblebee

No prizes for guessing that this is a red-tailed bumblebee, Bombus lapidarius, but it’s different to a regular worker, as this is a male, with a yellow collar and cap and a foxy-coloured ‘tail’ that’s more orange-red than scarlet. On a dull afternoon at Wrenthorpe on Friday, it was doing what drones do best, hanging around taking a break on our friends’ herbaceous border alongside another equally unmotivated male.

Helophilus Hoverfly

Hoverfly sketch
Hoverfly, Helophilus pendulus, on Himalayan balsam leaf.

In most hoverflies you can tell which is the male by looking at the eyes: in males there’s no gap between them, presumably an adaptation because the males spend so much time hovering, keeping an eye out for females or rival males. Helophilus hoverflies are different: the male does have a gap between the eyes, so you have to look at the tip of the abdomen. In the female this is pointed while in the male its rounded off with a genital capsule.

So this is a male Helophilus pendulus, a species name that translates as ‘pendent sun-lover’, appropriate as in summer male hoverflies typically hover, more or less on the spot, as if suspended by an invisible thread.

Fat-hen

fat-hen and sowthistle
Fat-hen and Perennial Sowthistle

On our walk around Carr Gate, near Wakefield, yesterday, fat-hen, a common weed, was growing on a grass verge alongside a slip road and perennial sowthistle at the side of the track by a small wood.

fat-hen
Fat-hen

Fat-hen, Chenopodium album, is in the goosefoot and orache family. The similar-looking common orache also grows as a weed in similar habitats and is also typical of open ground by the sea, so it can be found on roadside verges which get salt spray from de-icing.

Small White

Small white butterflies fluttering around a patch of lavender. Small whites have two spots on each forewing but in males, as in my sketch, the second spot can be indistinct.

small white butterfly
Published
Categorized as Drawing

Plain Portraits

Liz White

After my woodcut experiment in Adobe Illustrator, l’ve gone for more of a lithographic effect for these portraits, simplifying the tones in my original pen and wash drawings into ragged-edged blocks. You don’t get the texture of the original watercolour wash but it’s implied in those irregular edges.

This is Liz White in character as Fiona Grayson in Chris Lang’s ITV crime drama Unforgotten, drawn from a photograph in the Radio Times in March.

George Stephenson

George Stephenson
George Stephenson

It can be disappointing if you’ve painted a subtle watercolour and the nuances are lost on the printed page. A reduced tonal range might make for a more successful printed image. I’ll have to try it.

George Stephenson was all set to have a walk-on part in my current Addingford show at the Redbox Gallery, Horbury, but he was upstaged by Stan Barstow’s Joby, so perhaps I can use him in a print publication, looking suitably robust in the Image Trace treatment that I’ve given him in Illustrator.

Hepworth

Barbara Hepworth
Barbara Hepworth

I’m considering printing the series I drew of Wakefield Women in History and the graphic feel would work well as I’m trying to keep the subject brisk and lively, rather than making it archival and authoritative, like an illustrated Dictionary of National Biography.

Dame Mary Bolles

Dame Mary Bolles

Another Wakefield Woman in History, Dame Mary Bolles, the formidable Stuart-era lady of Heath Old Hall, also lends herself to this treatment. It’s easy for me to go for too much detail in a historical costume but what I want in this series is to sum up remarkable lives in broad brushstrokes.

Woodcut

nature studies, woodcut effect in Illustrator

These are my sketches from the weekend given the Image Trace treatment in the desktop version of Adobe Illustrator as I was after a lino-cut or woodcut effect. It gives my pen and watercolour natural form a graphic chunkiness.

grapevine

So how about the grapevine I drew yesterday? Would lend itself to the sort of woodcut-inspired design that you see on a wine label? No, it doesn’t have the graphic presence of the bluebell stem, I’d need to draw it again with the context of the design in mind and make it a bit bolder.

feather

This wood pigeon feather works better as it’s a simpler form. I could imagine using it for a logo.

The Nectar Thief

bumblebee on salvia

At Cannon Hall garden centre, this bumblebee was busy visiting the flowers of a salvia but instead of entering the flower in the usual way it was using the back entrance, checking out those holes nibbled in the back of the flower and bypassing the stamens and stigmas. It occasionally paused, apparently to do a bit of nibbling itself, perhaps to enlarge an existing hole or start another.

Grapevine

grapevine

At Hilary’s Village Store in Cawthorne we sit under a vine laden with bunches of small green grapes. We’re told that this vine is a cutting from a desert grape grown in a large south-facing greenhouse in Scotland. There the grapes were edible – although they were best eaten outside in the garden so that you could spit out the seeds – but here, outside and north-facing, they’re not going to ripen enough.

scone

However we didn’t come here for the grapes, in a village tea garden it had to be cream scones with our lattes.

Link

Hilary’s @ Cawthorne