Dust Sheet

dustsheet

I often end up drawing modular chairs when I’m in a waiting room but today I’m in luck, the decorators are here and they’ve left a folded dust sheet and a little still life of carpet tiles and cardboard cartons stacked in a bin. I can get absorbed in the deep folds of the sheet just as I might if I was up in the Dales drawing a rock face. Why should a dust sheet make a more fascinating subject than a modular chair? Writing in a different context, author Lia Leendertz suggests a reason in her article Our garden, our refuge in this month’s The Garden:

‘When I felt calm and happy there, it may have been because my garden contains plenty of ‘fascination’ – a not-very-scientific-sounding, but entirely scientific concept which suggests that or brains are calmed by certain shapes, such as unfurling fern fronds and the centres of aeoniums.’

Lia Leendertz, The Garden, December 2020

Link

Lia Leendertz, garden writer and author living in Bristol

RHS, the Royal Horticultural Society publish The Garden magazine

Tai-Shan

Tai-Shan

Dannii Minogue was our model for Sky Arts’ last one-hour live session of Portrait Artist of the Week. I wanted to go back to my regular sketchbook style, the quick sketches that I’d do if we were watching people go by from a cafe, rather than building up a single drawing, as I did in previous weeks.

I struggled with Dannii but presenter and portrait painter Tai-Shan Schierenberg worked better as a quick drawing. I’ll miss the weekly sessions but I feel that I’m getting geared up to travelling around with a sketchbook and hope that before too long in the new year we’ll have more freedom to travel.

sketches

Royal Gala

Royal Gala
king

“Uneasy lies the head that wears the throne.”

W. C. Seller & R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That

Another fruity character, this time a Royal Gala, so I’ve gone for an apple-shaped monarch suffering the after-effects of a Tudor banquet. This was as far as I got with him, as he didn’t have the same a-peel (see what I did there?) as Cavendish the banana-inspired butler.

One-point Perspective

perspective drawing

It’s back to the drawing board with the online course that I started last summer, Mattias Adolfsson’s The Art of Sketching: Transform Your Doodles into Art. This was the technical challenge, to draw a re-imagined version of your room in one-point perspective. Mattias suggested that once we’d established the framework, we should add a few hand-drawn touches but I decided that I’d like to stick with the drafting head on my parallel motion drawing board for all the right angles, adding the perspective lines with a ruler.

Acorns

oakwood

This mixed oak wood at the top end of Coxley Valley is typical of woods on Coal Measures. In the background there are planted conifers: crops of larch and Corsican pine have been planted here, adjacent to Earnshaw’s Saw Mill, although some of them have been badly damaged by grey squirrels.

oak leaves

Even on our short walk around the wood, there’s always something to see. We got a chance to squeeze in a quick visit a couple of days ago and I was determined not to stop to take photographs, but when I saw these frost-rimmed oak leaves, I couldn’t resist getting out my iPhone.

acorns

There are so many acorns this year that in places you crunch over them and they look like pea gravel strewn along the edges of the path. The resident greys haven’t been able to squirrel them away and the flock of wood pigeons, hanging around at the corner of the wood this morning, has come nowhere near making serious inroads into the enormous quantities on offer.

pigeon feather
jay

Wood pigeons are great acorn eaters but jays are the real specialists. We’ve often seen a pair of them flying from a large oak, crops bulging with acorns. On this morning’s walk we hear them screeching somewhere in the background but we’ve yet to spot them here, collecting and caching.

holly

Berries are few and far between on the hollies, which provide some winter cover in the shrub layer of the wood.

earthball

There isn’t a lot of fungus around at the moment but I spotted these common earthballs, Scleroderma citrinum, growing amongst the leaf litter at the top corner of the wood.

badger scrape
badger

What made this scrape amongst the roots of a larch tree?

  • A squirrel? They’d usually make a neater job, they’re discrete in their excavations as they hide and recover acorns
  • A rabbit? Apparently there are some in the wood, so it’s a possibility
  • A fox? Again, you’d expect to see signs of them
  • A badger? Well, yes, I’d go for badger because of the scatter of debris. To me it looks as if it must have been a robust animal doing the digging. There are smaller excavations dotted along the side of the path. I can imagine a badger snuffling and scraping on its way through the wood.

Skelton Lake eBook

Skelton Lake e-book

I’m delighted that my latest book Skelton Lake is now available in 51 territories worldwide, available from Apple Books as a free download. It may just be 11 pages of ‘wild flowers, fungi and autumn photographed on a muddy walk’ around the lake but it looks good on an iPad or desktop, so I feel that I’ve got to grips with the process of designing and publishing and I can tackle something more ambitious.

You should be able to find it on the Apple Books Store by searching for ‘Skelton Lake’ or my name as author. Its Apple ID, the equivalent of the ISBN, is 1542460295.

Skelton Lake in the Apple Books store and - 'Common Puffball' page - as it appears when you open it in the Books app.

Skelton Lake in the Apple Books store and – ‘Common Puffball’ page – as it appears when you open it in the Books app.

Links

Skelton Lake eBook link

Skelton Lake eBook, PDF version (produced using Adobe InDesign)

Apple Books app for iPad and iPhone

Out of the Woods

birch bracket
Birch Polypore or Razorstrop Fungus, Piptoporus betulinus, on silver birch at the top end of Newmillerdam.

Last month’s lockdown and the new Tier 3 restrictions staring today mean we can’t go far, so we’ve been looking for walks closer to home: yesterday a woodland walk at the top end of Coxley valley, today a circuit of the lake at Newmillerdam.

goosanders

There are four female goosanders at the sleepy lagoon at the top end of the lake and hundreds of black-headed gulls (none with ‘black’ heads at this time of year) hanging around in the willowy backwaters of the western shore. All the regulars are here – mallards, tufted duck, coot, moorhen, heron, cormorant and great-crested grebe – but conspicuously absent are what are normally the noisiest birds on the lake, the Canada geese. I suspect that they’re still in the area, perhaps heading for larger lakes such as Anglers.

Black-headed gulls
Black-headed gulls

About fifteen years ago, one of Newmillerdam’s trees left me scarred for life: as I stooped under the leafy branch of a sycamore, I gouged my scalp on the sharp end of a trimmed back branch. This morning I should have been at Pinderfields having the small wart that has grown over the wound removed, but the Dermatology Department rang me at breakfast-time to say that because of a positive test for Covid at the hospital, my minor operation has been postponed.

We’re not out of the woods yet.

Cavendish

fruit and cartoon characters

The Cavendish banana accounts for 47% of world production and makes the perfect name for a butler, especially as the Cavendish originated from the hothouses of Chatsworth House, the ultimate setting for a country house murder mystery.

I try to catch the individual character of a fruit as I draw it, so how would I bring that out as a cartoon character? The Royal Gala apple made me think of an overindulged Henry VIII character, the lemon of Poirot’s secretary Miss Lemon but it was that last banana, with a deferential hunched stoop and a slightly over-ripe seediness that made me think of an imperious but dodgy butler from a creaky 1930s murder mystery.

His colours are taken straight from the banana my watercolour sketch, using the Photoshop eye-dropper tool. Only the flesh tone needed lightening.

Elderman

Elder man

“Respect your elders?! Don’t make me laugh.” grumbles Sam Bucus, village elder, when I bump into him on our Monday morning stroll in Illingworth Park, “Hawthorn, blackthorn, field maple . . . they’re all included in Doctor Hooper’s hedgerow dating system except, you guessed it, elder! We’re the forgotten shrubs in the hedge.”

“And did I tell you about the time I auditioned for the part of Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy? Too wooden, indeed!”

elder man

Everything in this Photoshop collage was photographed in the Park, this time on a rather dull grey morning, which actually proved useful when constructing the figure as I didn’t have any conspicuous highlights and shadows to deal with. To tie him in with the background, I added a transparent shadow layer, using greens and browns taken with the eye-dropper tool from my background photograph instead of the neutral grey that I might normally use for shadows.

I did consider toning down and blurring the background but decided I’d just stick the original so that the whole thing looked like a regular digital snapshot and didn’t look too stage managed.

I stuck with the old elder boughs growing alongside the allotment fence and I’m pleased with the sinewy anatomical look they give him.

Published
Categorized as Drawing