Mussel and Barnacles

sketch

We did a bit of beachcombing along the strandline at Bridlington yesterday, between award-winning North Beach Fish & Chips and a champion roast latte at the local Costa.

mussel shell

Most of the mussel shells were small single valves, broken off at the wider end, but a few remained complete and still connected, including this one, partly encrusted by barnacles.

It’s a good time of year to go back to Agathe Haevermans Drawing and Painting The Seashore. It’s rare for me not to start a drawing in pen and ink, but, going back to Havermans’ examples, which are so evocative of summer strolls along the strandline, I thought that I’d try out her techniques.

Diana’s Sheds

Catching up with our friend Diana is hot work this morning, sitting in her conservatory overlooking the back garden, in contrast to midsummer’s day when there were a few patches of frost in the Dales and our thermostat switched on the central heating for the first time in months.

Green Alkanet

green alkanet

Growing by the entrance lodge near the war memorial at Newmillerdam Country Park, green alkanet, a native of south-west Europe, was grown in cottage gardens. The name alkanet comes from the Arabic name or henna as the plant, especially the roots, can be boiled to produce a cherry red dye, used by the Victorians in lip balm.

The Triffids at Kew

Triffids on vacation.

My homemade card for Simon is my tribute to Gary Larson’s cartoon ‘The Holsteins visit the Grand Canyon’. Larson later wished he’d done a whole series and sent the family off to different locations, ‘such as Three Mile Island’.

I was tempted to replicate his gag of one of the Holstein calves ‘doing the old hoof-behind-the-head trick to its sibling’ but Larson concluded that this was just too subtle in the original and that most people (myself included) read it as one of the calves wearing a ribbon. Even knowing the artist’s intention, I still see it as one of the calves wearing a bow!

It’s 5 or 6 years since we last got to walk around Kew Gardens with our nephew Simon, so I hope we can join him again there before too long.

The Day of the Triffids

Continue reading The Triffids at Kew
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Boxing Clever

scale model

At this rate I’m going to spend more time working on my scale model than on the actual exhibit in Horbury’s Redbox Gallery, but it’s better to sort things out at this stage, rather than hope for the best when it comes to installing it.

rough sketches
steps sketch

I’ve thought about using recycled materials only, but there’s a slight risk that, although the box is watertight, if we had a spell of really wet weather, it might get humid in there, which would warp the corrugated cardboard that I had in mind. Graham, from the Civic Society who maintain the box, suggests thin marine ply, but that’s going to be difficult to cut out when I draw my cast of characters and scenery.

So, as illustrated in my scale model above, I think that the most practical solution would be white foam board, which is very light, dimensionally stable and much easier to cut. Half a dozen A1 boards would be as much as I’d need.

Making and Exhibition of Myself

Or there’s the conceptual approach.

‘Will you just stand in it and (try to) look interesting?’ asked my sister on Facebook.

cartoon character
storks sketch

Brilliant idea, here’s me practicing my ‘interesting’ look.

Should work like a charm.

Radula Marks

radula marks

I always slip my Olympus Tough camera into my pocket when I set out to work in the garden and, even before I’d started repotting plants in the greenhouse, I noticed these zig-zag patterns on the seed tray I was using.

radula marks

They look like the marks left by a snail scraping away a film of algae from the surface of the tray.

Probably one of the garden snails that I’ve evicted from the greenhouse on several occasions.

Lagoon

lagoon
Original sketch about 3×3 inches square.

It’s been a good year for the pink-footed geese at St Aidan’s. Two families swam by along one of the drains with a total of 16 goslings between the two pairs.

tree

Not so visible were swallows, which I expected to be zipping around above us during our walk, but the warden explained that they do seem to come and go and that the sand martins were still busy at their colony in the sand martin wall.

The kestrels have yet to hatch any young and it’s possible that a grey squirrel seen on the jib of the huge dragline excavator where they nest has done a bit of nest-robbing. There’s still time for them to start again.

George Stephenson

George Stephenson
Stephenson

George Stephenson was the engineer of our local stretch of the Manchester and Leeds Railway (1840), so he deserves a walk-on part in my Redbox Gallery show. Perhaps that should be a swagger-on part because, not surprisingly as the designer of the Locomotion, he was proud of his achievements and perhaps a bit too keen to keep telling people about them.

This quote from The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography gives a good impression of what it would have been like to meet him:

To the end of his life he remained an inveterate and dogmatic deliverer of advice, often while waiting at railway stations telling engineers how to improve the efficiency of their locomotives, and demonstrating to labourers the most effective way to use a shovel and barrow.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Out of the Box

Redbox model

My first one-man show for over 25 years . . . and I’ve got to fill the entire gallery! The good news is that it’s the Redbox Gallery on Queen Street, Horbury: the box that appears on the cover of my local history booklet Around Old Horbury.

I’ve seen documentaries about how the Royal Academy prepares for a big show and it involves making a cardboard model of the gallery space, so here goes . . .

High Summer

Ebor Way

It’s a perfect midsummer’s day for our walk from Wetherby alongside the River Wharfe, past Flint Mill Grange to Thorp Arch but we appreciate the shade of the Sustrans route along the old railway on the return leg.

wayside birds

Each bird has its favoured habitat. The song post for the yellowhammer in open farmland is on a phone line in contrast the blackcap makes a call that sounds like pebbles clacking together from the foliage of a tree in a deep, shady railway cutting. The warbler (willow?) prospects elegantly in the shrubs of a burgeoning hedgerow while the red kite swoops through parkland as we reach Thorp Arch.