Green Tomatoes

green tomatoes

It was raining yesterday afternoon, so I sheltered in the greenhouse to draw, positioning myself to avoid most of the drips.

Our beef and plum tomatoes are slow to ripen but the last three months of the meteorological summer have been well below average for hours of sunshine, so that’s not surprising. Rather than grow them in buckets of potting compost as we normally do, we’ve got them growing directly in the soil of the raised bed in the greenhouse, which I refreshed by swopping bucketfuls of soil from our veg beds and adding plenty of our garden compost.

It’s like a jungle in there. The plants are much lusher than they would have been in pots, but we need to strip off some of the leaves now to allow the light and air in to ripen the fruits.

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Categorized as Garden Tagged

Crackenedge

Crackenedge
compass app

Crackenedge from the terrace at The Union restaurant, at the Redbrick Mill, Batley. Pigeons fly up from the roof but we don’t see what caused the commotion. A wasp briefly takes an interest in our strawberry jam.

Crackenedge, according to the Ordnance Survey app on my phone, rises to 138m, which is 250 feet above where we’re sitting. That’s about the height of Wakefield Cathedral’s spire, the tallest in Yorkshire at 247 feet, so Crackenedge is quite a landscape feature.

I’ve carried a compass/thermometer key fob attached to my art bag for years. According to that it’s now 20C, 68F, which sounds about right, however the compass is now completely inaccurate, wavering around unconvincingly, but I discover that I’ve got an app for that on my phone too, which not only gives me true north but also latitude and longitude. How did I manage without it?

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Categorized as Drawing

Adventuridge Ultra-light Camping Chair

chair

This camping chair from Aldi folds up ingeniously into a handy tote bag but as I’m 6ft 4 and almost 180 pounds, I’m pushing it a bit beyond its limits. As I sat down in it, one of the back legs pushed its way into the lawn and I lurched backwards. I had to dig out the rubber cap that got stuck six inches deep in the turf.

It’s not going to be stable enough for the rough ground where I’m likely to want to sit and draw.

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Categorized as Drawing

Ripening Peppers

Peppers

We haven’t grown peppers for years but one of our neighbours offered us seeds so we thought we’d give it another try. Like our tomatoes, they’re taking their time to ripen.

Dishevelled Sunflower

sunflower

A suitably dishevelled end-of-the-season sunflower which has grown from a spilt sunflower heart from the nearby feeders and which we’re now leaving to go to seed for the birds.

The feeders attract the local sparrowhawks and yesterday fluffy breast feathers were scattered across the lawn and the pond, probably marking a kill, the victim of one of our regular wood pigeons, which often peck around beneath the feeders.

A blue dragonfly whizzes past and makes a quick search by the cordon apples then returns and heads over the hedge into next door’s garden. From its predominantly blue appearance, I’m guessing that this was a migrant hawker.

Moccasins

Moccasions

No, these aren’t the moccasins that Leonardo DiCaprio wore when he trekked a thousand miles back out of the boreal forest, but they have clocked up some mileage and they’ve just been replaced, but the old ones are more interesting to draw than the pristine, fluffed up new ones.

slippers

My slippers are more Wallace & Gromit than Revenant.

Into the Woods

rough sketch

In a total contrast to yesterday, Storm Francis has arrived this morning and is lashing fairly gently on the studio window, so I’m settling down to some homemade birthday cards. This, as usual, will be in in pen and watercolour but I like the pencil as it is. I wouldn’t normally start with a pencil rough but it probably saves time in the long run and gives me an opportunity to have second thoughts: for instance, I decided that I’d drawn the fox too large, so I’ve rubbed him out and he’s more in scale with the other characters.

My original plan was to go for woodland invertebrates but I felt that the hedgehog should be central (she was originally going to be the teacher in a school photograph) so I stuck with woodland mammals plus a sleepy tawny owl lurking on the back row. By the way, it really is sleeping, not casually looking down at that well-fed dormouse and thinking ‘that’s lunch sorted’.

Sunflowers

sunflowers pen and ink

I like drawing sunflowers because of their obvious structure. Despite the repetition, each petal and sepal is slightly different so in drawing them you get into a rhythm, rather like practicing letterforms in calligraphy.

Near the bird feeder in the border we found one sunflower growing from a spilt seed. A few weeks ago it produced a single large flower-head, which has now gone to seed. Meanwhile five or six smaller flowers have appeared.

Sunflowers

Sunflowers thrive in the rich soil of our border. Last year we tried daisy-like cosmos flowers here, which we’d grown from seed from a Gardeners’ World magazine. They grew tall and leafy but by mid-autumn they’d put out just a handful of flowers. I feel that we would have had more success in getting them to flower if our soil hadn’t been so rich.

sunflowers drawing

As Storm Ellen swept across Britain on Friday, one of the sunflower heads snapped off and another looked as if it would be next to go. We brought three heads in as cut flowers.

sunflowers

Because they do so well in rich soil, we’ve decided to try growing sunflowers on our revamped meadow area next year. We’ll grow plenty of them from bird seed and hopefully there will be enough flowers for me to draw but plenty left of the plants for the insects and birds.

Back to the Drawing Board

Drafting

I’ve got half a dozen computer programs that can generate and edit 3D drawings but I’m enjoying getting back to my real life drawing board with its parallel motion and drafting head to draw this one-point perspective of a reimagined version of ‘My Room’ for Mattias Adolfsson’s The Art of Sketching course.

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Walking the Duck

This animation was a way of getting more familiar with onion skinning and using the Light Box in Clip Studio paint so it’s turned out to be a bit of lame duck because, having drawn the 12 frames needed for one half of its waddle, I didn’t feel that I needed to continue to complete the second half of the step. If I was starting again, I’d pay as much attention to the sway of its body, which is such a feature of ducks waddling along.