The Sea and its Wonders

The Sea and its Wonders, 1871
‘The Sea and its Wonders’ by Mary and Elizabeth Kirby, T. Nelson and Sons, Edinburgh and New York, 1871 and the frontispiece to an 1890 edition of Charles Darwin’s account of ‘The Voyage of the Beagle’.

“For the Victorians the voyage of the Challenger between December 1872 and May 1876 was akin to the Apollo astronauts’ trips to the Moon – it was a journey into the unknown.”

Exploring our Ocean, FutureLearn course, University of Southampton 2019

In the Exploring our Ocean FutureLearn course that I’ve just started, Emeritus Professor Howard Roe describes the significance of the HMS Challenger expedition. I wondered if the Challenger would feature in The Sea and its Wonders but the book dates from 1871, the year before it set out on its four-year voyage.

Dr Kane
Dr Kane was an American explorer who launched two expeditions in the Arctic in an attempt to rescue Sir John Franklin.

The book captures the excitement of the latest discoveries.

“Wonders abound in the Ocean. It is a world in itself, and is subject to its own laws.

“The fantastic forms and shining creatures that people the recesses of the Deep are here placed before [the reader].”

Mary and Elizabeth Kirby, Preface to ‘The Sea and its Wonders’, 1871.

The Last Great Auk

giant cuttlefish

With its lively engravings, The Sea and its Wonders reads like a combination of the National Geographic and, in places, The Pirates of the Caribbean but the scenes of turtle hunting, harpooning whales and driving albatrosses from their nests are hard to take, given what we know today about the effect this was going to have on wild populations.

The authors, sisters Mary and Elizabeth Kirby had crowd-funded a Flora of Leicestershire in 1848. It’s interesting to learn in Mary’s autobiography that for The Sea and its Wonders, the pictures came first:

” . . . our engagements with the publishers were increasing, and we were obliged to devote two hours or more every morning, and a couple of hours in the evening, to pens and paper. We had a number of plates from Mr. Nelson, suitable for a volume he wanted to bring out and to call The World at Home.

“This was a very pleasant book to do, for it required us to hunt up all the information that was applicable to the subjects, and there was so much latitude allowed us, that we were at liberty to range from the North to the South Pole.

“As soon as this task was finished, more plates arrived for Beautiful Birds in far off lands, and also for the Sea and its wonders.”

Mary Kirby, ‘Leaflets from my Life’, 1888

The last great auk had been seen just nineteen years earlier on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, but two of them appear in an illustration in the chapter on penguins. To confuse things still further, in the chapter on St Kilda, the great auk is described as if it is still resident on the remote Scottish island but the illustration shows a king penguin. As the pictures came first, we’ll blame Thomas Nelson Jr. rather than the Kirby sisters for the mix-up.

book plate

As you can see from the end papers, I bought this book so long ago that it was priced in pre-decimal currency, ten shillings, reduced to seven shillings and sixpence.

I’ve looked up John Taylor in the 1871 census for Leeds but unfortunately this was a common name, so, apart from us knowing that he was doing well in the French class at the YMCA, I can’t tell you anything more about him. He didn’t leave any annotations in the book.

Links

Exploring our Ocean, FutureLearn course, University of Southampton

Mary and Elizabeth Kirby in Wikipedia

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Herald Moth

herald moth

The herald moth, Scoliopteryx libatrix, feeds after dark on flowers and overripe berries, which probably explains why this one is hiding amongst our raspberry canes. Its larvae feed on willows, aspen and poplars.

frog

I’m aware that what to me seems like a neglected corner is home to some of the creatures that I try to encourage in our garden. As I clear the chicory from the mint bed, I disturb a common frog.

garden snail
Garden snail
slug
harvestman

The frog is outnumbered by slugs and snails, spiders and harvestmen.

My next task is to clear my little meadow area which is overrun with chicory. I want to make a fresh start and sow a cornfield mix to flower next spring and summer. I’ll clear it again at the end of the season in attempt to discourage the chicory.

Published
Categorized as Garden

John’s Shop

shop

I drew my brother-in-law John’s newsagents in the 1980s, stage directing his wife and one of his boys, along with Barbara (on the phone in the background) so that I could take a Polaroid for reference.

At the time, I had plenty of natural history and landscapes in my portfolio so I was making efforts to include more figures. I worked in A4 in pen and ink because photocopies were a useful way of posting out samples to publishers or advertising agencies.

No one commissioned me to draw a corner shop but I was kept busy illustrating a children’s book set in a Dales village, a couple of wildlife stories and a Dickens adaptation, so the effort I put in to my sample illustration paid off.

Like so many corner shops, this one closed and it’s now a private house, so I’m glad that I recorded the details of its interior.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

The Chair

To ease myself back into book design, I’m trying out Pages, Apple’s word-processor, which you can use to create e-books. I’ve gone for the ‘Traditional Novel’ template and, to keep things simple, I’m sticking to the design as far as possible. So far, I’ve only had to change the colour of the title, so that it shows up against my photograph.

I took the photograph on a visit to Sewerby Hall on Wednesday. I’d already decided on my subject, so I was on the look-out for a vintage armchair. Most of the furniture in the Hall is on loan from the Victoria & Albert Museum and has been carefully chosen to recreate the interiors as they appear in photographs taken in the Hall’s Edwardian heyday.

My holiday reading during our short break at Bridlington was a paperback of a Vera novel by crime-writer Ann Cleeves. The paperback’s cover features a glowering monochrome landscape, so I’ve gone for a similar treatment for my photograph, using various filters in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CC 2019.

Apple Books on iPad
The book works well as a PDF in Apple’s Books app.

I’ve used Lightroom’s ‘black and white split tone’, with added grain and some vignetting. When I took the photograph (having first checked with the attendant that photography was allowed), I had to crouch down to get the angle on the chair that I was after. This meant that the perspective of the paneling in the background was skewed, so I’ve used Photoshop’s ‘Edit/Transform/Skew’ command to straighten it up.

The author’s name was randomly generated in my favourite writing program, Scrivener. The original story, The Chair, is by my sister. It appears in an old school magazine which I came across recently.

Links

Sewerby Hall and gardens

The Chair, eBook on the iPad
The 1962 school magazine and the 2019 eBook version, looking great on my iPad.

Apple Pages ‘Create and collaborate on documents that are beautiful beyond words’ . . . such as my mystery story cover!

Adobe Creative Cloud: includes Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC

Scrivener ‘the go-to app for writers of all kinds’

Vue 8: Island Chapel

Vue 8 3D landscape

I had good news from e-on software this week, they’ve made a start on reinstating their Cornucopia 3D website, which suffered a cyber attack in November 2017. Their online support soon helped me get my ten-year-old Vue Pioneer 8 3D landscape creation program back into action, so I’ve enjoyed going through the basics to build up this scene.

side elevation

The Vue workspace gives you a plan view of your scene, two side elevations and a main camera view. I dropped in ready-made trees, rocks and reedmace but for the little chapel-style building I used just one cube and one pyramid. I grouped these together and copied them three times then re-sized them to make the apse, porch and tower. And I worked out how to add some chiselled-in-stone lettering.

Rendering the final image is a long process as Vue traces rays of light from the main source, the virtual sun, then goes on to calculate how reflected light and atmospheric haze will affect the scene. I was surprised to see that the first stage of the render created what looks like a night scene. The transparency of the plum tree leaves works well.

Link

sketchbook

e-on software: the latest version of VUE Creator and PlantFactory Creator is available for twenty dollars a month, so for my purposes I’ll have to make do with my 2009 version of Vue Pioneer . . . but I might be tempted by the free trial!

The spiral stair and the sketchbook were created in earlier version of Vue, then known as Vue d’Espirit. The staircase actually made it onto the readers’ letters page in PC Format magazine in 2004. You can see that I’ve never lost my urge, as a teenager, to be a set designer.

Robin’s Pincushion

robin's pincushion

Robin’s pincushion growing on wild rose in the hedge along the Balk, Netherton. It is caused by the gall wasp Diplolepis rosae, which lays its eggs in a bud in springtime. The larvae develop in chambers in the gall and the next generation of gall wasps will emerge in the spring, almost all of them females. Males of this species are very rare but the females can lay fertile eggs without mating.

It’s also known as the bedeguar gall, from a French name which is derived from a Persian word meaning ‘brought by the wind’.

Pocket-sized Stromatolite Fossil

stromatolite
Fossil 8cm across.
stromatolite

These stromatolites, seen in cross section in this fossil, are each just the size of a finger nail. My namesake, geologist Richard T Bell, found them in a rock formation while surveying in remote area of Canada, if I remember correctly, somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.

stromatolite
Cross section of stromatolite, 1.8 cm across

A stromatolite is a community of micro-organisms forming one layer on top of another. Colonies of cyanobacteria released oxygen into Earth’s atmosphere 3 billion years ago, leading to a mass extinction of anaerobic bacteria but, a billion years later, creating the conditions which would allow multicellular life to appear in the world’s oceans.

Stromatolites

From my wildyorkshire.co.uk blog, 19 November 2010:

THESE TINY stromatolites in a fossil from Canada, each about one inch across, were built up layer by layer on the seabed from calcium carbonate secreted by cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae. Once thought to be algae, they’re now grouped with the bacteria and, along with archaea, classified as prokaryotes.

Prokaryote cells have DNA but unlike eukaryotes the cells have no membrane-bound nucleus. We’re made up of eukaryote cells but our health depends on a variety of prokaryote cells – the ‘friendly bacteria’ in advertisements for Yakult fermented milk drink – that are active in our digestive systems.

Stromatolites appear right at the start of the fossil record 3,800 million years ago and they’re still with us today, in places like Shark Bay, Australia, where extreme conditions limit competition from other life forms. Stromatolites are often much larger than my pocket-sized examples – the size of a family car, for example.

Ferrybridge
Ferrybridge Power Station, 2010. As Britain achieves 50% renewable energy supply, Ferrybridge is being phased out. They blew up one of the cooling towers on 28 July 2019.
Malham Cove

Blue-green algae can be seen close to home as streaks on the cooling towers of power stations, such as Ferrybridge. The blackish streaks of blue-green algae at Malham Cove (right) gave Charles Kingsley the idea that they might have been made by a chimney sweep’s boy sliding down the face of the cliff, inspiring his story The Water Babies.

Microscopic as they are, the cyanobacteria were crucial in the story of life as they were the first organisms to use photosynthesis, releasing oxygen into the atmosphere. Cyanobacteria contain not only chlorophyll a, a green pigment, but also blue phycobilin, which combine to give the blue-green, almost blackish colour.

Link

Meeting Richard T Bell, from my wildyorkshire.co.uk diary, 30 March 2007.

Run-off

washed-out paving sand
washed-out paving sand

After a record-breaking late summer bank holiday with temperatures of 28C in Leeds, we had a downpour yesterday evening. The paving sand that I’d swept into the cracks a couple of days ago has been washed out in places by the overspill from our driveway. The dished concrete channel in front of the garage door can’t cope with the run-off from a rainstorm.

It’s been a good test for a small area. I’ll buy a small bag of cement and make a dry mix – three of sand to one of cement – with the remaining sand to brush into the crevices on the sloping driveway.

Wadi Rum

Wadi Rum, Google Earth image
The swirling shapes of my little patches of washed-out sand remind me of the run-off deposits that are left by flash floods in wadis, as in this Google Earth image from the Wadi Rum Protected Area, Jordan.

Link

Dansand No Grow Block Paving Sand: I now realise that I should have gone for the version that they do with added cement!

Tracks in the Sand

woodlice

Yesterday, after taking out a few weeds, I swept sand into the cracks between the paving slabs by the front door. Already this morning, there are signs of activity. Could these be tracks left by an insect? Or a woodlouse?

paving sand

Something has been active in the corner. I didn’t notice this tiny snail shell until I spotted in the photograph. It might have been dislodged from a crevice yesterday but I suspect that it’s been introduced along with the sand.

The sand is from Denmark. The grains are small, mostly less than a millimetre, and well-rounded, so perhaps this is windblown sand from a former dune system. Denmark has extensive dunes along its western, North Sea, coast and, further inland, extensive areas of glacial sand and gravel.

In my photograph, the glassy grains are quartz and I think that the larger, fleshy-looking ochre fragments are feldspar.

Danish sand: Dansand No Grow Block Paving Sand

Doorstep Bio-blitz

garden snail
Garden snail

The seven species that I disturbed as I weeded around the paving stones yesterday come from seven different families, four classes and three phyla, so, within inches of our front door, we have an annelid worm, a gastropod mollusc, an isopod crustacean and a social insect.

winged ant

I disturbed a large ant as I swept the driveway, which I guessed was a queen. The queen disposes of her wings after her nuptial flight, then sets about finding a suitable site – such as here under the paving stones – to start her colony.

Coincidentally, later, a few yards away, I spotted a worker ant carrying a single transparent wing, which looked like one that had been discarded by a queen.

Common NameFamily or OrderClass or SubphylumPhylum
EarthwormLumbricidaeClitellataAnnelida
Garden Snail, Helix aspersaHelicidaeGastropodaMollusca
Keelbacked SlugLimacidaeGastropodaMollusca
WoodlouseIsopodaCrustaceaMollusca
Shield BugHemipteraInsectaArthropoda
Rove BeetleStaphylinidaeInsectaArthropoda
AntFormicidaeInsectaArthropoda

Link

Dansand No Grow Block Paving Sand

Masonry Brush and Cultivator

brush and cultivator

We’ve had record temperatures for a late bank holiday so, again, I’ve been working in the shade at the front of the house, weeding the cracks between the paving slabs before cleaning up with the masonry brush and sweeping sand into the gaps with a soft brush.

I didn’t use the hand cultivator today, but it was more appealing to draw than the plastic-handled weeder that I had been using.

As I worked around the front door, I was surprised by the variety of life on our doorstep: a garden snail, woodlice, ants, small earthworms, a tiny rove beetle and one green shield bug nymph. The nymph looks like a smaller version of the adult but it lacks wings. This one had to laboriously walk over towards the cover of the hosta to escape my brushwork.

Procreate drawing

One again this is a Procreate iPad drawing and today I used just two of the available tools: the Gesinski Pen and the Round Brush.

If I’d been painting on paper, I would have used opaque gouache to add the light-coloured bristles against the darker background. This time I added them with Gesinski Pen with a 100% opaque light colour.

I was determined not to use an eraser but when I was finishing the drawing, I realised that a false start that I’d made with one of the prongs of the cultivator was throwing the whole drawing out of proportion. I opted for ‘painting’ over it in white, to produce a similar effect to when I used to correct illustrations with a dab of white gouache. The correction is intended to remain visible.