Supercharged Meadow

chicory and chickweed
Chicory, well established in the meadow area (below), is continually sending its white runners under the edging board and colonising the veg bed.

We’ve been fighting a constant battle with chicory, which I unwisely introduced to my little meadow area twenty-five years ago, when someone offered me a plant. With its blue flowers, it’s attractive but invasive. Its white runners, some threadlike, others tough and chunky, are continually making their way from their stronghold in the meadow, under the timber edging and into the veg bed.

meadow area
Chicory in the meadow area.

The chicory soon spreads to any bare patches in the meadow, swamping most of the wild flowers that I attempt to introduce, such as bird’s-foot trefoil. It loves the damp, rich, disturbed soil at the bottom end of our garden.

I’ve decided that after years of struggling to keep it under control, I’m going to abandon my dream of creating a traditional wild flower meadow and go for a more managed version, a supercharged meadow. It worked well when I tried a similar approach in the raised bed behind the pond; in place of the clumps of perennials, which were regularly getting infiltrated by coltsfoot and other weeds, I cleared the whole bed then put in a variety of flowers which were recommended by the Royal Horticultural Society as Plants for Pollinators (see link below for a useful list).

meadow area

Fiskars Digging Spade

Fiskars spade

Unlike the raised veg beds, the meadow has had very little cultivation so it’s going to need some heavy digging. My regular spade, which my dad bought for us when we started gardening, is a smaller border spade, with a small head for getting in between plants but with a proportionately short handle, which means that, as I’m 6 ft 4 inches tall, I’m doing too much bending as I dig.

So I’ve just bought a Fiskars Xact Digging Spade, with a lightweight extra long ‘soft grip’ ergonomic ‘Fiber Comp’ handle and a pointed boron steel head, which means that if I hit a stone while digging, I shouldn’t get such a jarring shock as I might with the straight-ended border spade.

spades

I’ll let you know how I get on when I start digging the meadow turf.

Link

Plants for Pollinators, recommended by the Royal Horticultural Society

Fiskars Xact Digging Spade

Published
Categorized as Drawing

First Day of Spring

swan on nest
gadwall
chiff-chaff

It’s that time of year again, when there are still wintering wildfowl –gadwall, wigeon and tufted duck – on the lakes at Nostell but the summer migrants have already started to arrive. A chiff-chaff, just in from Africa, was singing from the top branches of a birch near the Cascade. It’s performance seemed a bit offhand. It doesn’t set itself up at a song post as a blackbird would, but just breaks off foraging along the branches and rattles off a few phrases wherever it happens to be:

“Chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff, chiff.”

mute swan
blue tit

As we arrive at the Adam Bridge at Nostell, a mute swan is chasing an intruder around the Lower Lake. After a few minutes the unwelcome visitor gets the message and flies off.

jackdaw

A blue tit takes nesting material into a cavity in a dead tree on the lake shore. I was pleased to see one taking a beak-full of moss into the nestbox in our rowan. The box has now been there a couple of years but has yet to be used.

Also carrying nesting material, a jackdaw perching on top of the high brick wall around the vegetable garden at Nostell. Its mate emerged and flew off and the jackdaw popped down inside.

The First Cut

The first day of spring and it’s the first cut for the lawn. I push the mower over three times, first on its highest setting to take the top off, then medium and finally – going at right-angles to my previous cuts – on the lowest.

I’ve got an electric strimmer, which might have been useful around the edges, but I prefer to use the hand mower because it’s quieter and I don’t feel the need to put on goggles and ear protectors. It’s a good work-out too.

Mailing List

My first Wild Yorkshire newsletter; I hope to continue with weekly updates.

The first day of spring also seemed like the perfect time to make a fresh start on my Wild Yorkshire mailing list. If you’d like a weekly update, please subscribe below. You can of course unsubscribe at any time.

De Atramentis Ink

tree
My first drawing with de Atramentis Document ink.
ink
De Atramentis ink bottle, original drawing 2.5 cm, one inch, across. Even enlarged, there’s no sign of the ink running into the watercolour wash.

De Atramentis Document Ink in my Lamy Vista fountain pen and so far it’s working perfectly, showing no hint of running when I add a watercolour wash. My thanks to dapplegrey for suggesting that I try it.

Link

Invisible Horse, blog by dapplegrey

Ear Fungus

ear fungus

I didn’t spot this ear fungus growing on an elder stump as I walked through the Corsican Pine plantation at Newmillerdam last week. It looks so fresh that I suspect it must have grown as a result of all the rain we’ve had over the past week.

Grebe Display

grebes

A pair of great-crested grebes were displaying at Newmillerdam this morning. Their face-to-face head-shaking display was interrupted by a third grebe which was soon chased off by the male. The male has more prominent cheek-ruffs and ear-tufts than the female.

A second bout of head-shaking was soon interrupted by the intruder and then all three birds dived out of sight for what seemed like a minute. Later we saw a single grebe diving near the war memorial, so perhaps this was the intruder who had decided to give the pair a break.

The Revenge of Gnome Tony

Gnome Tony

Here’s my finished gnome comic strip with speech balloons added and, a final flourish, a couple of subtle glows. I’ve still got a lot to learn about Clip Studio Paint but at least I’ve gone through all the stages of Kamakiki Mai’s tutorial, plus a few extras such as the speech bubbles.

Gnome Tony is the first gnome that you meet on the Gnome Roam at Newmillerdam Country Park and this strip is based on an incident I saw on a morning’s walk during the last half term holiday. Beware the Wrath of the Gnome! Tony has friends dotted around throughout the park . . . you have been warned!

Links

Kamakiki Mai’s Clip Studio tutorial, creating an illustration

Gnome Roam at Newmillerdam Country Park

Textures in Clip Studio

textures

I used my iPad to photograph these textures in the garden: wood grain on the shed, wood chip on the path and lichens on sandstone. There’s also a swatch of watercolour paper and one of our dining room carpet.
By importing an image into Clip Studio Paint, I can superimpose the texture on my artwork.

textures on artwork

I superimposed the watercolour paper over the whole image then scaled the lichens, vertical wood grain, wood chip and carpet onto the individual panels. The horizontal wood grain was superimposed on the title. I used the ‘Overlay’ setting for each layer and reduced the opacity to about 50% except in the case of the wood chip on the falling boy panel, which worked better on the ‘Screen’ setting, probably because there is more contrast in the wood chip image.

Just the speech bubbles to go in now and I’m finished! I’ve learnt so much from Kamakiki Mai’s tutorial.

Link

Kamakiki Mai’s tutorial

Painting in Clip Studio

adding colour

It seemed a long process, building up the flat colours each in its own layer – trees, figures, gnome, ground – but when it comes to painting with a virtual watercolour brush to add light and shade, I can see the point of all that preparation. There’s a ‘lock transparent pixels’ button, which sounds technical but it means that, if, for instance, you’re painting a shadow on one of the figures, your shading won’t spill over onto the background.

I’m working on the big screen of my iMac Retina desktop computer, painting using my Wacom intuos 4 graphics tablet. To change colour I’ve been selecting the eye-dropper tool from the menu in Clip Studio. How useful it would be if I could alternate between watercolour brush and eye-dropper by clicking the lever on the Wacom stylus. I tried clicking it and discovered that the lever is already set to activate that particular shortcut!

Wacom stylus, with that handy shortcut lever, which I’ve just started to use today after I’ve had my intuos 4 tablet for seven years!

That speeds things up a lot and the other refinement that I’ve been able to include, thanks to my large screen is to float a large version of the Colour Wheel Palette on my workspace, so that I can easily select lighter, darker or more colourful versions of any flat colour that I sample.

One final improvement is that I’ve specified and saved a virtual watercolour brush, which I’ve called ‘My Even Watercolour’. Unlike the default ‘Transparent Watercolour Brush’ that I’d normally use, it doesn’t lift a small amount of colour from a previously painted background, as a real-life watercolour brush would. To adapt this new brush with a few tweaks from the regular ‘Transparent Watercolour Brush’, I followed Kamakili Mai’s instructions in the step-by-step tutorial that I started going through yesterday.

Link

Kamakili Mai’s tutorial

Flat Colours

flat colours

Adding flat colours is one of the pleasures of creating a comic in Clip Studio Paint but I found setting it up for the first time a bit technical so I needed to do a bit of searching online and watching YouTube videos to find some of the features which can be ‘hidden’, lurking in sub-menus. But once I got going the paint bucket worked well. It has a ‘paint unfilled areas’ options for getting the odd spots that inevitably get missed on the first pass.

The next stage is to add more colour using a virtual watercolour brush to get a bit of light and shade into the frames and I also want to try adding texture and a gradient.

There are also a couple of speech bubbles to add. The story seems to me to be self-explanatory without them, but it’s another technique that I want to practice.

Back to the Drawing Board

Roughs

Rather than drawing well, it’s important to draw what you enjoy.

Kamakiri Mai

In a step-by-step guide to creating an illustration in Clip Studio Paint, the Tokyo-based designer Kamakiri Mai suggests that it’s important to enjoy creating the rough draft for your illustration and not to worry too much about drawing well. She’ll even do a bit of writing to help create a back story for the imagined world of her illustration, even though that isn’t going to figure in the final artwork.

You can see that I’m not worrying about drawing well as I work out a four-panel comic based on an incident that amused me as I walked along the Gnome Roam trail at Newmillerdam a few weeks ago. My aim is to go through the process of telling a simple story as clearly as I can.

I’ve been doing a lot of drawings on my iPad recently but I’m surprised how many illustrators alternate between drawing on paper and designing on the computer. For example, my workflow so far has been:

  • draw the pencil rough
  • scan the rough into Clip Studio and draw the panels using the panel border tools
  • print out the blank panels at exactly the same size as my roughs
  • put the roughs on my light pad and trace the figures in pencil
  • ink over the pencil

The next stage will be to scan the line art into Clip Studio and start adding areas of flat colour

Link

Professional illustration process: Kamakiri Mai, Clip Studio Tips

No Great Shakes

I wouldn’t want my drawings to look too perfect but I’m frustrated when they turn out too shaky so, since we got back from Rome a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been trying to do something about that and I decided to see if cutting down on my caffeine would make any difference. So far it seems to be working well. I can’t give up my morning coffee but most places can now offer a reasonable decaffeinated version.

My Home Gym

home gym

I’ve also been keeping up with the suggestions for exercises in the books that I read recently by Dr Chatterjee, which I’m hoping are improving my posture when I’m sitting at my desk or drawing. They should also help with movement as they’re designed to activate muscle groups, in my shoulders for instance, that might otherwise be neglected.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve bought myself an aerobic step, as recommended by Dr Chatterjee for improving balance. It sits in the corner of my studio under the bookshelf along with some dumbbells. The step was just £12 from Argos, the dumbbells £5 from Aldi, which makes them a bit of a bargain compared with gym membership. I do only about five minutes exercise a day so I couldn’t even get to my nearest gym in the time that it takes to go through a simple routine.

Eighteen months ago, I had a brief suspected TIA (transient ischaemic attack), which I now suspect might have been an unusual migraine or just the result of getting up too quickly after an overlong session on the computer. Because it was transient even the experts can’t say for sure. As a result I got myself a FitBit fitness tracker. I’m giving it a break now because I feel that it’s done it’s job of making us aware of how many or how few steps we might do in a day and it hasn’t shown up any problems with my heart rate.

During our three and a half days in Rome two weeks ago, we walked the equivalent of a marathon, according to Barbara’s iPhone: 70,000 paces, 43 km (0ver 26 miles), so I think that we’re fine for walking and, for me, it’s slouching at my desk and shaky hands that I want to tackle next.

Just my Cup of Tea

Blacker Hall

So at Blacker Hall farm shop this morning we both went for decaffeinated lattes and, it might just be coincidence, but my drawing of the old beams seemed that bit steadier than when I’ve drawn them on previous occasions.

I do feel a bit calmer. I’d describe the difference, when I need to perform a smooth movement, such as drinking from a full cup of coffee or starting a drawing, like this:

  • Before: I’d tense up and attempt to rigidly control my movement
  • Now: I feel more relaxed and happier to go with the flow

It’s early days so there’s no way of knowing whether it’s cutting down on caffeine or doing the exercises has been of any benefit. Perhaps it’s just getting over the excitement of our break in Rome and recovering from a cold. Whatever it is, I think it’s worth carrying on for a while.