The Yorkshire Wildlife Trust’s Ledsham Vale is a long thin strip of meadow so as the rest of group make their way to the top end I can pause to draw field scabious.
We saw six or seven fresh-looking marbled whites.
Sunflower
I’ve always preferred to use cartridge for sketchbook work and to save the more expensive watercolour paper for my finished work but I’ve recently moved over to Pink Pig’s Ameleie watercolour sketchbooks, which I think is a step in the right direction.
Today as I set out to a golden wedding garden party I grabbed an A5 landscape format Langton sketchbook. Langton is traditionally mould made fine grained 300 gm (140 lb) ‘Not’ paper. ‘Not’ means cold rather than hot pressed. I thought this might be too absorbent and textured for ink but there’s no sign of bleeding, which makes a welcome change from my current ‘Wainwright’ sketchbook.
The ‘hammered’ surface of the paper is enough to give a slight stippliness, which adds character to a watercolour wash.
Water Margins
I’ve been back at the RSPB’s Old Moor reserve, keeping my focus on flowers, which makes sense as it’s rather a quiet time for birds. I’ve added more drawings to some of last week’s pages.
Marsh orchid and greater spearwort.
Meadow vetchling and birdsfoot trefoil.
Purple loosestrife
Centaury and self-heal.
Reedmace and heath bedstraw.
Lady’s bedstraw and sedge warbler.
Meadowsweet
Old Moor Sketches
Sketches made over the last two days at RSPB Old Moor, South Yorkshire. Having practiced some botanical illustration in the studio last week, I wanted to see how I could carry that through into sketchbook work.
It was so warm at lunchtime today that I took shelter in the family hide, which was pleasantly cool with all the flaps open and light; unusually for a hide it has floor to ceiling windows. Again with improving my observation in mind, I concentrated on one species, the lapwing, until a black-headed gull chased it away.
Great burnet and yellow-rattle.
A variable species, this was growing in a dry area, by a hedge near the visitor centre.
Marsh orchid, probably the Northern Marsh Orchid.
Scrambling amongst vegetation by the marsh.
Melilot, a tall leguminous herb on drier ground.
Lapwing in moult. I guess that it’s an adult but it could be a juvenile coming into its adult plumage.
Purple loosestife – my last sketch of the day and it proved quite a challenge with all those interlocking stems and foliage, especially as it kept blowing about in the afternoon breeze.
Watercolours; a Natural Selection
After thirty years, it’s time to upgrade my studio watercolour box. Most of the colours have dried out so I’ve given up on it over the past ten years, preferring to grab one of my more freshly stocked pocket-sized boxes.
I’ve been able to rescue a few of the colours that I’d refilled over the years and, thanks to a friend who spotted an unmissable bargain in a sale (thank you, Godavari!), I have a solid nucleus of Winsor and Newton artist’s watercolours new and unwrapped, ready to pop in.
But that still leaves a whole row of the box to fill.
Felix Scheinnberger’s Urban Watercolor Sketching prompted me to review my colour habits but for specific suggestions for natural history subjects I’ve turned to Agathe Haevermans’ The Art of Botanical Drawing and Drawing and Painting the Seashore.
My primaries are already pretty well covered so my additions fall into three categories; neutrals, violets and greens. Some of the violets, mauves and magentas are tricky – if not impossible – to mix so I’ve added several of those.
A Green Shade
Secondaries such as sap green and olive green aren’t strictly necessary because you can easily mix an approximation from various combinations yellows and blues but having them ready-mixed in the box can save a lot of time.
The darker perylene green might be useful for shadows and leaf veins, as might terre verte and opaque oxide of chromium, a colour that I’ve struggled to find a use for in the past, unless I’ve been painting lichens.
In The Art of Botanical Painting by Margaret Stevens suggests that you should treat every green individually;
‘. . . nothing beats making your own green shade card; I know from experience that if you give six people a palette each with a blob of Cadmium Yellow and Cobalt Blue you will get six different greens, since everyone will use varying proportions of paint and water. There is no substitute for experimentation and practice.’
She warns that manufactured greens can look harsh and inappropriate if taken straight from the tube. I remember viridian dominating my greens when I first started to use it and I probably wouldn’t have included it if I hadn’t rescued it from my previous selection.
Botanical Grey
In Botanical Painting, Margaret Stevens describes ‘botanical grey’, a transparent mix of light red and French ultramarine. Used well diluted, sometimes with a hint of a reflected colour, it can be useful when painting white flowers.
I don’t have a light red but I’ll experiment with my Indian red (another ‘rescued’ colour) and ultramarine. I’ve never tried Davy’s grey before, so I’m hoping that will prove equally useful.
Winsor and Newton
I’m keen to support my local art shops so I ring around a couple but they don’t stock my favourite Winsor and Newton artist’s colours. Should I go for Daler Rowney instead?
Time to phone a friend. Illustrator John Welding confirms my feeling that Winsor and Newton are about the best, although there are colours in the Daler Rowney range, for instance the warm sepia, which some artists prefer to the Winsor and Newton versions.
This gives Barbara and I the excuse to visit Huddersfield where Calder Graphics in the wonderful Victorian Byram Arcade stock W&N artist’s colours . . . and more, it’s an Aladin’s Cave for those of us who are hooked on artist’s materials, but, after spending £55 on a dozen colours, I resisted the temptation to browse pens and sketchbooks!
Must go again soon.
Links; Winsor and Newton, Byram Arcade
Potato
Having the plant right there in front of me should make it easy but, like all flowers, this potato is a restless sitter.
It takes me longer than I think to get so far and I’m far from satisfied with the result but the end result isn’t really the point of the exercise;
‘You can only reproduce something well if you [see and observe]. If you can decode what you see, you will be able to explain it, and anyone who sees your drawing will be able to understand it. The artist’s view is just as important and personal as the subject itself.’
Agathe Haevermans, Drawing and Painting the Seashore
I’m happy just to spend the day observing and hopefully turning that into a successful botanical drawing will follow on from that.
In Impressionism by sampling spots of colour in a detached way, you should be able to build up a convincing image even of an object in the landscape that you can’t identify. Courbet was supposedly able to accurately paint a patch on a distant hillside without ever asking what it was – a limestone outcrop, a patch of dried vegetation or a pile of chippings. The colour and texture were enough.
With botanic drawing you’re really trying to deconstruct then reconstruct the subject in order to clearly explain it.
Perhaps I should have taken the flower apart before I started drawing.
Pink Pig
I’m delighted to have made it into the Pink Pig catalogue (educational version) which has just dropped through the door. This is a sketch I made of the railway embankment in my Holly Green Sketchbook.
I feel it’s appropriate that I live just five miles from what might well be Great Britain’s biggest sketchbook factory, the rate that I get through them. On several occasions I’ve called there to pick up a bundle of a particular size of sketchbook, most recently I upgraded to their own brand of 270 gsm watercolour paper, Ameleie, in an 8 x 8 inch format which I’m intending to reproduce in print using one of the digital book printing services.
If you’re sharp-eyed you might spot a couple more extracts from my Holly Green Sketchbook in the catalogue and by coincidence I’m sharing a page with fellow ex-Leeds and Royal College of Art student, John Ross. John spent most of his time at the RCA in printmaking, mainly in etching, ultimately producing The Biggin Hill Frescoes. My Royal College publication was A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield.
John’s got as far as Andalusia but here I am still beetling away with my sketchbook in the country round Wakefield.
(That’s not quite the whole story because John recently spent a year in a project to restore the most Gothic of Huddersfield’s leafy parks, Beaumont Park).
Link; Pink Pig sketchbooks (they supply direct to the public but you might be lucky enough to find a stock of assorted Pink Pigs in your local art shop, which enables you to get the feel of them).
Another link; my work also appears in a newly revamped website of Simply Fires. A small detail but I think it gives the site a warm and friendly look; which is just right for a family firm that supplies wood-burning and multi-fuel stoves!
The drawing of the coal bucket on their contact page was one I made when I stayed at Langsett Youth Hostel, which had just had a new stove fitted. Sadly, ten years later, the Youth Hostel has now closed, which is a shame because they would have been guaranteed a full house in ten days from now when the Grand Depart of the Tour de France passes within a hundred yards of their front door.
Potato Flower
I take a break for coffee and when I return most of the flowers have closed up, so there’s an element of reconstruction in the watercolour.
Just the foliage to add now.
Potato in Pencil
Mr Atkinson, my maths teacher, saw me struggling with geometry and examined my pencil;
‘You could plant a potato with that, Bell!’
Sharpening up my act, this morning I’m drawing potato flowers with a 4H pencil, sharpened with a craft knife and honed to a point with an abrasive pad.
I don’t ever remember choosing a 4H for drawing but I’m taking advice from Agathe Haevermans’ The Art of Botanical Drawing and she often suggests starting out with a hard pencil. If you need to erase there’s less risk of damaging the surface of the paper because the harder lead stays on the surface.
For white flowers like these she suggests erasing almost to the point where your outlines become invisible, so that you don’t get pencil lines showing through your wash.
This variety of second early potato is Vivaldi and, by coincidence when I started this drawing they were playing Vivaldi’s Concerto in B Flat on Radio 3.
Sage Advice
I like to draw is on location, direct from nature so why have I brought this herb into my studio?
After reading up on botany this spring I feel the need to go in closer to my subject, something that I struggle to do when flowers are blowing about in the meadow.
I’ve resisted the urge to reach for my pen but I still want a sharp line so I use an abrasive pad to keep a point on my HB pencil. I need to do this four or five times during the course of the drawing.
Botanical Drawing
The Art of Botanical Drawing by Agathe Ravet-Haevermans has given me some gentle encouragement. There are meticulous examples of her work as a scientific illustrator at the Museum of Natural History in Paris but also a few sketches from her field trips in Madagascar and South Africa. Step by step drawings and swatches of the watercolours used in each example show how she depicts the flowers, fruits and foliage of familiar garden flowers and exotic blooms.
My favourites amongst them are the different kinds of bark, the cherry tomatoes on a vine, the fungi and the bunch of carrots.
Encouragingly for the rest of us she concludes with a selection of her mistakes; ‘But is it such a disaster? It’s just time and a sheet of paper. The most important thing is to be able to learn from it.’
I’ll keep that in mind as I try to get into botanical mode.
Link; Agathe Haevermans, L’Institut de Systématique, Évolution, Biodiversité