I’d been presented with a blue ballpoint pen at Horbury Street Fair so I used it to add a tone to represent the foliage of the Turkey oak in Barbara’s sister’s front garden.
It was something of a family day as I’d drawn this when we called on her brother this morning. In between I was keen to head for the creperie stall at the Street Fair but, you know what these events are like, we kept getting held up by friends we hadn’t seen for months!
But the banana and Nutella crepe was worth waiting for.
Ten years ago Danny Gregory was with us for the weekend and we sat and drew at Horbury Street Fair.
The bobbles of hooked seeds of wood avens are spreading out over the pavement at the end of our drive. My guess is that fifteen or twenty years ago it originally established itself from a seed carried here attached to the coat of a dog returning from a walk in Coxley woods.
It’s made itself at home at the edge of the spreading ivy beneath our rowan, the sort of shady place on fertile soil that this plant prefers. There is now so much of it that many of the seeds must be making the reverse journey back into the woods as dogs pass by each morning.
It’s a member of the rose family with a five-petalled yellow flower with five sepals. It’s lower leaves remind me of nettle but the upper leaves that I’ve drawn here are three-lobed.
Also known a herb bennet, which, according to Richard Mabey’s Flora Britannica, comes from the medieval Latin ‘herba benedicta’, ‘the blessed herb’;
‘Its root has a spicy clove smell and was widely used in herbal medicine.’
Latin Roots
Its Latin name is Geum urbanum. Geum was the name of a herb mentioned by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History. It might derive from ‘geuo’, the Greek meaning ‘to taste’, referring to those aromatic roots. ‘Urbanum’ means ‘of the town’.
Pliny the Elder died on 25 August 79 A.D. at Pompeii. A quote attributed to his nephew and heir Pliny the Younger opens the film Pompeii;
‘You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men; some were calling their parents, others their children or their wives, trying to recognize them by their voices. People bewailed their own fate or that of their relatives, and there were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore’
I thought that Pliny the Elder might get a walk on part during the movie. If he did, I missed it.
Pompeii is an epic best enjoyed in 3D and surround-sound but I could have happily spent the time taking a leisurely tour through its impressively reconstructed street food shops, villas and temples of Pompeii and missed out on the gladiatorial combat and eruption, impressive as they were. Perhaps we could have a prequel; A Short Tour of Pompeii with Pliny the Elder.
It was just the pair of fins on the belly that I couldn’t name of when I drew this goldfish at the dentist’s last month. They’re the pelvic or ventral fins. It’s probably the fact that there are two names that I find it difficult to remember.
Members of the salmon family have an extra fin; the adipose, a small upward pointing fin between the dorsal and caudal.
This drawing is an amalgam of several fish that were in constant motion in the tank in the waiting room. They varied widely in fin length and colour patterns so I tried to keep coming back to the individuals that were closest to the standard goldfish.
The Peace Lily, Spathiphyllum wallisii, is stemless, the leaves and flowers growing directly from the compost. Although it is from tropical America the leaves can be damaged by strong sunlight.
The flower reminds me of the cuckoo flower. It consists of a spadix – the sausage-shaped flowerhead – which is sheathed in a spathe; a leaf-like bract. The spathe is white to start with but gradually turns pale green.
Pencil and Watercolour
Drawn with HB Derwent Graphic pencil which I sharpened to a fine point on a metal emery board. Watercolours are White Night. I prefer Winsor and Newton but White Nights are perfectly acceptable and I’ve got a greater range of colours in a larger box.
Instead of the waterbrush that I normally use, I’ve gone for a Cotman no. 10 field brush and a Cotman no. 3 reversible (brush fits into handle). The number 3 is finer than I’d normally use but I’m trying to manage without a fine pen to provide sharpness in the botanical details.
Basil never seems very happy in our garden so we’re going to see if this African Blue variety does any better.
Pencil and watercolour isn’t normally my thing but I’m currently reading Agathe Ravet-Haevermans’ Drawing Nature, so I’m giving her favourite media a try.
She works as a botanical draughtsman at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and her approach has a typically French analytical edge. She suggests that you should start by looking for the axis for a plant or an individual leaf;
‘To make the drawing a coherent whole, you must always draw the axis first and the surrounding elements after’
This is rather different to my approach to observational drawing where I map out shapes and the negative spaces between them, trusting that the whole plant will then look convincing.
I’m aware that I get set in my ways so Felix Scheinberger’s Urban Watercolour Sketching made perfect holiday reading when we were in the Dales a few weeks ago. It’s a short refresher course in watercolour, one that I’ll dip into again.
This is an illustrator’s approach and the examples are almost exclusively pen and ink and watercolour rather than pure watercolour, which suits me because that’s invariably the way I work.
The English watercolour tradition is wistully rural, going back via John Piper and Beatrix Potter to Girtin and Cotman so it’s refreshing to have Scheinberger go through the rudiments of watercolour so briskly and thoroughly from a streetwise, rather punkish perspective.
Considering Colour
It’s a great opportunity for me to reconsider all the aspects of watercolours that I’m familiar and a few that had never occurred to me. For instance, I like the way he champions indigo and Naples yellow; colours which I’ve dismissed because of their apparent disadvantages. Disadvantages which he suggests can be turned to your advantage for certain subjects. Must try them.
As an illustrator I like the way he rounds off the book by touching on page design, developing ideas and the perennial question of ‘how much is your picture worth?’
As for the urban element, I’m afraid that he can’t convince me that I’d enjoy painting a prefab block of apartments in Romania more than an old farm Provence, but I can see what he’s getting at.
The sourdough from the Flour Station kept us in bread for a week and it’s inspired me to get back to breadmaking so I made this farmhouse loaf today, using a multi-grain flour along with the strong white and strong brown.
I drew it with a .25 Rotring Rapidoliner then added the bolder lines with a .70. My great hero amongst Victorian art critics, John Ruskin, is emphatic that this illustrator’s trick of adding variety to a drawing is always bad practice. Sorry about that John.
I’ve been reading so much recently that I’ve slipped a bit on drawing. Three of the books were about drawing so I ought to have all the inspiration that I need by now.
This section of my book shelf includes my current reading such as library books and Dummies Guides to various computer programs.
There are also odd things that haven’t yet found a place elsewhere such as the green and blue paperback which is a Donald Duck comic strip book in German that I thought might help me to learn the language. Next to it is purple box that contains a wildflower meadow mat which I must now roll-out over a sunny patch in the back garden.
Pen and Paper
I’ve drawn this with a Rotring Rapidoliner which I thought might work on the absorbent paper of a sketchbook that I’m trying to finish off. The paper too soft for the pens I use but it won’t take a watercolour wash without going blotchy. The worst of both worlds.
It’s a Wainwright sketchbook that I bought a year ago because I liked its hardback binding. I think that whoever designed it was so keen to make it like a ‘real book’ that they used paper that was better suited to printing.
I spotted this fragment of clay pipe when I went out at sunset to see if I could catch the slug that’s been eating our French bean seedlings. In thirty years of digging I find it surprising that this is the first time I’ve spotted it. I’ve found pipe fragments before but never anything as elegantly decorated as this.
I’m assuming that it was dropped here as we haven’t ever imported topsoil. The style of the lettering makes me think 18th rather than 19th century so I’m surprised that it looks so fresh after having been in the topsoil for a couple of centuries.
Perhaps the brown rats have brought it to the surface. They’ve been active under our compost bins and we recently spread compost on this bed.
Who the ‘JG’? This was farm land so could it have been one of the Gemmels, a local farming family?
As we’re only 40 yards from a ford that ran along Coxley beck it could have been dropped by any drover, wagon driver, traveller or labourer who happened to be passing by.
J Gambier
A Google search reveals that one of the biggest pipe manufacturers was J Gambier of Paris, a firm which offered its customers over 2,000 different kinds of pipe.
It was something of a family day as I’d drawn this when we called on her brother this morning. In between I was keen to head for the creperie stall at the Street Fair but, you know what these events are like, we kept getting held up by friends we hadn’t seen for months!
