Now Would be a Good Time

lapwing chickI’D JUST passed a sign warning people to take care because of ground-nesting birds during the summer months as I walked from Penistone Hill country park, Howarth, towards Top Withins via Harbour Lodge. I thought yes, they might well be hidden amongst the heather but with alarmed adults flying around making sure they stay under cover I’m not going to see any, but just 20 or 30 yards along the track over the moor I came across two lapwing chicks wandering around on the track.

As I approached them I took my camera from my pocket and switched it on, took three quick snapshots as I walked on by and left them hoping that the adults, of which there was no sign, would soon come back to them.

Nethergill

nethergill farm

So what happened to June? We had a week at Nethergill Farm in Langstrothdale, in the centre of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, not far south of Hawes. The Nethergill eggs are described as ‘very free range’ and, as many of them had been used to make a Yorkshire curd tart for the launch of the farm’s new field centre on the day we arrived, our half dozen were laid by special request. We were staying in a self-catering apartment called the Byre and as we walked upstairs in the evening we could look through a window into the barn and see the little red hen and her ‘sisters’ (there’s no cockerel, so that guests can sleep in!) settling down to roost, three of them tucked snugly onto the windowsill.

It was partly a research trip but mainly a holiday. The trouble with taking a week off is that we came back to what seemed like more than double the work, gardening and errands for mum. Add to that all the reading I’ve been doing and the research trips for my book and I’m afraid the diary has slipped.

red henI’ve just finished my monthly nature diary for the Dalesman magazine so that back in diary mode I’ve got so much that I could write about this month that it would take many hours. But for a nature diary I prefer to write about what has happened on the actual day so now would be a good time to draw a line and start afresh tomorrow and try and get back to a page a day format. To try to write a little every day, even if sometimes that didn’t amount to much. There’s always something going on.

Link: Nethergill Farm

 

Flame Shoulder

flame shoulderflame shoulderALONG WITH TWO white ermines in the moth-trap this morning (and the usual one that got away) I found this unfamiliar species. It wasn’t too difficult to track down in the book thanks to those straw-coloured bands along the edges of its wings, made more conspicuous by a flash of black alongside. There are also two oval or kidney-shaped markings outlined in white and its underwings are conspicuously off white.

It’s the flame shoulder, Ochropleura plecta, a common resident. In a good year in Yorkshire there will be two generations, although the second will not be so numerous. Further north in Scotland there would be one generation, in southern Britain two.

The Field Guide to the Moths of Great Britain and Ireland warns that it ‘comes to light, when it flies wildly and has the unfortunate habit of occasionally entering the ears of moth recorders near the light!’

This one was flying wildly around its bug box so I released it as soon as I’d sketched and photographed it as best I could.

The little moth in the top left corner of my sketch is a small dusty wave, Idea seriata, which is often found near houses, sometimes on window boxes and potted plants. I think that I’ve seen this indistinct little moth before, resting on the wall by the back door. Some pug moths look very similar.

Guilt and the Good Life

farmhouse loafSHOULD I BE spending more time at my desk? Well of course . . . but there are other things in life.

We fitted in a session weeding the onions when we got back this afternoon which I can’t say was urgent but it’s one of those jobs that, if left, leads to bigger problems later on. The onions get onion setsswamped by the competition and you run the risk of damaging their roots as you remove the by then established weeds.

I have to admit that I prefer weeding, at least when it is as easy as this, to the fiddly business of sowing and planting out crops. No decisions to be made, a fairly mindless activity. It’s the first time I’ve used my little hand-held onion hoe for the job that gives it its name; weeding the narrow spaces between the rows of onions.

A spoonful of honey

After that half hour in the garden I took time out to bake a farmhouse loaf, again not strictly necessary – we could easily have picked up a loaf on the way home – but it’s such a pleasure to do. Being pressed for time after everything else we’d fitted in today I went for a recipe which doesn’t require knocking back and a second rising, saving 30 or 40 minutes.

This recipe includes a couple of spoonfuls of honey which gives the yeast a bit of a boost, helping speed things up. The hint of honey works well with the country grain and rye, which I add to the basic mix of white and wholemeal flour.

Boulder

boulderTHIS MUCH-INITIALLED gritstone boulder sits on top of the Cow at the Cow and Calf Rocks above Ilkley. To get this view I had to perch on another boulder, which wasn’t comfortable enough to encourage me to sit and draw it there and then so I took a photograph and today I’ve been working from that.

When I’m working from photographs I tend to get hooked into drawing every detail. In the real world the level of detail is so overwhelming that a natural editing process inevitably kicks in, enabling me to take more liberties with a scene and to be less literal than I am with the photograph.

A simple solution would have been to include exactly the same amount of detail but to draw the background with a finer pen which might have given more of an impression of aerial perspective. To a certain extent I thickened up the lines around the boulder by reworking them but I didn’t want to overdo that.

Hopefully when I add the watercolour there’ll be more depth in the illustration.

Back in the Flow

Ilkley Moor
Ilkley Moor; I’m starting this in pen and scanning that version before adding colour for the final illustration. Keeping my options open.

LIKE ME, my pen is a bit of a slow starter after a break. I draw a series of loops to get the ink flowing again.

loopsIt’s a cool rainy day, not the sort to encourage me to go out on a research or sketching trip, and it’s a pleasure to be sitting at my desk in my airy studio with the prospect of a whole day devoted to drawing. A rare chance to listen to the radio.

The excuse to draw all day is the main thing that attracted me to illustration as a career, so it’s a shame that so much of my time gets taken up with other tasks.

doodleMaking marks with a pen is such a pleasure and after getting the ink back in circulation I start writing ‘The quick brown fox . . .’ then go on to drawing circles, dots, rectangles and crosshatching.

This doodle (right) starts by looking like frogspawn and ends up looking like a multi-cored cable. I’ve scanned it here half as big again so that you can see the inky wobbliness. I think that both those qualities, the inkiness and the wobbly line, are important to me, hopefully giving a softer friendlier feel to my drawings rather than technically brilliant panache. I must be succeeding to the extent that no-one has ever described my work as technically brilliant.

These are all drawn with my ArtPen with the F, fine, drawing nib, filled with Noodler’s El Lawrence (brown) ink.

A Month Behind

crab tree blossomPEOPLE HAVE said to me that the season is running about a month behind average but this weekend we suddenly caught up by buying some vegetable plants from the garden centre and getting another bed and a half planted out. This is half the available space and as we had previously planted a bed with onion sets and potatoes so we’re now almost there. All we need to do now is watch it grow. And a bit of weeding.

As often happens, only one of our two espalier apples has blossomed. This year it’s the single espalier Golden Spire cooking apple which has been covered in blossom while the double espalier (imagine a capital Y but the the two arms curving out to rise vertically) is either late or it’s taking a year off. My quick watercolour sketch is of the Golden Hornet crab apple (left) which always has plenty of blossom.

feet

After all that work at the weekend I deserved to put my feet up this evening . . . and I owed it to myself to do a drawing just for the fun of doing a drawing.

I’ve been rummaging through old sketchbooks to track down some illustrations for a magazine article which reminded me how much I enjoyed drawing such mundane subjects.

Beware of Woodpeckers

woodpeckernestboxWE’RE A BIT concerned about the great spotted woodpecker that we’ve seen a couple of times by the nestbox by the back door. The blue tits have been busy but as far as we know there are no chicks in the box so far.

This morning the woodpecker perched briefly on the front of the box. It’s not that I want it to go hungry but we did invite the blue tits to nest here by erecting the box so I feel as if we have a duty of care.

blue titWe can’t keep an eye on it from dawn to dusk but if we see peck marks appearing around the entrance hole I’ll try getting a strip of metal cut to protect it. Just hope it doesn’t succeed in breaking in at a first attempt.

The Old Mill

NewmillerdamI REMEMBER the low stone building on the bottom left, on the Barnsley Road by he dam head at Newmillerdam, being a popular Italian restaurant back in the 1980s. This was the old watermill, a successor to the medieval corn mill that gave the village its name. The waterwheel itself was preserved, dominating the centre of the room but sadly it was later destroyed in a fire. Enough of the shell of the building survived to allow its restoration.

Somewhere amongst the houses beyond there’s a show home which was exhibited in the Ideal Homes exhibition in Olympia in the late 1950s or early 1960s before being reconstructed here.

Further up the hill there’s a row of old stone-built terraced cottages that Barbara and visited when we were house-hunting. Despite the attractive location we had to cross it off our list as the ceiling was too low for me to stand upright. Much as I love period features, I couldn’t have coped with that.

I drew this with an ArtPen filled with El Lawrence brown Noodler’s ink and added the colour later, using a photograph that I’d taken as reference.

The Wide Open Spaces

View from Charlotte'sWE’RE A BIT limited as to where we can take my mum for a coffee now that she’s not as mobile but the ice cream parlour at Whitley has a lot going for it. Yes, it might be the same place that we brought her last week and the week before but the panorama, looking up the Calder valley to the tops of the Pennines is different each time we visit. It has greened up a lot since we were last here.  But it changes every few minutes as shadows of clouds move across pasture, wood and moor.

It’s so good to have a short burst of the wide open spaces.

I like watercolours where forms are simplified so why do I find it impossible not to make some attempt to blob in every tree when I’m painting this view? The problem is that I’m so fascinated by detail. As I painted this I could see the blades of the wind turbines turning on the horizon, traffic passing on the motorway 6 miles away, crows bursting from the wood beyond the reservoir as a buzzard flew over . . .

It’s so difficult not to get hooked on the detail!

Sheepish Dog

A sheepish TillyAFTER A day writing an article I get a brief chance to draw and to try, as I’ve done on numerous occasions (for example in March), to catch Tilly the bookshop border collie in sheepish mood.

I’ve drawn this with a Rotring Tikki Graphic pen, a disposable technical pen which has waterproof pigmented ink. But when I added the colour I realised that I’d missed a small but expressive feature of Tilly’s; she has two light brown spots above her eyes which help to give her a certain innocently worried look.

Close up

sheepish close up

When I scanned the drawing I accidentally left the scanner on the high res setting that I’d been using for a book illustration I’d been working on. Computer resolution has come along so much in the past decade but, as this high res detail shows, you’re still not getting the full texture of a drawing when you see it same size on screen.

My fiddly pen work becomes freer and calligraphic on this scale. The watercolour is from my new Bijou box, which has naturally become my favourite.

If anything Tilly looks even more worried.