Rhubarb

I WANTED to draw something in the garden but nothing too fussy so at this time of year an obvious subject is the newly unfurled leaves of Rhubarb. Some are still looking crinkly from recently unpacking themselves from the folded-up form that emerged from the bud.

The glossy elephant’s ears leaves bring a touch of the luxuriantly exotic to the vegetable garden, flouncing around by the hedge with the kind of grand, swaggering gestures that you’d find in Baroque theatre or Elizabethan costume.

The pattern of veins with sections of puckered leaf surface between reminded me of the river valleys and hills of Europe that I’d been sketching from the plane a couple of weeks ago.

I was intending to stick purely to line and I didn’t want to add watercolour but by the time I’d finished a few leaves my drawing was looking like a map so I added cross hatching in the gaps between the leaf margins and indicated some of the shadows from the afternoon sun to give some clues to the way the leaves are arranged relative to each other in space.

Being right-handed I started in the top left corner and worked my way across. Theoretically I could have continued in this fashion, piecing my subject together from interlocking shapes like a jigsaw but my attention soon wavered and by the time I got to the large leaf in the centre of the top row I went drastically wrong in scale. I’ve left my mistake in the drawing so that you can see that at my first attempt I drew the main leaf vein about two thirds of the size it should be and 2 centimetres to the left of where it should have been on the page.

I realised that however relaxing this drawing was supposed to be I needed a strategy to tackle such a convoluted subject so I started by indicating the main veins before getting involved in the subsidiary details.

It sounds like a controlled process but the outlines and veins make what might appear to be a still life feel as if it’s animated. I felt as I imagine a novice skier must feel if they attempt to go straight from the nursery slopes onto the red routes. A feeling of controlled chaos.

The lighting was consistent and there was little breeze and little to distract me other than a sparrow chirping in the hedge above the rhubarb.

Imitate the Action of a Tiger

Thinking about the need for a degree of determination even when you’re doing something that is supposedly relaxing, after I drew this I was listening to a short talk on Radio 3 by choral music conductor Gareth Malone who said that when he had a big performance to conduct on the way to the concert hall he would read the ‘Once more unto the breach dear friends!’ speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V on his mobile phone. Not that singing is like fighting but he feels that he needs to instill in his choir some spirit and determination.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon . . .
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’

I know what he means because you need something of that sense of attack when tackling a drawing. You’ve somehow got to keep that ‘stillness and humility’ but also harness the controlled energy suggested in the line about ‘greyhounds in the slips, straining upon the start’. Relaxed concentration is what I usually call it, but that’s what the ‘action of the tiger’ appears to be when you see one hunting in a wildlife documentary; fluid movement and observant determination.

Drawing Pen

I used a Pilot Drawing Pen with an 08 nib for the rhubarb drawing which contains waterproof, light resistant brown DR pigment ink. When drawing botanical details I’d normally go for the finer 01 size nib but I wanted a more expressive and relaxed line here.

For me this 08 nib might be the nearest that I’ll get to the feel of a fountain pen when using a fibre tip. I tend to wear down the fibre tips before the ink in the pen runs out, perhaps because I’m using too much pressure or because I’m drawing on slightly toothed acid free cartridge paper. I soon find that I have to hold the pen vertically to get a consistent line out of it. I’m hoping that the larger tip size will enable me to draw at an angle for longer. Perhaps a proportionally larger tip in relation to the size of the ink reservoir helps give a smoother flow.

Links Gareth Malone, Pilot Drawing Pen

The Chocolate Brown Sketchbook

AFTER THE appropriately aubergine-coloured sketchbook that I used for our week in Greece, I’m starting a new pocket-sized sketchbook for urban excursions. At A6, about 4 x 6 inches, it’s no bigger than a chunky bar of chocolate and it has a chocolate-coloured banana paper cover.

A6 Pink Pig sketchbook

It’s literally a pocket-sized sketchbook and I’m trying to decide what would be the most portable form of colour to go with it.

This morning I took an ArtPen tin loaded with a selection of a dozen watercolour crayons but, for a subject like this anyway, they don’t work as well as watercolours. I try to mix an approximation for the grey of the sky by shading it with the lightest blue and ochre that my small selection of crayons allow.

I don’t find crayons anywhere near as versatile as watercolours. With watercolours you can add the smallest speck of ochre, crimson or blue to a grey mix to get the colour you’re after. You can then add water to get the tone or gradation of tones that you need.

Birdstrike

‘PTOMPH!

It’s happened again; a Goldfinch hits the patio windows and lies senseless on the patio. Luckily by the time we’ve had breakfast it has gradually recovered, looked around and, though we didn’t see it go, flown off.

In the afternoon it’s a Wood Pigeon that hits the window, leaving a dusty outline of its wingspan and a powder puff impression of it’s breast. The Wood Pigeons do this fairly regularly but never seem to come to any harm.

The photograph is the impression of a bird that hit the patio windows 6 weeks ago. You can even see an eye-ring in this picture. It might have been another pigeon but the eye-ring reminds me of a Sparrowhawk.

On the morning that this appeared a smaller impression, perhaps a Goldfinch appeared on the other window.

When you see the two impressions together it looks to me as if both birds hit the window together, the hawk chasing the finch.

In this over-enhanced version you can speculate that the Goldfinch had been on the feeder and the Sparrowhawk had swooped over the hedge. A moment of drama captured in feather impressions.

May Blossom

THE FIRST Hawthorn in blossom is a bush overhanging the railway cutting at the foot of Addingford Steps. It gets the warmth from the south-facing brick embankment below.

The hawthorn blossom has a sweet smell, I wouldn’t call it a ‘heady’ smell; it’s not an over-the-top sweetness nor is it sugary sweet like sherbet it’s just, um, sweetish.

Each flower has five petals, which is not surprising because Hawthorn is a member of the rose family, Rosaceae. There’s one female pistil in the middle surrounded by a number of male stamens, each with a reddish tip. When you see the haws, the hawthorn berries, later in the year, the petals and stamens have withered away but you can still see the remnant of the pistil at the end of the berry.

Botanically the haw is a true berry, even though it might seem too pulpy and woody to qualify as what we’d expect if we bought a ‘mixed berries’ yogurt. From a botanical perspective raspberries and blackberries aren’t berries, they’re collections of drupes; fleshy, thin-skinned fruits containing the seed in a stone. Smaller versions of single drupe fruits such as the cherry, plum and olive.

Ra-cha-cha-chat

What bird sings from a bush by the canal, opposite a flooded marshy field known as the Strands, in what I’ve described in my field notes as an ‘agitated chattering, rasping, stoccato, occasional morse code phrases’?

Like smells, bird song is difficult to describe in words!

Sunday was International Dawn Chorus day. At this time of year you get the full variety of the dawn chorus as the summer migrants have joined our resident birds. I’m no expert on bird song but at least having got out a bit this spring I’m familiar enough with our residents to spot a new and noticeably different song.

 Crab Apple blossom at the Strands last week

This song is one that I’ve heard down by this marshy field before and I know that it’s either Reed or Sedge Warbler. I always forget which one by the time it appears next year. I didn’t manage to focus my binoculars on it but thought that I glimpsed it singing inconspicuously from halfway up in the bush.

The RSPB website (see link below) describes the song of the Sedge Warbler as ‘a noisy, rambling warble compared to the more rhythmic song of the reed warbler’. Reed Warblers are, anyway, as the name suggests, more typical of areas with large reedbeds. You’ll find Sedge Warblers in reedbeds too but also at damp wetlands like the Strands, where you’re less likely to find the Reed Warbler.

Link; The Sedge Warbler page on the RSPB website helpfully includes a recording of the song.

Kingcups

I’M NOT FINDING pen and Indian ink a responsive medium as I draw these Kingcups by the pond. If I don’t press heavily enough on the paper I don’t get a mark but if I press too hard on the springy nib the pressure builds up for a moment and then – whizz! – the nib sets off and draws a straighter line than I’d intended!

Surely, if I keep at it, I can exercise some relaxed control over the recalcitrant medium. The ink soon goes claggy and even during this short session of drawing I have to pause to clean the coagulating Winsor & Newton black ink from the nib.

Is it the beautifully sunny but not sultry weather that’s drying the ink too quickly or is it the shrill excited scream every five seconds of next door’s children playing happily on a trampoline a few yards away that’s putting me off my stroke?

I think that I’ve been spoilt by the predictably flowing combination of ArtPen and Noodler’s ink. It’s second nature to draw with that combination, but I would like to experiment with different mediums, which create different marks.

Anyway, time to admit defeat, perhaps I’ll add some colour later when it’s a bit quieter!

Nightjar

10.30 a.m., Langsett Reservoir, lakeside path through conifer plantation.

THE TWO things that struck me about this bird were:

  1. How grey it was.
  2. That it appeared somehow hunched, almost as if it hadn’t got a head.

As I wrote in my notes, it was ‘grey and blockily streaky, like the bark of a pine tree’. It reminded us in size and proportion of a woodpecker. Barbara has a distinct impression of it having a ‘chopped off’ tail.

We’d seen two hikers walking along the fence bordering the cleared area at the other side of the reservoir and I suspect that this bird had been flushed by them and perched on the banking on the northern shore until we came along and it flew up to the cover of the treetops.

The first thing that the Collins Bird Guide says about the Nightjar, highlighted in italics as a diagnostic feature, is that it is ‘mottled brown, buff-white, grey and black‘ which to me equates well with my strong impression of it being ‘blockily streaky, like the bark of a pine tree’. The ‘headless’ look is also a characteristic of nightjars, which have large heads and inconspicuous beaks. As the Guide says, they’re ‘hard to detect’ when ‘resting lenghtwise on a branch’. So a bird noted for its close resemblance to pine bark.

The area on the far side of the reservoir has been cleared and is being managed in order to encourage birds of heathy, open clearings like the Nightjar and Redstart. Nightjars are summer migrants, arriving in May. Hope this one – if that’s what it was – settles and breeds.

Other possibilities from such a brief sighting are Wryneck – highly unlikely – and Little Owl  which is more of a possibility but it’s a bird that we’ve seen occasionally before and are fairly familiar with. It’s brownish rather than greyish and, even at a brief sighting ‘owlish’. The Little Owl has a ‘chopped off’ tail, but it has a distinctly rounded head.

We saw if fly for no more than 50 yards up the slope, but saw no trace of the undulating flight that is typical of woodpeckers or the ‘bounding’ flight of the Little Owl. It was silent in flight, as you’d expect from owls and nightjars.

Sandpiper

No doubts however about the Common Sandpiper which we got an unusually close-up view of, looking down on it at the water’s edge from the road that goes along the dam wall.

Sallow Catkins

Trees drawn on our travels yesterday.

FEMALE CATKINS of the Pussy Willow – also known as the Goat Willow or Sallow, Salix caprea, are starting to release their fluffy thistledown-like seeds.

This willow is dioecious, meaning unisexual. An individual Pussy Willow will have either all male or all female catkins. Pollen is distributed on the wind so pollination and seed-dispersal has mainly taken place before the leaves unfurl, obstructing windblown pollen or seeds.

The shape and size of this beetle is a good match for the leaf buds.

Black Bag

I’VE DRAWN this in dip pen and Winsor & Newton Indian ink then added a premixed ink wash. I used this method for my High Peak Drifter sketchbook, taking four small plastic containers of pale to dark washes with me.

This proved ideal for subjects in the Dark Peak in late winter and early spring, such as drystone walls and running water and places like Thor’s Cave but as summer approached it seemed wilfully contradictory to use the same monochrome treatment for wild flowers and butterflies. But I stuck with it to the final page, drawn one sultry early summer’s evening at Jacob’s Ladder, the zig-zag path that climbs up to the Kinderscout plateau.

I recently kitted myself out with a fresh batch of Pink Pig cartridge paper sketchbooks in a range of sizes and my plan is to have art-bags ready to go in a small (A6), medium (A5) and largish (A4) sizes.

I’m still looking for a bag that is suitably compact for an A6 sketching kit, perhaps it will all go into a wallet and fit into my pocket. My growing collection of art-bags tend to flop around the studio, usually getting parked on a chair, so I’ve attached a hook to the wall and hung them there, ready to grab one depending on exactly where I’m heading;

  • A National Trust organiser bag in natural canvas is ideal for what I intend to be my natural history sketchbook, an A5 landscape format spiral bound Pink Pig.
  • The black Timberland backpack, a birthday present from a friend last week, is the one that I’d use for more ambitious outings, perhaps to draw whole landscapes rather than smaller details. The bag is designed to hold a laptop, so there’s plenty of room for my A4 landscape format sketchbook and it has extra compartments so that I have the option to include some more ambitious media, dip pen and bottle of ink rather than my habitual fountain pen for instance.
  • Finally, hanging like a shadow behind the National Trust organiser in my sketch, there’s the black shoulder bag (described as a ‘fisherman’s bag’) that I bought at Marks & Spencer’s in Glasgow last year. This is my sketchcrawl around town bag, probably the one that I’ll take most on my errands and book deliveries. This fits my new square 8 by 8 inch holly green Pink Pig like a glove.

But the square page of the holly green sketchbook doesn’t accommodate long thin drawings; that’s why my A5 bag ended up hanging out of frame off the bottom of the page! (Pink Pig do some quirky long thin sizes, perhaps I should go for one of them for tall, thin subjects).

Wing over Corfu

The heron appeared larger and proportionally longer in the wing than ours but, when I look it up in the book the Purple Heron is actually a bit smaller than our Grey. As we waited in the departure lounge we looked out towards Mount Pantokrator, the highest mountain in Corfu. We’ll have to return to explore further.

The runway goes out along the edge of an inlet, straight towards Mouse Island. It cuts off a lagoon which was the ancient port of the town. A large bird, which I’m able to confirm from my quick sketch was a White Stork, flies down to the scrub at the edge of the runway but we’re called to board the plane before we can get out our binoculars and focus on it.

Our plane heads not out over Mouse Island but over the town, giving us an amazing view of the fortress and old town and then the green and hilly north of the Island as we head north west along the Adriatic Coast of Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia Herzegovina and Croatia.

Corfu Town

OUR FINAL full day and we walk up via the hairpin bends through the olives and pines for a last coffee at the Garden of Dreams, at the San Merino wine and snack bar at Milia, on the terrace opposite the Achillion Palace. Theodorus Vassilakis the owner (above) treats us to a glass of red wine made with grapes from his vineyard, a five year old vintage, and a toasted olive sandwich – his own olives of course – which is delicious. He sits patiently as I draw him. He runs a traditional Corfiot distillery, producing kumquat liqueur, which you can sample here.

After lunch we’re probably a little overenthusiastic as we set off along the road to Corfu town, a walk that takes us about 3 hours to complete and which takes us alongside one of the islands busiest roads with no pavement in several places.

We stop at a small bar halfway and manage by gestures to make the barman understand that we’d like two mugs of tea but, when he brings them, we have the problem of asking for the milk. In the three weeks before the holiday I made a half-hearted attempt to learn some basic Greek phrases but I had to resort to an internationally understood impression to make myself understood by saying ‘MOOoooo!’

We find our way to the Liston Square, where we sit at a cafe table at the Libro d’Oro in an arcade overlooking the park in front of the fortress and have a fresh fruit salad, which is something of a work of art. I try the honeyed tea. The waiter speaks English so there’s no need to do my impression of a bee.

We walk back through the old town along streets wide enough for two donkeys to pass each other then take the bus back to Benitses.

Link Vassilakis and Sons

Merlin and the Kumquat

MUCH OF the bedrock that I’ve seen in rocks on the shore or in roadside cuttings is like this; it’s full of fragments of limestone, strongly bound in a cement of pulverised and powdered rock.

The 1 to 2 millimetre deep indentations on this pebble (right) are in rows too regular, I think, to be part of any geological erosion process. But I can’t imagine why any marine creature would go to the trouble of pitting out patterns in this way so my guess is that it is some kind of a fossil.

I’m not sure what species this large thistle was but it looked different to our Spear and Creeping Thistles.

Kumquat

The Kumquat was introduced to Corfu by an English botanist called Merlin. The fruits are turned into marmalade and also distilled to make a fruity liqueur. A Merlin variety of orange is still grown on the island.

This Spotted Flycatcher was perching on aerial, veranda and wire, darting off and hovering below the balcony of an empty villa.

This White Wagtail is the same species as our British Pied Wagtail but a different race. The continental male has a grey back, as shown in my sketch, while our Pied has a black back. The continental variety is Moticilla abla alba and the British race Moticilla abla yarellii.