SINCE YESTERDAY most of the lake at Newmillerdam has frozen over. Mallards, Black-headed Gulls and Coot have gathered by a small open area no bigger than a garden pond near the causeway across the top end of the lake. A Canada Goose waddles awkwardly across the ice towards the war memorial where someone is feeding the ducks.
We get a better view of the Dabchick. As the main lake is frozen it’s on the inlet channel, along with a few Mallards. While my drawing was enough to serve as a field sketch (even though it was drawn from memory later), I didn’t catch the buoyant character of the Dabchick; not as rounded and buoyant-looking as a rubber duck but not as lean and lanky looking as my sketch, which took on the proportions of an adolescent Moorhen.
I realise when we walk under the conifers where we saw the Siskins yesterday that I drew them (from memory) on pine branches, while in fact they were on Larch. I picked up this branch with two female larch cones on it to draw.
ABOUT THREE-QUARTERS of the lake at Newmillerdam is ice-covered this morning but there’s room for Tufted Ducks to dive, apparently for freshwater mussels, in a spot ten or twenty yards from the shore between the boathouse and the war memorial, where I’ve seen them diving before.
Can there really be so many mussels in the lake?
Nearer the shore we can see these shells, at least some of which look empty. I’ve boosted the contrast in the photograph because of the glare on the water surface.
Amongst the Mallards there’s a single Pink-footed Goose, which hisses as it pecks at some scraps that a visitor has left on the path.
Barbara picks up this feather which I assume is from the goose but looking at my photograph of the bird, a breast feather like this should be greyer and banded horizontally, rather than streaked vertically, so I think this is more likely to be a feather from a female Mallard.
At first glance, as it dives under, the Dabchick or Little Grebe looks like a diminutive duck but, as it keeps bobbing up briefly, we can see the more pointy bill of the grebe. By the boathouse we see a Goosander, a saw-billed duck (the saw-like edges of the bill help it grip small fish).
I’ve drawn squirrel-nibbled cones on several occasions but, as it was too cold to be comfortable to stop and sketch, I picked these up to draw in the studio later.
As we walk back through the conifer plantations, there’s a twittering all around us in the tops of the trees. Even with binoculars I can see no more than a dark silhouette, possibly with streaky plumage, but the shape and the shallow notch in the tail make me think it’s a finch and the size, about the size of a Blue Tit, narrows it down to Siskin. Siskins visit in large flock during winter and often visit conifer plantations.
I’M LOOKING forward to spring and being able to get out drawing wild flowers again but I can get a bit of practice by drawing cut flowers from the florists. The iris appealed to me more than the carnations and daisy-like flowers in the same bouquet because the structure of the flower is more obvious.
I’m continuing to familiarise myself with the features of the latest version of Photoshop and I’m intrigued by ‘Puppet Warp’, a new feature in Photoshop CS5. This works by putting a mesh across your drawing which you can then manipulate by adding node points and pulling and pushing them about to distort the drawing in various ways.
It’s useful for a whole lot more than the ‘puppet’ animation that the name suggests but that’s a good place to start to get to know what it does.
When I drew the walking Moorhen a few years ago I had to draw a dozen or more separate frames to make up the complete action. With Puppet Warp you can do just the one drawing and bend, distort and move it around in Photoshop.
It’s not going to give you the charm of a fully hand-drawn animation but for certain subjects it should work well. It has the advantage that you can avoid the ‘boiling’ effect you get from textures, such as crayon and watercolour, that you can’t possibly match between one hand-drawn frame and the next and it can save a lot of repetitive ‘in-betweening’ between the key frames of the action.
IN MY COFFEE BREAK this morning I watched another You Tube video about animating in Photoshop and here are the results of me trying it out. I’m sure this is going to have a useful end result.
I’d been looking out of the window since this morning thinking that I’d like to do a watercolour of the wood in the mist and later in sunshine but I didn’t manage to get my sketchbook out until 5 pm I’d finished my other work. I dispensed with my usual pen and ink and used 2B pencil for speed. The sharp detail had already disappeared but by sketching quickly rather than drawing carefully, I had time to add some colour, relying one my knowledge where the colours are in my box.
Despite the limitations of this sketch which took little more than five minutes, I still prefer it to my animation!
I’M JUST STARTING to get familiar with a new version of Photoshop and I’m pleased to find that simple animation seems a lot easier than it did with my old version, Photoshop 7, where you had to jump to another program, Image Ready, to save your work as a GIF.
Here’s a first try. Annoyingly repetitive but at least it shows that I’ve understood the basics.
Canimation
Looking towards the M62 from Starbuck's, Birstall.
There’s a chance to see a sample of the work of the next generation of animators at the cinema today in a short promotional film about the Red Bull Canimation competition. Every entry must prominently feature a can of Red Bull. It doesn’t sound like the most subtle form of product placement but the student animations look suitably impressive.
But I now know why I never made it in the animation world; I just don’t look cool enough, like the young hopefuls in this promo. The other essential is to have a film crew with you – whether you’re wandering in the backwoods or walking along the dreary terraced streets of your hometown – to capture the moment when that surprise call comes to inform you that you’ve made it onto the shortlist.
I like the scene where one young chap runs into the house, phone in hand, gasping excitedly ‘Mum! Dad! I’m going to London!’
Link: Canimation – these competition entries make you feel you don’t always need a Pixar-sized studio behind you to produce a presentable animation. I’ve got a long way to go though.
Game of Shadows
It’s good to see so much illustration in the work of these animators, in some of the advertisements and trailers and in the film we’ve come to see, Sherlock Holmes, A Game of Shadows. The clues to the mystery include a series of charcoal sketches on a very specific type of paper, as you’d expect in a Sherlock Holmes story, and the closing credits include 1890s Strand Magazine style versions of characters and scenes from the movie.
In one scene we see some of the hundreds of details that Sherlock observes as he scans a room, looking for a vital clue.
‘What do you see?’ asks his female companion.
‘I see everything . . . that is my curse!’
It’s such a good line that I feel Conan Doyle himself would have been pleased to come up with it, but I don’t remember it from the stories. It does show that Holmes would have made a good illustrator (like Conan Doyle’s father, grandfather and two of his uncles). In The Greek Interpreter Sherlock claims that he is related, through his grandmother, to the Vernets, a family of French painters.
LIKE A FISHERMAN’S TALE, it’s the one that got away that we’d really liked to have put on our list. It’s the annual RSPB garden birds survey so we move one of the sofas over to the patio windows and between 10.30 and 11.30, we record every bird we see and the maximum numbers at any one time.
I can't settle to sketching as we have to keep scanning the garden for any new species that we might miss.
After twenty minutes we have, amongst other birds, one Great Tit, three Blue Tits, several House Sparrows and a respectable total of 13 Goldfinches on our list. We’re pleased when a Coal Tit, a less frequent visitor, and a Willow Tit, an even less frequent visitor, show up briefly. No sign of the Long-tailed Tits but they typically call just before sunset to feed on the fat-balls. Bullfinch, Chaffinch and Greenfinch put in an appearance as I hoped they would.
It’s not until the final 15 minutes that the resplendent cock Pheasant struts up the garden path then crows challengingly when he reaches the lawn. But today there’s no sign of his coterie of hen Pheasants. Perhaps as it’s Sunday and people are out walking their dogs, they’ve headed off to a quieter corner of the woods.
It’s not people who spook the local birds this morning but our resident top predator, a large brown Sparrowhawk. All the birds at the feeders dive for cover as and the Wood Pigeons that have gathered in the tops of the Ashes at the edge of the wood take flight as the hawk makes its way up the meadow, on a straight flight-path about six feet above the ground.
Sparrowhawk, Wood Pigeons and a Jay that we see at the edge of the wood shortly afterwards don’t count for our garden birds survey because they’re not making use of our garden. Nor unfortunately can we count the female Great Spotted Woodpecker that comes and feeds from the suet log ten minutes later. We’ve seen Great Tits feeding on the fat-balls mixture in the holes drilled in the log but this is the first time we’ve seen a woodpecker using it.
Nor can we count the Siskin that shows up at lunch time!
For the Record
Birds in our back garden, in order of seeing them, were: Blue Tit (4), House Sparrow (7), Dunnock (2), Great Tit (1), Goldfinch (13), Chaffinch (1), Blackbird (2), Greenfinch (2), Bullfinch (2), Robin (1), Coal Tit (1), Willow Tit (1) and Pheasant (1).
I FEEL AS IF I’m being a bit intrusive if I start drawing people in a social situation. If I’m drawing people, I’d rather be in a public place; sitting in a cafe perhaps or at a street market. So as we talked after the meal this evening I found myself drawing corners of the room instead of assembled relatives from as far afield as Paris and Wath-on-Dearne.
THE BIRD FEEDERS have been so busy recently. Not only do we have the cock Pheasant strutting up the garden every morning, he’s also accompanied by a growing harem of hen Pheasants. Whether he leads them into the garden or whether he tags along with them is debatable.
He was the first bird that we’ve seen drinking from the new bird bath and apart from him we’ve spotted only one Goldfinch perching on the rim, although we didn’t actually see it drink.
For much of today there have been up to a dozen Goldfinches feeding, often joined by Bullfinches (2 males, 1 female) and more occasionally by Greenfinches (3).
A female Chaffinch skulks around below, picking up spilt grain but Barbara spotted it briefly visiting the feeder during a quiet spell at breakfast-time. I don’t remember ever having seen one on the hanging feeders but the type that we’re using now have accessible perches (plastic rings at each hole) and they’re very close to the hedge which the Chaffinch perches in so it’s surprising that we don’t see it going directly to the feeder more often.
It’s the RSPB garden bird-watch this weekend, so we’re hoping that all these colourful finches will turn up to be counted during the allotted hour.
Another bird that uses the feeders infrequently and with difficulty is the Robin. It returned several times to the fat-ball feeder.
There were two Robins in the hedge by the feeders this afternoon, one soon chasing off the other.
Note; My drawings today are from sketches I’ve made over the years, some going back to the early days of this diary, a decade ago. Screen resolutions and average bandwidths were so different then, so if I could get a sketch, like the little one of the Bullfinch down to 1 kilobyte, I thought I was doing well. Seeing these on my latest computer I’m surprised how flat and dotty those early GIF (graphic image files) are. They used to look just about acceptable but I’d do things differently today.
THE CAFE at Marks & Spencer’s Birstall looks out over the higher ground between the valleys of the Aire and the Calder. Ignoring the cars and the stores of the retail park I drew the trees and made quick watercolour sketches of the sky to the north when we called with my mum for coffee this morning.
Birstall appears as Burstall in 13th century manuscripts, a place name that derives from the Old English burgsteall, meaning the place of the burn, or fortified homestead’.
THIS IS just the relaxed kind of drawing which I like to use my fine-nibbed ArtPen for. Adding colour, even the subdued colour of old brick and stone and grey winter skies, adds another dimension and more information, and helps to establish mood and atmosphere.
The views are disjointed because I was limited to drawing the details that I could see through the gaps in the vertical blinds at Barbara’s brother John’s when we called to see him and Margaret this morning.
SINCE YESTERDAY most of the lake at Newmillerdam has frozen over. Mallards, Black-headed Gulls and Coot have gathered by a small open area no bigger than a garden pond near the causeway across the top end of the lake. A Canada Goose waddles awkwardly across the ice towards the war memorial where someone is feeding the ducks.
as a field sketch (even though it was drawn from memory later), I didn’t catch the buoyant character of the Dabchick; not as rounded and buoyant-looking as a rubber duck but not as lean and lanky looking as my sketch, which took on the proportions of an adolescent Moorhen.
