Recent iPad sketches drawn in Procreate and Clip Studio Paint.
Black Ponies
Pocket Sketchbook
A few more pages from my current pocket sketchbook
Birds by the River
Addingford, 10.30 am: A male reed bunting flits into a hawthorn bush by a pond between the canal and the river, flashing its white tail bars.
Wintering duck have now moved on but a single drake goosander makes its way down the river, diving occasionally as it goes. Later we see a female heading up river.
Swans often nest on the quieter side of the canal but this year a pair have built an island nest on a tennis court-sized pond by the Strands. They’ve built up the nest platform from the dried stems of reedmace, which is now bursting into fluffy masses of downy seed. Slender willows along the banks are dotted with pale catkins.
A pair of grey wagtails bob about on a flooded corner of the The Strands.
Bailey Trees
11.15 am: On a cool, drizzly morning, two mistle thrushes are checking out the well-trodden grass of the play area at Pontefract Castle. One of them appears to have a sash of darker feathers across its speckled breast, perhaps a result of hopping through wet grass. On both birds there’s a white spot on the wing.
John Carr Logo
The wreath has turned out folksy rather than streetwise Hamilton-style energetic but it reads clearly so it will do the job. The ‘300th birthday’ wouldn’t fit in, so that’s going on the plinth below the John Carr cut-out.
Laurel Wreath
I was going to use a design based on the south door of Horbury St Peter’s Church as a frame for my ‘John Carr, 300th anniversary’ logo for the Redbox Gallery display but, as an architectural feature, it would have competed with my model of the spire, so I’m going for a laurel wreath instead.
Towards the end of his life John Carr, who rose to be Mayor of York, was depicted in two busts as a latter-day Roman senator, so the laurel wreath is appropriate.
With his sense of humour, John Carr would probably have chosen to have a putti – a cheeky little angel – floating above him, like the one that beams down from the plasterwork by the chancel arch in his church.
Rather than design the logo on my iPad, which would have enabled me to take advantage of all its graphic features, I’m sticking with the recycled theme and making the wreath from cardboard.
Setting the Scene
I could go on adding details (or start again and try to get nearer the actual proportions!) but there’s enough to evoke John Carr’s spire in my recycled materials model for the Redbox Gallery show.
Think of this as being more stage set – well a stage set for a stop action animation perhaps – rather than architectural model.
I’ve given my cut-out version of the Beechey portrait of Carr a bit of a Pop-Art makeover in Adobe Illustrator.
John Carr Model
More progress with my St Peter’s spire model the the John Carr display. I’ve done it all by eye but as I added frieze, balustrade and pilasters to the belfry I realised that even adding a slither of card to my model would change the proportions. I’ve been working from a photograph and one of my drawings made close to the church so the spire isn’t as tall and soaring as it appears when seen from a distance across the valley.
Pillars
Continuing on the theme of using found materials, I’ve cut up a garden cane and a piece of left-over dowel that I’d used for stirring paint to make the pillars supporting the spire for my model of St Peter’s Church tower.
Spire
My first day – my first ever day – with a very faint positive test for Covid-19 and I’m taking the chance of being grounded to catch up with my cardboard model of St Peter’s Church, Horbury, spire for my John Carr tricentenary exhibit in the Redbox Gallery.
Barbara’s brother John unfortunately caught covid at the hospice but, as of this morning when we made a video call to him, he wasn’t showing any covid symptoms.