I’m rounding off the William Baines centenary year on a suitably seasonal note with this article, A Composer’s Christmas in the December edition of The Yorkshire Dalesman.
From the diaries of William Baines, the Yorkshire composer who died 100 years ago, and from reminiscences of his relations and friends, Richard Bell has sketched this impression of Christmas early in the last century.
View from the first floor Barbara Hepworth sculpture gallery looking down on the weir on the River Calder. Drawn in Procreate, using Román García Mora’s set of brushes from the Domestika course, Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate.
I’ve just started a Domestika course, Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate and illustrator and 3D modeler Román García Mora has asked us to choose an animal or bird and put together a reference sheet about it. As we were heading for the Thornes Park duck pond yesterday I decided to go for Canada geese, a bird that I can guarantee being able to find if I need to go back for further reference.
Photographic reference is fine but Román believes that the way to understand your subject is to draw it yourself, preferably from life in its natural habitat. Failing that the zoo or a natural history museum gives an opportunity to learn more.
I’d be surprised to find a stuffed Canada goose in any of our local museums but I do have a Victorian stuffed bird that I can use for the purposes of the tasks we’ve been set in this exercise so I’ve drawn this juvenile great-crested grebe.
The unfortunate grebe was shot on Bretton Park Lake at a time when the species was all but extinct in the area because its plumage was valued as ‘grebe fur’ in the fashions of that time. Unfortunately I don’t have an exact date.
I’m following Román’s technique for sketching in Procreate, working on a light grey background and starting with what he calls a ‘stain’, a rough tonal outline of the bird. I’ve downloaded the Procreate brushes that he used in the online demonstration and used them as you might use chalks, tonal washed and pencil.
No, this isn’t a maze for Swaledale sheep, it’s a cut-away view of the smelting flues used by lead mines in Swaledale: hearth for the smashed up ore on the right, outlet chimney centre and the maze of corridors in between where various minerals settled out from the vapours as they precipitated out.
I suspect that this drawing was a rough for my book Yorkshire Rock, a Journey through Time published by the British Geological Survey in 1996 but still in print today (see link below).
If it was intended for the book, it didn’t make it into the final cut, which instead featured the less technical but more dramatic process of hushing.
We found a small colony of white saddle fungus, Helvella crispa, alongside the track on the south bank of the River Aire between Mickletown and Methley.
Drawing on an iPad is ideal when you’re visiting the Hepworth as wet media aren’t allowed. I wanted to put into practice the tips that I’d picked up at the Procreate session at the Apple Store yesterday so I took a photograph as my starting point, not only as a guide to drawing as but also in order to extract a palette of autumnal colours from it.
The ragged shapes of willows didn’t give me much form to simplify so when I stopped for coffee I started again with a line drawing of the willow that I looked out at from the corner table by the window.
A heron stood motionless at the foot of the weir but didn’t seem to be having much luck in the middle of the foaming torrent. It evidently had an amazingly efficient heat exchange system to be able to tolerate the rush of water around its feet but it did eventually pause to lift its legs from the torrent and to briefly preen through its feathers.
