Plesiosaur skull, Cryptoclidus eurymerus, from the Oxford Clay, drawn in 1989 for the City Museum and Art Gallery, Peterborough.
Plesiosaur Skull
The Weir at the Hepworth
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.
Canada Goose Feet
Canada goose feet, drawn on the iPad Pro in Procreate.
Canada Goose Reference
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.
Link
Domestika online art courses
Canada Goose
Black-headed gull, moorhen, mallard and Canada goose at Thornes Park duck pond this morning.
Oak Leaves
Oak, white deadnettle and so far unidentified leaf (cherry?) by the canal near the Navigation Inn yesterday.
Lead Smelting in Swaledale
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.
Link
Yorkshire Rock, a journey through time at the BGS shop, £6.50.
White Saddle
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.
Hepworth Willows
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.
Green Planet
It grows on you. This double album, from the original television soundtrack composed by Benjamin Merrison and Will Slater, is my favourite when I want to settle down to a session of drawing plants (or any other subject else for that matter) as it flows so organically, like the impressive time-lapse sequences in the Green Planet television series.
But it stands on its own too; I like the lightness of touch; it’s not too ponderous but it does evoke the sense of wonder that you get from being in green spaces and observing nature. It’s good on plants behaving badly too – strangler vines*, I’m thinking of you! – described with humour and sometimes a sense of impending menace in the music.
I’m looking forward to revisiting the series to see how the now-familiar music fits with the sequences.
* Looking at the tracks list, I’m not sure that the notorious strangler fig actually makes an appearance but the tracks on cholla buds and ancestral grasses have a similar thrusting dynamic about them.