Happy birthday to Florence.
Barcode 5018 4453 isn’t as fierce as depicted; it’s from the top of a jar of Marmite.
Barcode Safari
Wookiees
Great Star Wars party at the weekend. Happy birthday today to Ruby. Or, as they’d say in Wookieespeak . . .
Golden Spire
Golden Spire cooking apple drawn in Pro Create on an iPad Pro using, you guessed it, an Apple Pencil. Music by Peter Ellis.
Summer
The last day of meteorological summer and I’m gathering my sketchbook drawings from the last three months together for an eBook.
I’m experimenting with the eBook option in Adobe InDesign, going for an iPad format. This gives me a more control over the way words and images are presented than I get with my regular blog.
Rather than use a regular typeface, I decided to use the carved lettering on one of the tombstones in Brodsworth Church as my starting point for a title logo.
In true Roman fashion the stone mason used the chiselled ‘V’ that you’d find on a Roman inscription to represent an upper case ‘U’, so I patched one together from the lower half of an ‘O’ and two different capital ‘I’s, keeping the slant he’d used one to fit it into the word ‘AETATIS’ (‘age’).
I imported my title logo into Adobe Illustrator and converted it into three tones using Image Trace, then took that back into Photoshop and replaced the three tones with colours derived from my cover image.
Alder Bark
As I sat drawing this alder at the lakeside at Newmillerdam I felt something drop on my back. An alder cone? No. My shirt needed to go in the wash. Not sure who was responsible but I’m guessing that the wood pigeon is the first one that I need to rule out of my enquiries.
Cutting Back
Back down a rather overgrown bark chip path to my ‘Rough Patch’ in our back garden. The birds have finished nesting and it’s time to cut back.
This is my first attempt at composing a backing track in Garageband and also my first experiment with a dji Osmo gimbal mount for my iPhone.
Letterforms, Brodsworth Church
Carved and engraved lettering in the Church of St Michael and All Angels, Brodsworth.
Whitebeam
Whitebeam growing by the canal at the Strands, downstream from Horbury Bridge.
Malham Magic
I’m on to the final transfer of my local pocket guides from PC to InDesign on Mac and it looks as if I’ve stepped away from my local patch into Wainwright country with my pen and ink illustrations to Malham Magic, which I first published over twenty years ago.
It’s also a bit of a follow up to my Yorkshire Rock, a journey through Time from a few years earlier because I follow the classic limestone trail around upper Malhamdale.
I also included the origins of place names, folklore, literature, ferns, wild flowers and even the movies, several of which were filmed on location in Malhamdale. I realised that I’d pushed the pocket book format of my first local books to its limit so in the new edition, which has a few minor revisions and updates, I’m almost doubling the size of the page. I’ll probably rescan the artwork which I had scaled down to fit the smaller format.
I’m hoping to print the new edition next month.
Link
Willow Island Editions, my imprint. Malham Magic is currently out of print, in fact I don’t have a copy of the first edition myself.
Yorkshire Rock, a journey through time, published by the British Geological Survey
Crayfish in Coxley Beck
The man with the headphones and baseball cap is looking intently down at the stream as we enter Coxley Valley so he doesn’t see us, but his terrier does and gives a yap and a tug on his lead.
“Sorry! I’ve been looking at the crayfish,’ he explains, ‘I’ve seen 8 or 9 of them.’
I’m told that years ago there were crayfish, our native crayfish, the White-clawed, in the beck but with those conspicuous markings on the claws and the size of this one, about 6 inches long, I’m guessing that it’s the introduced American Signal Crayfish, Pacifastacus lenuisculus.
It’s the first we’ve seen, so our thanks to the observant dog walker for pointing it out to us. I’m wondering how the population of bullheads is doing in this stretch. I’ve heard reports of run off from a septic tank finding its way into the stream. Herons still fly down to one of the quieter bends in the stream.
After the dry spell we’ve had the stream was unusually low today.
In the late 1960s friend of mine perfected the art of tickling trout by lying on the bank and reaching down into the spots where they used to rest. I think it was the deeper undercut bank on the outside bend of the stream.