Card for an engineering student. We met some well adjusted members of the Wing-Nut family last year.
Screwed Up
Overflow
There’s a bit of a log jam where fallen crack willow debris has formed a leaky dam across Coxley Beck so after recent rain it’s overflowed amongst the alders.
Drawn in Adobe Fresco using the conté crayon, with a few lines ‘scratched’ into it using the eraser.
Frantically Relaxed
As so often, something – perhaps the buzzard – put up the wood pigeons and they’re perching in the top branches of the two tall ash trees, surveying the scene, as if waiting for the all-clear. There are still patches of snow amongst the clumps of grasses in the meadow.
I was hastily drawing this on a busy day before popping out for an annual blood pressure check at the doctors’. The idea was the therapeutic process of drawing and tuning into the natural world would calm me down. It didn’t work! But they’re giving me a second chance so I’ll give myself more chance to settle down before my return visit next week.
It was more relaxing today when we were able to take the morning off to go to Blacker Hall cafe, giving me chance to draw the view from the cafe over coffee and cranberry scones.
There wasn’t time to add the watercolour so I took a photograph and added it later.
Cutting Corners
I’ve made a start on the fireplace for the Redbox Gallery’s Night Before Christmas display but I keep going back to my model to work out the details on the grounds that it’s easier to make changes there than it is when you’ve already cut into an A1 sheet of foamboard.
There’s not a lot of room for the armchair and table we’re planning to add but hopefully I can dovetail a couple of foamboard cut-outs into the two corners without obscuring the fireplace.
Teasel
3.02 pm: A sparrowhawk swoops around the bird feeder, perches in the crab apple for a moment, then flies off without catching anything.
Early afternoon snow, an after effect of yesterday’s Storm Arwen, covers the seed heads of the plant formerly known as Sedum, now Hylotelephium spectabile. A female blackbird and dunnock forage beneath the feeders which attract great tits and blue tits, a coal tit and a nuthatch.
The snow soon starts to melt and these cyclamen, in the bed beside the patio beneath the cordon apples, look none the worse for it.
The Buzzard on its Rounds
4.10 pm: A kestrel hover over the meadow and dives as if it’s about to make a kill but abandons the dive at tree-top height and flies off over the neighbour’s garden.
The buzzard was doing its rounds over back gardens and the meadow at breakfast-time this morning and it’s back again as the light fades, just thirty feet above me, as I sit at my desk by the skylight studio window.
Navigation Walk
Drawn this afternoon at Navigation Walk, Wakefield, colour added in Photoshop.
Rusty Brown
Reading Chris Ware’s hefty graphic novel (really six closely related graphic short stories) is good for building up my biceps but I’m struggling with the one millimetre high all caps captions, some of them on coloured backgrounds so I’m calling on the opticians today to see if they can recommend some extra strength reading glasses, specially for reading Chris Ware graphic novels.
It’s clear enough when I come back to it in the daylight, so perhaps I should be thinking about improving the light that I read by.
The Night before the Night Before
The night before Christmas: ‘a fire place with roaring fire & stockings hung down. Maybe a chair & table & treats left out for Santa on the table . . .’
That’s what we’re aiming for, now all we have to do is work out how to fit all that into the Redbox Gallery, the old telephone box on Queen Street, Horbury.
I’m designing the stage set and it will be up to the local Brownies to add the decorations. I think that I could fit a small fireplace diagonally across the far corner of the box but that doesn’t leave any room for a table and chair, so I’m imagining those as illustrated cut-outs, as if we were looking at a pop-up Christmas card.
Whitby
Sketches from Whitby and from ‘Yorkshire’s Food Capital’, Malton. Tone added in Photoshop.
