Ash roots grow over an old quarry face near the ice house at The Menagerie at Nostell.
Ash Roots
Tag: Ash Tree
Ash Tree on the iPad
As the light faded, I drew one of the ash trees at the edge of the wood using a new version of Clip Studio Paint for iPad. For the next few weeks, there’s an opportunity to give it a six month free trial.
It feels so much more direct than using the iPad with a wifi link to the same program running on my main computer and I appreciate the thought that has gone into redesigning the interface to make it more suitable for a tablet.
I started with a pencil drawing then, on a new layer, added a suggestion of colour, finishing with an ink layer for drawing with the G-pen.
Link
Clip Studio Paint for iPad on iTunes
Ash Trees
Today’s snow showers have been punctuated by brighter intervals but it doesn’t seem worth going out and clearing the driveway as the thin slushy layer that has accumulated here is likely to melt away in rain showers and warmer temperatures tomorrow. I hope that the forecast is right and that it won’t freeze solid and need scraping off laboriously.
The snow brings a cock pheasant to our bird feeders and I guess that, now he’s discovered us, he’ll become a regular. Other colourful visitors today have included bullfinch, chaffinch, goldfinch and greenfinch.I enjoyed drawing with my dip pen with the Tower Pen nib so much yesterday evening that I wanted to try it on a landscape and, as it would have been an uncomfortable business to set myself up outdoors I 
drew the view from my studio window. I’d hoped to include the snow-covered meadow but the sun was soon masked by the next bank of cloud approaching from the northwest and it was getting late in the afternoon anyway so I confined myself to the silhouette of the ash trees against the eastern sky.
drew the view from my studio window. I’d hoped to include the snow-covered meadow but the sun was soon masked by the next bank of cloud approaching from the northwest and it was getting late in the afternoon anyway so I confined myself to the silhouette of the ash trees against the eastern sky.Ash Trees at Dusk
4 pm; I was going to draw birds but there was little activity by the time I’d filled up the feeders and settled down with my sketchbook. A couple of Blue Tits briefly peer out from the hedge, a Robin flits about below, a Blackbird pecks in distracted haste at the bare earth of the border while over in the wood, three Woodpigeons are clattering around in the tops of the Ashes.
Yesterday morning I was sorry to see this large Ash (left) in Horbury Cemetery being felled, one of several that are to go. It appears to be a healthy specimen but there’s no doubt that in some gale over the next decade or so it would have blown down, causing considerable damage to the houses that were built adjacent to the cemetery in the 1960s, when the tree was probably already half a century old (if I get the opportunity, I’ll count the rings). Unfortunately trees can do more than damage property and this autumn, during one evening of high winds punctuated by more powerful gusts, a huge bough from a tree at Stanley Churchyard crashed down onto a passing car, fatally injuring a woman.
Luckily the Ashes and Crack Willows in my watercolour of the lower end of Coxley Wood, don’t threaten any road or property and it’s highly unlikely that anyone would risk walking through in the kind of high winds which caused the accident at Stanley.