Tag: review

Cucumber Spider

yellow spider

This female Common Cucumber Spider, Araniella curcurbitina, scuttled away as I gathered up the ivy that I’d cut back from behind the herb bed. I’d spread an old shower curtain on the ground to catch the trimmings, hence the background; the weave of the cloth gives a clue to the scale: the spider is just half a centimetre long, excluding legs.

The cucumber spider is common on trees, woods and hedgerows, where it spins a small orb web. It has a conspicuous red spot on its underside, just below the spinnerets. The male has boxing-glove style pedipalps (the small front pair of legs).

yellow spider

Britain’s Spiders, A Field Guide

Identifying it gave me a chance to use my new field guide, Britain’s Spiders, by Lawrence Bee, Geoff Oxford and Helen Smith (2017).

As I already have two spider field guides on my shelf, Collins Field Guide Spiders of Britain & Northern Europe, by Michael J. Roberts (1995), and The Country Life Guide to Spiders of Britain and Northern Europe by Dick Jones (1983), did I really need another?

Dick Jones had support from Kodak and Pentax when he photographed 350 species of spiders and harvestmen for the Country Life Guide (top right), but his Kodachromes can’t quite match the clarity of the digital photographs in the latest guide, which also has the advantage of up-to-date distribution maps, even so, the Country Life Guide is useful to have for a second opinion when you’re checking out a species.

Collins Field Guide

pedipalp
Male palpal organ of the Cucumber Spider, Araniella curcurbitina, drawn by Michael J Roberts. Copyright Michael J Roberts, 1995.

If you were getting serious about identifying spiders, you’ll need a copy of Michael J Roberts’ guide, because, in addition to 288 colour paintings, he includes 1,500 line drawings of the spiders’ reproductive organs, which would be essential if you were trying, for example, to distinguish between the Common Cucumber Spider, Araniella curcurbitina (which is most likely to be the one that I found), and it’s near identical relative, the Cucumber Spider, A. opisthographa.

“The distinguishing features of the male palpal organs are best seen from below,” says Roberts, “and this is difficult with a field microscope, unless the specimen is particularly obliging.”

He explains how to construct a homemade ‘spi-pot’ to harmlessly examine a spider in the field. But don’t feel inadequate if you can’t tell one species of cucumber spider from another because it seems that even the spiders themselves occasionally get it wrong:

“Very rarely, specimens may appear rather intermediate, possibly due to hybridisation.”

Link

Britain’s Spiders, A Field Guide

Collins Field Guide Spiders of Britain & Northern Europe

Dr Geoff Oxford, Eco Talk, The Amazing World of Spiders, YouTube

Claxton

Claxton review copySome nature writing, Mark Cocker warns us, ‘like medicine, needs to be consumed in small doses’ but his Field Notes from a Small Planet slip down so easily that you’ll be tempted to OD.

His portrait of the wilder side of Claxton, a Norfolk village, like his favourite jazz improvisations, builds ‘steadily, patiently, minutely in rhythmic layers’, in encounters ‘where anything can happen and seldom does’.

He inevitably includes some of the rarities and the wildlife spectaculars that Norfolk is famous for but the appeal of this country diary is in meeting, as he reflects on a winter’s day,  ‘so many of our living neighbours – the leafless trees, the dank grasses and flowerless plants, the expiring fungi and voiceless birds – [which] hardly ever acquire the foreground of our minds. Yet every single one of them is integral to that magical uplift in spirits, which is the great gift of a walk in wild space.’

Every parish should have a chronicler like Cocker and, if your parish hasn’t acquired one yet, this illuminating book might encourage you to set out on your own home patch, armed with notebook and pencil.

Claxton, Field Notes from a Small Planet by Mark Cocker, illustrated with woodcuts by Jonathan Gibbs, will be published in hardback later this year by Jonathan Cape.

Links; Mark Cocker, Jonathan Gibbs, Vintage Books, the trade department of Jonathan Cape

How to be an Illustrator

How to be an IllustratorHere’s the book that I wish I could have read forty years ago but which is equally welcome now as a way of reassessing the way I work.

Darrel Rees, an illustrator turned agent, looks at the nuts and bolts of the business with plenty of solid advice on invoices, contracts and agents but he brings his story to life with glimpses of his own ups and downs and through a series of short interviews with illustrators and art directors.

I recognise so much of myself in it; the contrast between college and career; the mistakes you’re likely to make when you put together your first portfolio and the pros and cons of working from home. At several points Rees urges illustrators to try and see their work from the other person’s point of view.

I’m making it sound as if the book is a series of warnings, and you probably also get that impression from the sober cover featuring Brett Ryder’s illustration of sininster pencil-head men in white coats, but, with examples of work from a mixed bunch of illustrators, it’s also a celebration of a way of life that is, in the words of one of them, Michael Gillette, ‘terrifying at times, extremely liberating at others’ and, for Jeffery Decoster a ‘constantly surprising’ spur to ‘the creative process and personal growth’.

How to be an Illustrator second editionLinks; Laurence King, publishers of How to be an Illustrator (2008), which is now available in a second edition . . . with a less scary cover.

Darrel Rees’ Heart Agency

Urban Watercolor Sketching

Scheinberger 'Urban Watercolor Sketching'I’m aware that I get set in my ways so Felix Scheinberger’s Urban Watercolour Sketching made perfect holiday reading when we were in the Dales a few weeks ago. It’s a short refresher course in watercolour, one that I’ll dip into again.

This is an illustrator’s approach and the examples are almost exclusively pen and ink and watercolour rather than pure watercolour, which suits me because that’s invariably the way I work.

The English watercolour  tradition is wistully rural, going back via John Piper and Beatrix Potter to Girtin and Cotman so it’s refreshing to have Scheinberger go through the rudiments of watercolour so briskly and thoroughly from a streetwise, rather punkish perspective.

Considering Colour

It’s a great opportunity for me to reconsider all the aspects of watercolours that I’m familiar and a few that had never occurred to me. For instance, I like the way he champions indigo and Naples yellow; colours which I’ve dismissed because of their apparent disadvantages. Disadvantages which he suggests can be turned to your advantage for certain subjects. Must try them.

As an illustrator I like the way he rounds off the book by touching on page design, developing ideas and the perennial question of ‘how much is your picture worth?’

As for the urban element, I’m afraid that he can’t convince me that I’d enjoy painting a prefab block of apartments in Romania more than an old farm Provence, but I can see what he’s getting at.

Link; Felix Scheinberger; his website, which, by the way, is in German.