Tag: Sketchbook

Summer Sketchbooks

sketchbooks

Delivered today, my summer sketchbooks, and I’ve gone for five A5 landscape Pink Pigs. I’ve been working in 8-inch square and A5 portrait sketchbooks but I for me a landscape format works better for natural history, as you’re always in a landscape of some sort. My A6 landscape travel sketchbook can seem a bit cramped and A4 landscape can seem a bit too much to fill in one session but A5 landscape is right there in the ‘Goldilocks Zone’. Not too intimidating to aim at one page of natural history a day.

Ink Sketches

I’ve just read Marcos Mateu-Mestre’s tale of medieval mercenaries, ‘Trail of Steel’, so I’ve tried to put a bit of his swashbuckling mayhem into my drawings of a sofa, a cruet and various piles of books and CDs.

I’ve been doing so many birthday cards recently that I’ve run out of De Atramentis black so I’ve moved on to the brown.

Lombardy Poplar

lombardy poplar and terrier sketch

At the Coffee Stop again, which is newly extended with some stylish hand-painted graphics and decorations.

water jug

Our lunch stop was the Ego Mediterranean, our first visit since before the pandemic and our first during the subsequent event, a pointless war in Europe.

cup holder

Pen Sketches

sketches

After so much drawing on the iPad, it’s a good feeling to go back to pen on paper in my pocket-sized sketchbook.

Sketches

chairs and people sketches

Recent sketches from my 125×90 mm Hahnemühle D&S sketchbook. Tones added in Photoshop.

People in Parkas

sketches

You wouldn’t guess that it was midsummer from the way people are dressed in waterproofs, parkas and high vis jackets this afternoon on the windswept precinct behind the town hall in Ossett.

Figures drawn as I waited in the hairdressers. Watercolour added later from memory, but for most of the people I could remember that as the colour seemed as if it was a part of the character, as much as the way they walked.

sketches

Pocket-sized Sketchbook

meadow
This meadow at the bottom of Hostingley Lane, Middlestown, was mainly mud by the end of a long, wet winter.

I usually say that May is my favourite month but cold weather has delayed blossom, birds and butterflies to such an extent that this year June is feeling as fresh as May, even though we’re not just nine days from midsummer.

Last page in my previous sketchbook, a seawhite A6 hardback.
salvia
Bumblebee on salvia. First sketch in my new Hahneműhle sketchbook.

I’m trying to focus on natural history this summer and to try and keep my main sketchbook – an 8×8 inch square spiral bound Amelie watercolour paper Pink Pig – as a nature journal but I do need a pocket-sized sketchbook for when we’re dashing about on errands, so this morning I started an A6 landscape Hahneműhle Watercolour book which is a sturdily bound hardback, so it slips into my little art bag more easily than a spiral bound version would.

There isn’t a handy bench in the library garden, so I’m trying a new pocket-sized (if you’ve got an extra-large pocket, that is) folding foam mat. It’s never going to replace my folding chair for comfort but it will just about do for ten minutes sitting on the concrete paving slabs, resting my back against one of the raised beds.

Fox Scat

It was a plastic plant label from our Musselborough leeks left lying in the middle of the back lawn that made me suspect that we’d had a fox in the garden. What else would take such an interest in a plant label?

Today we’ve got conclusive evidence of its presence with a dark, curled fox scat that has appeared overnight in the corner of the lawn by the pond.

Over the past week or so we’ve noticed a few fresh scrapes – about teacup size – mainly in the veg beds but also in the wood chip path.

One morning two weeks ago, shortly after we’d laid down a thick layer of wood chip on the path by my little meadow area, we saw a magpie eating carrion. We found the remains of a brown rat – by then just the vertebra were left, picked clean by the magpie – and we now think that it’s likely that this had been cached by the fox.