My urban sketching bag, a Trespass Mini Belt Bag, just right for an A6 landscape Seawhite travel journal, a small box of Winsor & Newton watercolours and Pentel Aquash water brush, a Pentel brush pen and Lamy fountain pens filled with black De Atramentis ink, except the yellow Lamy Safari which has a regular Lamy ink cartridge.
Sadly the pen that didn’t make it into the final selection was my Lamy Vista with an extra fine nib. After several refills and flushings out the ink still isn’t flowing into the nib.
There’s just enough room in my new one litre bag for an A6 pocket-sized sketchbook, bijou watercolour box, pack of crayons, Safari pen, water-brush, Olympus Muji Tough camera and microfibre buff (‘a bandana with attitude’) plus an attached key fob compass/thermometer. As it says on the label:
‘So pack up . . . and get out there on your next big adventure.’
Or in this case mini adventure as this is the bag that I’ll grab when we’re setting out on our errands and appointments, for instance this morning when we had a few things to do in Ossett and I spotted the brown sporangia of a hartstongue fern growing in a crevice in an old stone wall on New Street.
Usually those furry caterpillar sporangia would be arranged in a feather pattern on the back of the frond but here the frond has shrivelled and curled inwards along the midrib, exposing the spores to any passing breeze, so no doubt thousands of them will find their way into suitable crevices.
May Sketches
Cuckoo flower growing on my friend Roger’s wild flower lawn.
It’s only a month ago that there was snow on the hills but since then the spring has burst into action. We’ve made efforts to get the garden up to speed and to plant all the veg beds so I haven’t had as much time as I would have liked to draw but here are the few pages of sketches from my A6 pocket book.
