Leaf of the Day:Trees and Rooks

I have three small sketches today. One is a drawing of the rooks in the village which I did quickly from the car when coming back from Lincoln 4th Feb. Its just felt tip pen in my sketch book with a bit of smudgy wash. The second one is the rook from the top of the Weeping Ash(See previous drawing) which I drew from the dining room window. This one is with a dip pen and ink on a piece of paper from a watercolour “experiment” that I had chopped up. It’s brown ink ..I think French Sepia. ( I always try to rescue something from failures.. I have lots of bits of failures! ) The bird was somewhat wind ruffled, but I think it looks a bit more like a blackbird in my drawing.
The last one is a tree experiment done mostly with a razor blade.. a neat trick I learnt on Nicholas’ course. Its interesting to see how the three different techniques work.
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Trees and Rooks


Still leafless in Linconshire: Weeping Ash & Two Rooks

Sitting sketching in the dining room, I had a good view of the other magnificent weeping tree in our Lincolnshire garden. This weeping ash has been the same as long as I can remember and we moved to this garden thirty two years ago. In the summer this beautiful old tree makes an almost perfect enclosed circle with its leafy branches, a secret den of shade, dark and cool inside. In the spring when the light can get to the ground under the bare branches, aconites and snowdrops push up between the ivy and fallen twigs. We always watch the tree for its first leaves.
” Ash before oak, we shall have a soak.
Oak before ash we shall have a splash”..
Thankfully the black buds of the ash are normally the last to appear. When I went home last year in May it was just getting its first leaves. Weather lore is another fascinating subject which I will no doubt return to and the superstitions about trees are legion. A couple of rooks kept returning to caw in the branches. I am very fond of rooks.

Again with this drawing I misjudged the size of the tree and it is spilling off the edges of page. I have taken some photos of the twisted stems of the trunk which I hope to use for a large painting in due time.
I am still regarding these sketches as warm ups. Its just a good discipline to try to do something every day..this one is with a felt tip pen. It was a difficult job scanning it, as the paper is just slightly bigger than A4. I had to do it in 2 halves and deal with shadows on the paper, but I think it’s OK for a sketch.
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Weeping Ash..with rooks!

Leaf of the Day: The Hairiness of Leaves and Gecko`s feet

I am returning to leaf morphology today so I have ten small drawings of various kinds of hairiness (pubescence to use the correct name) which also give me some more practice with pen and ink. Hairs in botanical terms are, by the way, referred to as trichomes.
You only have to think about leaves to realise that they do all feel different, we describe them as leathery, waxy, prickly, furry.. etc. However, the correct botanical language and names are wonderful, descriptive and Dickensian. I am sure somewhere a character must have been described as having “velutinous” hair. Some are very bizarre, some you can associate with the everyday. “Floccose” is easy for anyone who went to an UK Indian restaurant in the 1970`s to remember. Yes!…that obligatory deep red furry “flocked” wallpaper. Wallpaper is another favourite subject of mine and just out of interest, a flocked wallpaper was made a few years ago that reacted to ambient noise by changing colour, and now Jonas Samson has developed wallpaper that emits light.. very beautiful ..see here

Here are the 10 different types of hairiness from my drawing, there are more!

Echinate… beset with prickles.
Tuberculate… warty or with tubercules
Strigose… with bent over (appressed)spikes
Stellate… with star shaped hairs
Floccose… soft woolly tufts of hair
Velutionous… dense soft silky hair
Tomentose… matted soft woolly hair
Unicanate… hooked points
Scurfy… scale like particles
Hirsute… stiff bristly hairs


The often unnoticed surfaces of things are, of course, brought to our attention through a microscope. Here to illustrate the surface of a leaf is the beautiful image of a blade of grass from David Kunkel’s Microscopic World, at the Astrographics.com website. The images show in wonderful colour and detail another fascinating, and to an artist, inspirational world. See more here. I especially like the “gecko foot/toe hairs”. I have a lovely little gecko who lives in my studio room. Apparently he gets around the ceiling by rolling and unrolling the hairs on his feet! I will regard him with heightened wonder and respect now!
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Ten Leaf Surfaces

Leaf of the Day: Asiatic Jasmine

Last night it rained hard and heavy, hour after hour. This morning the sun came out and it was like a sweet balmy May morning in England. Spring is definitely jogging the elbow of those plants who are allowed a winter layoff here in Florida. Even the ones reduced to black slimy heaps by the big ugly freeze are showing new growth. Its very encouraging.
Trachelospermum asiaticum is the Latin name for this very well behaved creeping ground cover plant that is everywhere in the urban car parks, traffic islands and mall borders and after 3 weeks of pencil work I am trying some pen and ink.
This was done on Bristol board with a technical pen, not my favourite surface or pen… but I am very out of practice and cannot remember when I last did a careful study in pen and ink. My normal style with a pen is much sketchier, using a crow quill dip pen which has a less regular but more expressive line. This is much more to my taste but maybe not so good for botanical work. I will just have to practice and try a few more combinations of paper and pen
A word about Michaels
I am hoping to try another study of this little plant with the crow quill nib and Indian ink which will mean a trip to Michaels the big chain craft store just across the easy road. This is crafter heaven, spoilt only by the overpowering smell of dried flowers and the soporific muzak. Customers glide serenely up and down the displays, wafted on a cloud of artificial jasmine and mesmerised by soupy saxophone love songs. Its like being encased in a huge bubble of niceness and is sometimes hard to break the surface tension and escape back to the mean streets of Winter Park.
However it is fascinating to see their changing displays. The last lingering Christmas baskets have been wheeled away and the aisles are ablaze with Valentine reds and even an Easter chick has crept onto the shelves….and of course I am the very first in line with my 40% discount coupon!..
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Asiatic Jasmine



Technical pen on Bristol Board



Crow Quill nib and Indian ink on Bristol Board.
A bit more expressive but not so accurate!