Bee and Flower

It’s mid way and the drawing of the White Dead Nettle flower is more or less compete. The leaves are deeply veined but this is not a “botanical” drawing so I don’t feel the need to draw every one of them, just give an impression of their complexity.

It’s a time to assess the weight of various areas. The black bee and the two bugs are the main focus but I need some more weight at the top left. I am going to add some straight lines for an indication of the strange silver birch trees that form the background to Holme Fen and will add the distant bird hide which you can see when you look towards the wood from the info centre where the white dead nettles grow. maybe even a Highland cow.

 

On the board..image about 10 x11 inches . Watercolour and pencil on Arches HP 300

Under the Skin 4: Lucy’s Skull & a Tiny Corset

Generally I like to find things for myself but have not been lucky enough to find a deer skull. Then my good friend Lucy found one and kindly gave it to me. It is fabulous. I have been wanting to draw it for months so I am very glad now to have the opportunity. 

 

Sketchbook studies A4

Watercolour start with model

Lucy’s Skull

Watercolour study on Not paper 8 x12 inches

 

Gouache study. 8 x 10 inches.

The Tiny Corset

One last study of a small broken skull turned upside down. I just caught sight of it on the floor as it was lit by the low angled sun, with its beautiful long cast shadow. It took a while to draw as it’s very detailed. As you draw things you tend to see connections, repeated organic shapes and similarities to other forms. It hard not to if you spend 2 hours staring at something. The more I drew it, the more it looked like a great design for a corset. A tiny fairy one.

 

Upside down skull. pencil 4 x 2 inches

I have so enjoyed the bone drawings this week and I intend to make some more finished studies of the skull.  Thank you Lucy!

Under the Skin 3: Something of the Rabbit about it…

As I walk round the reservoir I pick up all sorts of odds and ends and am always very excited when I find bones. I found this flat single bone with tiny teeth some time ago.  It was with a small cache of other bones at the base of a favourite willow tree.

Initially I was not sure what animal it belonged to, but there was something rabbity about it. So I am guessing it is a rabbit’s jaw. It looks more like a rather curious 2 dimensional foot

Pencil study of bone and a stray bit of grass. Image size 4x4inches

Watercolour study: 4.5 x5 inches

 

Drybrush watercolour: 3.5 x2.5 inches

Under the Skin 2: The Long Bone

I found this long bone near the reservoir about a month ago. I think it’s a leg bone from a muntjac deer. We have quite a few of these curious little creatures round here.When we first arrived we saw a decomposing body up on one of the tracks. I didn’t then have the presence of mind to drag it back home. I might now :) Stubbs would have.

 
Pencil A4 sketchbook

I had not really looked at it before today and initially  liked the sweeping line of the outline but then I saw the glimpse of the beautifully detailed interior.

 

Pencil drawing is 15 inches long,

This is the bit I was most interested in…

Detail of the above drawing..

More than interested really. I hadn’t really intended sketching anything but the bone shape but the labyrinthine structure is too good to leave at a small study. It is the most fascinating world of overlapping fine bones..layer on layer. I made a more detailed study.

 

The scanner is a blunt tool for pencil work and strips out many of the subtle tones and I think there is more depth to the original. I could have continued for many more hours, refining and finding more and deeper layers but I drew what I could see with the help of a small magnifying glass and ran out of time.

Labyrinth…pencil 8 x 6 inches

I was not sure what this bone was, so had a quick search and found the very excellent Jakes Bones. I am learning so much from his site!

Under the Skin 1: An Incomplete Dodo

Bones lovely bones. This week I am looking at some bones, the underpinnings of the bodies of many Beautiful Beasts, and fabulous structures in their own right. This incomplete Dodo is from the Hunterian Museum. See more about the Dodo my blog post on Pencil and Leaf.

I liked its assembled nature.

 

Raphus cucullatus
skeleton

Object Type
Mounted dry bone

An imperfect mounted skeleton of a dodo (Raphus cucullatus). The bones are from several individuals.

This mounted skeleton of a dodo is a composite from several individuals. The bones were from a large collection excavated at La Mare aux Songes in Mauritius in 1865. The first hundred or so of these bones were shipped to Richard Owen and from these he published his monograph on the osteology of the dodo in 1869. Further collections of bones were sent to England and were sold by auction. The College Conservator, William Henry Flower, purchased a series of bones for £10 from which he was able to construct this partial articulated skeleton for display.

 

Dodo sketches pencil A5 sketchbook

Saddleback Pigs

My next page of sketches for Chris’ Salute the Pig blog. They are so very design-y..with their smart black and white colouring.

Chris has written about them here; “ Fattening Fast… 

 Sketchbook pages A4

On the board…

Watercolour on Fabriano. Image 10 x 8 “

"A Certain Sleepy Perfection of Contour”

What can this be?.. Why, a pig of course!

“To begin with, pigs are very beautiful animals.  Those who think otherwise are those who do not look at anything with their own eyes, but only through other people’s eyeglasses.  The actual lines of a pig (I mean of a really fat pig) are among the loveliest and most luxuriant in nature; the pig has the same great curves, swift and yet heavy, which we see in the rushing water or in rolling cloud. “

GK Chesterton liked pigs.. this is from “Rhapsody on a Pig” published in the The Illustrated London News, 8 May 1909.

I think it would be fair to say that G K Chesterton himself had some of those very same luxuriant contours.
And he is so right about the pigs. Those gorgeous soft curves and that wonderful spread of weight as they lie down….

 Sleeping pigs…well, most of them.

Pencil on A4 sketchbook

Skeleton Sketches

I do like to understand a bit more about the structure of pigs so spent some time looking at the skeletons of pigs and wild boars. The high vertebrae at the top are Interesting at the top..more so in the boar which accounts for its “crest”. There is so much info about animal skeletons muscles and structure on the internet.. Fabulous!

Small Beginnings: Devil’s Toenails

“Beginnings” are always exciting and surely nothing can be more exciting than the earliest forms of life. Fossils, I thought might be the perfect place to start my year of exploring the world of Beasts. This first week then will explore my local fossils.

I live by Grafham Reservoir whose shoreline is littered with shelly fossils. They are mostly Gryphaea remains, otherwise known, delightfully, as “devils toenails”.

This beautiful image is from the Natural History Museum’s page on the Gryphaea of Lyme Regis. The ones we see here are much more weathered and misshapen but there is still the magic feeling  of handling something so very ancient. They are from the early Jurassic period approx 199-189 million years ago. There must be millions of them here.

Most of the ones from the shore here look like this:

 
Devils Toenails from Grafham Reservoir shore Jan 2014

 

A typical piece of the “shingle”in today’s sun. It’s mostly made up of bits of graphaea from a bay on the reservoir that I, really creatively, call Devil’s Toe Nail Cove.

Devils Toenails 2012 Sketches from earlier P&L post, inspired by their odd shapes.

In life the Gryphaea were bivalves and relatives of our oysters.

From Bristol University’s site  Fossil Types

 GRYPHAEA (or Devil's Toenail): An extinct genus of bivalve. It is believed to have been an unattached recumbent recliner on the sea floor, with its very own self-righting mechanism if a strong current knocked it out of the sediment.

From the Natural History Museum’s Gryphaea page

“As a bivalve it possesses two valves. The valves are markedly unequal in size and shape, the left valve is strongly incurved, the right valve is small and flat. The left shell is thick and its surface is marked with numerous ridges.

They lived on the sea floor with the flat right valve facing up, it probably acted like a lid, when open allowing water carrying oxygen and nutrients to flow in and be filtered out of the water.”

Having read this, it now makes more sense of the shape.

Devil’s Toenails: Graphaea Fossils from Grafham Water

 Pencil on cartridge 8 x10”

I did find one today with a fraction of the “lid” intact. See the drawing top left. It explains some other odd shaped things I have found.

Devils Toenail?
The name does seem rather obvious when you see the gnarled and twisted shapes. Some may have thought they were the actual  toenails of demons. In that case there were legions of demons around Grafham, which could account for quite a bit.

More about these strange creatures, other local fossils and their inhabitants tomorrow.