As often happens, only one of our two espalier apples has blossomed. This year it’s the single espalier Golden Spire cooking apple which has been covered in blossom while the double espalier (imagine a capital Y but the the two arms curving out to rise vertically) is either late or it’s taking a year off. My quick watercolour sketch is of the Golden Hornet crab apple (left) which always has plenty of blossom.

After all that work at the weekend I deserved to put my feet up this evening . . . and I owed it to myself to do a drawing just for the fun of doing a drawing.

I’ve been rummaging through old sketchbooks to track down some illustrations for a magazine article which reminded me how much I enjoyed drawing such mundane subjects.

This morning the woodpecker perched briefly on the front of the box. It’s not that I want it to go hungry but we did invite the blue tits to nest here by erecting the box so I feel as if we have a duty of care.

We can’t keep an eye on it from dawn to dusk but if we see peck marks appearing around the entrance hole I’ll try getting a strip of metal cut to protect it. Just hope it doesn’t succeed in breaking in at a first attempt.

Somewhere amongst the houses beyond there’s a show home which was exhibited in the Ideal Homes exhibition in Olympia in the late 1950s or early 1960s before being reconstructed here.

Further up the hill there’s a row of old stone-built terraced cottages that Barbara and visited when we were house-hunting. Despite the attractive location we had to cross it off our list as the ceiling was too low for me to stand upright. Much as I love period features, I couldn’t have coped with that.

I drew this with an ArtPen filled with El Lawrence brown Noodler’s ink and added the colour later, using a photograph that I’d taken as reference.

It’s so good to have a short burst of the wide open spaces.

I like watercolours where forms are simplified so why do I find it impossible not to make some attempt to blob in every tree when I’m painting this view? The problem is that I’m so fascinated by detail. As I painted this I could see the blades of the wind turbines turning on the horizon, traffic passing on the motorway 6 miles away, crows bursting from the wood beyond the reservoir as a buzzard flew over . . .

It’s so difficult not to get hooked on the detail!

I’ve drawn this with a Rotring Tikki Graphic pen, a disposable technical pen which has waterproof pigmented ink. But when I added the colour I realised that I’d missed a small but expressive feature of Tilly’s; she has two light brown spots above her eyes which help to give her a certain innocently worried look.

Close up

When I scanned the drawing I accidentally left the scanner on the high res setting that I’d been using for a book illustration I’d been working on. Computer resolution has come along so much in the past decade but, as this high res detail shows, you’re still not getting the full texture of a drawing when you see it same size on screen.

My fiddly pen work becomes freer and calligraphic on this scale. The watercolour is from my new Bijou box, which has naturally become my favourite.

If anything Tilly looks even more worried.

Some of the mixes, top to bottom rows, of Winsor green (blue shade), permanent sap green, Winsor lemon, cadmium yellow and permanent rose.

Bijou watercolour box.

AFTER NINE YEARS of almost daily use my smallest watercolour box has been worn down to the metal on the outside, like a battered old ammunition box. I decided that it was time to treat myself to a new one, although I’m keeping the old one so that I don’t have to keep transferring the new box from one art bag to the other.

The new Winsor & Newton Bijou box has the advantage over my old unbranded version, which is exactly the same size, in the arrangement of the half-pan watercolours; I can get an extra two colours in it.

I decided to go with the selection of eight that comes with the box - scarlet lake, permanent rose, Winsor lemon, Winsor green (blue shade), French ultramarine, yellow ochre, burnt sienna and ivory black – removing the tiny brush from the central section to add four extras; cadmium yellow, permanent sap green, cerulean blue and raw umber.

I’m surprised how well ivory black mixes with other colours (the far right column and the second row from the top in my swatches), for instance it makes an olive green when mixed with cadmium yellow.

Made in France and described as a ‘superior hand finished stove enamelled artists metal box’, it seems that unfortunately the Bijou has recently been discontinued but it’s worth checking your local art shop to see if they’ve still got one in stock.

It made a web too fine for me to see and hung there in its temporary quarters. I’d spotted it hanging down by the bathroom sink a day or two previously.

As this spider is brown and long-legged with no obvious pattern on its back I didn’t think that I stood much chance of identifying it but that is where having a shelf full of field guides proves helpful. I soon found it in Paul Sterry’s Collins Complete Guide to British Garden Wildlife.

Its the Daddy-long-legs spider Pholcus phalangioides, an introduced species which has spread in Britain thanks to central heating.  Sterry states that it cannot survive if the temperature drops below 10°C so instead of realeasing it outdoors I release it at the back of the garage by the central heating boiler.

I wonder how long it will be before it blunders into the bath again.

The photograph in Garden Wildlife shows a ‘Mummy-long-legs’ surrounded by her brood of rather cute spiderlings. The bands around the joints on her legs which I’ve shown are clearly visible.

I think that the spider that I drew must have been a female too as she has small palps (the ‘feelers’). Male spiders usually have palps like furry boxing gloves, which are used in mating.

It is also sometimes known as the skull spider its face bears a cartoonish resemblance to a human skull.

GEORGE AND SARAH ANN are back from their makeover and it’s been quite a transformation. Robin Taylor has cleaned them, removing as much of the old discoloured varnish as he could without damaging the paintwork. He’s touched up the blemishes (the ‘bullet-wound’ on George’s forehead has healed up nicely) and finally he applied a resin varnish which has restored the richness and depth of the colour.

I’m impressed by this detail of embroidery on the sofa arm in the portrait of Sarah. These are painted photographs so I’m not sure whether this has been meticulously painted or whether it is the original photograph showing through a transparent glaze of oil paint.

Although today we’d see basing a portrait so directly on a photograph as ‘cheating’ at the time this was a way of embracing a new technology. Robin, who was as surprised as we were by how well these battered old paintings have responded to restoration, describes the painting as a superior job.

The paintings are on card with a sheet of wood backing them. I was rather hoping that Robin would find an old document stuffed in the back of the painting. He tells me that he occasionally finds a page from a newspaper added as packing behind a painting in a frame.

The printed label on the back of each portrait states that Geo. Wilkinson & Son of 98 Devonshire Street, Sheffield (two doors down from Westfield Terrace) offer the following services:

Oil Paintings, carefully cleaned, re-lined and restored
Water Colour, and other drawings cleaned and mounted
Engravings, cleaned – mildew and damp stain effectively removed

The Bride in Black

I’m sorry that photographer and picture restorer George Cecil Wilkinson and his oil painter colleague J H Ainley aren’t still around to see how well these portraits are looking a century and a quarter after they produced them.

My mum tells me that George Wilkinson married a cousin of her dad’s and I believe that Ainley too was either a friend or in-law. They were to play a part – a controversial part - in the story of my family at a later date.

I was wondering why Sarah Ann should be wearing black. Had she recently lost a member of her family and gone into mourning. Apparently not; this was before a white wedding became the norm and black was often worn by brides. George and Sarah were married in the mid 1870s but, if they were photographed at the time, it seems that the paintings were produced some years later as the Geo. Wilkinson label reads ‘established 1879′.

I’m taking these two portraits as a starting point, a re-starting point, for my family tree research and I’m going to put together a little biography of George, a Sheffield spring-knife maker, and his wife Sarah Ann who started her working life as a home help aged 11. Sarah, I feel is a key characters in the story of that branch of the family. She was born when the industrial revolution was still at its height in the city and she lived long enough to get caught up in the Sheffield Blitz.

Song of the Slave

She reminds me in this portrait of one of the young women who Mrs Hudson ushers into the consulting room at 221b Baker Street at the start of a baffling case for Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. But this time it’s up to me to observe the details and to attempt to piece to together  something of the story of her life.

Is there some significance in the way she is holding her pocket watch?

Sarah’s fingers, my mum tells me, were as chubby as shown as a result of all her domestic duties but she was taught to play the piano by one of the families she worked for. One of the pieces that she learnt was The Song of the Slave. We still have the sheet music. This brings home the historical context; born on Boxing Day 1850, Sarah was learning to play the piano in the days immediately before the American Civil War and the subsequent emancipation of the American slaves.

George doesn’t give much away in his sober Sunday best suit but I’m looking forward to hearing what my costume expert friends can tell me about him.

The candid camera photograph (which I’ve already featured in this diary) of George that is son took around 1900 is more revealing of his background and domestic circumstances.

Link: Robin Taylor Fine Arts

My last Vue creation was Chipp’s Dolphin mini-submarine, but I remember struggling with the paint-shop part of the tutorial!

Link: Cornucopia 3D