They compose well into infographics, especially infographics involving cake.

This one is an extract from a larger drawing which documented a super excursion in Austria with a great group of work-friends.

And below is the earlier post which was a sketch that I made at work as a conservationist in a chalk gorge — an old quarry where thousands of wild orchids now grow under careful wilderness management.

Every year we count the orchids — yes, we actually do — as well as counting the bees, butterflies, glowworms, pond-life, and wildflowers.

“I’ve come so far — I shan’t give up”

This snail is clearly signalling the letter P (for ‘prize’) in semaphore. I’m just sorry I couldn’t stay to transcribe the entire message. If I may hazard a guess, I imagine she was quoting John Bunyan.

And though she doth but very softly go,
However, 'tis not fast nor slow, but sure;
And certainly they that do travel so,
The prize they do aim at they do procure.

Extract from Upon a Snail, by John Bunyan

And in close-up:

A tree that would not give up, nor be held back from reaching its destiny.

There’s a lesson for us there, I think. If I’d posted this yesterday, you might have mistaken this for an April Fool’s joke, but it’s real, I promise.

I was taking a snap of some apple blossom and noticed a determined little ladybird almost invisible among the flower buds.

Did it fly there or climb, I wonder? It seems to blend in pretty well. I’m tempted to start a series on mini-beasts hiding in plain sight.

This Robin nonchalantly took flight from its perch on a tree in a sensory herb garden.

My companion busied themselves with the potting soil, while I snapped a colour and texture collection at golden hour.

The muted colours of winter giving way to the buds of spring provides lots of visual interest if you are prepared to look up-close. An early bumblebee resting on some Virburnum.

Here are some of the visual treats we collected in our meanderings.

When the spring weather is wet, slugs come out for track meets, lining up, and racing each other. With their engines running, pumping with excitement, they line up on the tarmac of the neighbourhood sidewalk in the broad daylight. VROoooM, and then they are OFF!! Leaving their singly footprinted tread-trails behind them.

In these recent rainy days, there is one flower which is well equipped to cope with the wet, wind, and the cold.

It is the Lenten Rose or Hellebore. The Germans call it the sneezewort. The photos above and below are taken from a snail’s eye view. That’s because the flower faces downwards by habit.

From a human being’s point of the view the flower looks and acts like an umbrella. The spring rain runs off the flower, keeping it nice and dry inside.

The barberry is still wearing its winter outfit in last year’s fashionable Cayenne and Viva Magenta.

Barberry bushes often have spoon-shaped leaves. This variety has little spikes on the leaf-edge, that remind us of slug horns, holly, or agaves.

The winter and spring cherry tree looks magnificent in its oriental splendour.

The inspiration came from the blue umbrella, the blue light, the halo of the streetlights, and (out of frame of this shot) some lovely building façades.

However, when I reviewed this shot, I was delighted with the couple on the left-hand side of the street, specifically the serendipitously uplifted central foot, that suggested an effortless dance, “singing in the rain”, or a three-legged race at sports day.

The three-legged hound is cute too.

Trees are magnificently complex systems. The tree has an up and down elevator. The up elevator is the sap layer surrounding the heartwood. It is called xylem. It carries water from the soil via the roots to the leaves.

Together with carbon dioxide from the air and energy from the Sun, the tree makes glucose and oxygen in the leaves. The oxygen enters the air, and the glucose goes down the down elevator (the inner bark called the phloem).

The sugar-laden sap tastes good. Some humans eat it. They are called Canadians. There are a few Canadians in my family. They love pancakes for breakfast and they smother them with tree sap (that is maple syrup).

A bare-root whip is a young tree, about two years old. We planted just over 200 recently. They were alder buckthorns.

These trees are one of only two tree species that the brimstone butterfly caterpillar loves to eat, the other being the common buckthorn.

The pale yellow-green of brimstone butterflies is similarly beautiful to the sulphur quartz that they are named after. They look like the leaves of the plants that they inhabit like alder buckthorn and ivy.

The whips were planted in small plantations on the bends in a lovely small river. The intention is to prevent erosion of the river bank as it meanders.

They were planted together with hawthorn, blackthorn and spindle, which are all twiggy, woody trees that make a good hedge. They attract pollinating insects, bees, and birds like thrushes, redwing, fieldfare, and finches. The hawthorn attracts wood mice and slow-worms, the spindle attracts magpie moths, spindle ermine moths, scorched wings, and holly blue butterflies. The blackthorn is popular with hairstreak and swallowtail butterflies and many species of moth caterpillars.

Some crack willow has been planted in these plantations. These will grow tall. In windy conditions the branches crack noisily and fall.

The fallen branches can float downstream and get lodged in the bank and grow into new trees.

Several passers-by stopped to ask us what we were doing. I met Peter who shared his beautiful photos of the local river taken at sunrise and sunset.

I will explain what a dibber and tang are, in case you don’t know. A dibber is a special spade that foresters use to plant small leafless trees (called whips).

The dibber has a kind of foot-rest called a tang. The idea is that the tool cuts the soil, so that the whip can be be inserted, burying its roots.

While planting, we added a soaking of living nature called compost tea (a special concoction containing mycorrhizal fungi). I think of it like the tree’s power-breakfast of sourdough toast and marmalade.

The Royal Horticultural Society has this to say on the topic:

Mycorrhizas are beneficial fungi growing in association with plant roots, and exist by taking sugars from plants ‘in exchange’ for moisture and nutrients gathered from the soil by the fungal strands. The mycorrhizas greatly increase the absorptive area of a plant, acting as extensions to the root system.

To grow well, plants need a wide range of nutrients in various amounts, depending on the individual plant and its stage of growth. The three key plant nutrients usually derived from soil are nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, while carbon, oxygen and hydrogen are absorbed from the air. Other vital soil nutrients include magnesium, calcium and sulphur.

Phosphorus is often in very short supply in natural soils. When phosphorus is present in insoluble forms it would require a vast root system for a plant to meet its phosphorus requirements unaided. It is therefore thought that mycorrhizas are crucial in gathering this element in uncultivated soils.

So now you know :-) about tree plumbing!

The fungi are little traders — exchanging water and micronutrients for sugar. Sourdough for marmalade, kind of!

The system pays off because those fungi are hanging out between the soil and the root tips. Root tips hold starchy sugar stores, like a squirrel stores acorns.

… and you can probably see that it looks like plasticine or play-dough. You might have also noticed that it looks like a fish bone or something.

With today’s missive, I wanted to highlight how you can be creative by fiddling with plasticine or play-dough.

In a post last month, I wrote about Indian elephants. I tried to sketch one from memory and was disappointed by how it looked (you can ignore the giant rabbit and giant mouse).

I searched up “elephant anatomy” and came across some super photos of a small Indian elephant on Jake’s Bones.

I decided to make a copy with the first thing that came to hand.

Elephants fascinate me because they look as if they are walking a high-wire sometimes.

I learnt, from Jake that: elephants walk on tiptoes; elephants leg bones go straight down; elephants walk by lifting fore- and aft-legs on one side off the floor at the same time.

Maybe that’s what captures my attention about how elephants move. Like Winnie-the-Pooh, the bulky abdomen enhances their charm.

In a forthcoming post, I’ll share how we can take this approach into another dimension. Are you excited to expand your creative comfort zone, as easily as putty in your hands? Then, please stay tuned for the next instalment in this series.

Making a drawing from start to finish takes a few hours or even days, so, before beginning, it helps to know what the final art will look like.

That requires a different approach. Ideas are sketched in a very basic way. From those sketches, you get a sense of what to include on the page, and how to portray all the elements for the effect you are aiming for.

At this point, don’t think about the edges of the paper, just scrawl. It is a pell-mell of images you are sketching. They can cut into each other, and if you reach the edge of the paper before you wanted, just place another sheet underneath and tack it on with clear tape later.

When art accompanies a story, the art must also reflect the drama and suspense.

You can think about each page as an emotional ride.

• What is the reader’s first reaction when turning the page and seeing the art?

• Will they continue to inspect the art and notice things which surprise and delight them?

• Will they be motivated to turn to the next page?

In the example, the rabbits climbing into a rocket and the farmer (also a rabbit) reclining against the tractor were conceived as parts of one page.

However, on reflection, the relaxed farmer might not be right for this stage of the story, when the excitement is building.

Perhaps it belongs after the climax, when we want to peacefully remember what has transpired, and convey rest and readiness for sleep.

Keep going and work everything through as many times as you need.

Also, give your mind time and space to create. There is a scene in this book where the rabbit reaches with their paws to cup the earth — the earth as seen as a blue marble from the moon. You can see this in the sketch above. Two or three days after sketching that, I was working in a garden next to a statue of a person reaching up with long arms and making a cup with their hands. While I was looking at the statue, my mind clicked to the idea that rabbits could be standing on each other’s shoulders with the smallest on top making the cupping gesture. I thought this would convey more emphasis than the original sketch (above).

I continue on this theme next week, so please look out for Tuesday’s post to find out what this is, and why it can help you draw the natural world.

So many fallen sweet chestnuts covered the paths in this wooded garden.

It was like walking on marshmallow — a soft cushion under the boots.

In the trees, birds were singing — robins, song thrushes, jackdaws, and blackcaps.

This garden has treecreepers, a mystical bird that walks up (never down) trees.

I wonder how old these trees are? Sweet Chestnut trees live long lives: 700 years or so.

There is a tree known as Castagno dei Cento Cavalli on Mount Etna that is estimated as aged between 2000 to 4000 years old. In Britain, some sweet chestnut trees are 400 to 500 years old, meaning they were around during the Tudor and Stuart periods.

How did they get to Britain? Theophrastus (371–287 BC), ‘the father of botany’, spoke of sweet chestnut covering the slopes of Mount Olympus. Some people say the Romans must have brought them here for their kitchen gardens.

Facts credit: https://www.forestryjournal.co.uk/features/18952371.disputed-origin-uncertain-future-sweet-chestnut/

I think the key to drawing hands is observing each cylindrical section of the fingers, paying attention to their orientation in 3-dimensional space, and their level of tension, relative to each other.

Your practice with complex forms helps in other ways:

• Drawing people : young children walking, running, or leaping. A child has a very dynamic stance, and their limbs are not stiff and rigid even when still. Draw someone who is slouched or curled on a sofa chair.

• Elephants can have a surprising appearance of lightness of gait, not lessened by their trunk and tail.

• Illustrating a bed of wildflowers or a group of trees also requires careful observation and composition.

Even the blossoming crêpe myrtle, below, has a structure that somewhat resembles the human hand. It is crowned (gloved) with a tight crop of dark leaves and confetti-like flamingo-coloured blossom.

It would be a lovely tree to illustrate because in real life it attracts songbirds and wrens, which make for an attractive subject. Add some Indian elephants ridden by princes and princesses!

Trees which are open, letting light spill through them, are even harder to paint faithfully than hands, in my opinion. The shadow on the ground makes for an extra challenge.

The tree’s shadow can make for a great composition, creating depth and adding leading lines to the picture. Dappled light in the shadows can add areas of visual interest as a kind of negative counterbalance to positive areas like confetti blossom or wildflower heads.

Illustration really zings when line and form balances texture and contrast. So always look for the hard and soft edges.

Drawing trees, with open structure like jacarandas (not pictured), and these pink lemonade trees/shrubs (staghorn sumac)* and willow below, is a lot of fun, don’t you think?

* actually not sure if those are staghorn sumac. Could they be ash trees? Neither make sense to me because this garden is on the edge of a river flood plain. I’ll try to find out from the owner of the garden. Does anyone care to make an educated guess?

• Prune suckers. This is not a competition held on fruit farms in California where you compete to run 100 yards with a straw, nor am I talking about what my Aunt Mildred has for breakfast before she has put her teeth in. Ornamental trees are cultivated by grafting a cutting onto the roots of another apple tree. This ensures that the new tree is a copy of its parent. However, the root stock is picked for its hardiness, so it can push up its own shoots from the roots, which can smother the cultivated tree. Therefore, the “suckers” should be snapped or snipped off.

• Replace damaged tree-wrap. Check that the tree trunk is protected against rabbits that may nibble the bark. Wild rabbits which are plentiful in my neighbourhood chew grass, but come winter, when the grass is covered by snow, the rabbits may chew bark of young trees to get to the layer beneath. This layer is called the cambium and contains the living growing part of the trunk, which is vital. The tree is wrapped in a cellulose wrapping which breaks down over time (deliberately biodegradable) but should be replaced if damaged. Muntjac are very partial to apple trees, and an orchard is their mother lode.

• Check for and prune dead branches. Clues: the branch is visibly broken, has no leaves, when touched breaks, when scratched is hard and doesn’t reveal a green sub layer. Low branches beneath a healthy canopy serve little benefit to the tree and will often die off, unless the tree has a weepy habit.

• Remove grass and weeds from the base of the tree — these compete for nutrients and water. Add wood chippings as a mulch layer. Mulch helps protect the soil from drying out, holding moisture in.

While scratching away at the base of the trees, I disturb various small spiders and ladybirds. Some of the ladybirds are so tiny as you can see by comparison with a thumbnail.

The ladybirds walk in such an agile way carrying their upside-down-boat-like bodies up and down blades of grass with an easy gait.

I have put this note in the animation section to remind myself to make a walk cycle demo from some of my videos.

It is the season for burning meadow cuttings.

I shot a number of reference videos today, in real-time and slow-motion, so that I could study the dynamics of fire and smoke.

What I observe may appear in animated shorts.

I regret not bringing some baking potatoes and marshmallows for lunch.

I call this style “cheesecake illustration”, and it’s a favourite style of mine to share a capsule of feeling about a place.

I took a photo of a “Wall” — the butterfly from an earlier post — and superimposed it onto an illustration of a chalk gorge.

Not sure if butterflies like cheesecake. What do you think?

I will work on this a bit more, because I would like to share it as a paper-cutting hobby project.

I like the Carder bee for its orange faux-fur gilet and striped stockings; or perhaps it is sporting the warm collar lapels of a flying ace’s bomber jacket and a striped scarf. Snoopy would approve.

Is it a coincidence that its formal name is Bombus pascuorum — the “field bomber”? Bombus actually means “buzz” not bomb. So whether the buzz of an aeroplane’s engine or the buzz of a fashion catwalk jives more with you, remember to look out for these very hairy bumblebees.

Wardrobe questions aside, we can learn so much about the art of flight by watching nature go about its business.

There is an air show happening every day, if you care to look for it.

Late in the season, this Holly is sporting some snazzy stripes.

He does seem to remember that he is quite likely to get a scrap of food on a Tuesday.

If you try to pick this fellow up, then hold him well aft of those claws to avoid a nasty nip.