Tree and leaves

A few recent sketches, of leaves and a tree in the botanical garden. Ballpoint on printer paper, about size A5.

Tree sketch

Sketch of a karree tree (Rhus lancea) made during a visit to Dinokeng nature reserve north of Pretoria. Ballpoint pen, in A5 sketch book.

Scenes from the highveld

Photos I took earlier today on a trip to the highveld area where I grew up, near the town of Bronkhorstspruit in South Africa.

Some typical scenery:

Sedimentary rock on a hill; the layers are clearly visible. If memory serves, these rocks are some two billion years old, though I'd have to go read up on it again to be sure:

Many of the rocks are heavily encrusted with colourful lichens (a city slicker once asked me why all the rocks are splattered with paint!):

Local plant life:

Wild apricots, Ancylobotrys capensis, so named because of the superficial similarity of the fruits to those of apricots. The fruits are edible and quite delicious, although tasting nothing like apricots or indeed any other fruit familiar to western civilization. Some years the shrubs are overloaded with fruit; this year the harvest was somewhat meager:

Wild wormwood, Artemisia afra. Apparently an infusion of the leaves can be used to treat chest ailments. Wouldn't surprise me if it actually worked, because the crushed leaves are very richly aromatic:

Flower of common protea, Protea caffra. Some years there are many, but as with the wild apricots, this year I could find only this single flower:

Something of a rarity, the elephant's ear (Streptocarpus vandeleurii) has only a single leaf, and a mass of white flowers:

The large witchweed, Striga elegans, lives up to its name: it's a parasite, the roots of which grow into those of grasses from where they withdraw nutrients:

The thick, fibrous stem of the monkey's tail, Xerophyta retinervis, helps to protect it against fire, a common phenomenon in this area:

The intricately woven nest of a weaver bird:

And a partially completed nest:

Late afternoon: a typical summer storm brewing. All through the day, the clouds get larger and by late afternoon will form thick and rather spectacular banks, frequently lit up from inside by lightning. Time to get indoors!

Self-portrait

New year; time for a new self-portrait. As with all my self-portraits, I look like a murderous psychopath. I'm not really that unfriendly.

A homemade rainbow

It has been a while since I have had time to post anything here. Well, rather late than never. Here is a photo of the sun's light falling through water in a wine glass and in the process being broken up into a spectrum of its constituent wavelengths:

And here is a closeup of a part of the rainbow:

Finally, a photo of a "real" rainbow I took some weeks ago:

My simple point-and-shoot camera is not the best tool with which to capture the rich colours. All seven, er, six, er... how many colours are there in a rainbow anyway? At school, we are usually taught that there are seven. Precisely seven, no more and no less, and the clever kids, none of whom have ever taken the time to look - really look - at a rainbow, can even name them for you: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Or something like that. I can never quite remember, and I don't think I have ever seen more than six clearly defined colours in a rainbow. Because the colours smoothly flow into one another, one can perhaps see more than seven. Or, depending on your culture and language, fewer than six.

Next time you see a rainbow, take note of how many colours you see. You may be surprised.

Edit, 24/12/2011:
There is a good article in Wikipedia about rainbows, that explains quite a lot about them, here.

Pears

Haven't had much time to draw for a while. This sketch was done from a photograph from the reference library at WetCanvas. Even though I dislike working from photos - it was part of a monthly work-from-reference-photo thing they run there.

Charcoal

In a fit of madness, I decided to try out drawing with charcoal. Well, it is like watercolour: impossible to control, and quickly turns into a powdery mess. The drawing also tends to be extremely fragile compared to a pencil drawing: the slightest accidental touch, and your carefully placed line is smeared all over the paper. I am astonished at the way in which classically trained artists can use it to produce highly detailed and precisely naturalistic drawings. Perhaps practice will make perfect.

I do like the medium's rich, velvety blacks and grays, and its essential simplicity: it is the one drawing tool you can easily produce yourself (and indeed, until fairly recently, artists did burn their own charcoal instead of buying it). The drawing process itself is also an exercise in simplicity and minimalism: stick of charcoal, paper, eraser, and nothing more. In the old days, artists used a piece of old bread as eraser; these days we have a thing called a kneaded eraser that can work miracles in forgiving our artistic sins.

Without further ado, here's the powdery, murky, messy horror that resulted from my first excursion into this medium; it is about size A5:

This is going to take some practice...