It’s a cool and rainy Easter weekend here in south-east Queensland. Perfect days for soup, sketchbooks, reading and getting cosy with canines. Each day I try to add a little more to one of my many sketchbooks. Most of them are themed; they all have purpose, and much of the time my mood dictates which one/s gets attention.
This weekend I’ve been working on more ferns and a visual journal for word association doodles. More on that once I have a few more pages to show.
In the meantime here are three more pages from the fern visual journal.
I’m only on the second two page spread, but already I’m thinking this might be a multi-volume project. There is so much to learn. Sketching ferns is time-consuming, even for the less complex leaves, but very enjoyable and quickly becoming a favourite side project.
I’m a huge fan of ferns and sketchbooks in equal measure, but I am often hesitant to draw or paint ferns as they can be quite delicate and complex, not to mention…
Stippling in pen and ink isn’t for everyone. It requires a certain level of observation and focus, and especially time that isn’t always available. It can also get a bit boring after…
I’m a huge fan of ferns and sketchbooks in equal measure, but I am often hesitant to draw or paint ferns as they can be quite delicate and complex, not to mention diverse. I recently started a new pen and ink drawing involving ferns, but was finding my lack of confidence was a barrier to progress. So, to better understand my subject and boost my confidence, I decided to start (yet another) sketchbook, this time just for ferns. It’s a somewhat daunting task as there are more than 10,000 known species of fern worldwide. I’m not going to draw them all in one lifetime, let alone fit them all in a single sketchbook, but that’s not really the point. The point is to sketch to understand. The process of filling a sketchbook or journal with a focused subject requires a great deal of reading and research, staring at specimens and then (hopefully) rendering a reasonable facsimile on paper. They don’t have to be botanically precise or detailed, as it’s more an exercise in developing my visual library. To ease in to fern drawing I decided to start with some of the more primitive forms, excluding horsetails, as seen below.
Above is the first full page of a Paperblanks Flexis notebook (Midnight Rebel Bold flavour). The paper is exquisitely smooth and takes fineliners and coloured pencil very well. There is some tolerable ghosting, but no bleed through (the paper is 100 gsm), at least with fineliners. These plants are part of the same class of plants that include maidenhairs, silver lady’s and black tree ferns. One page in and already the limit of my knowledge has been exposed.
Once again, one page doesn’t do justice to the history and past of the Māori people
This is going to sound more like a plug for New Zealand than an introduction to New Zealand archaeology, but here goes anyway . . .
Between the ages of four to almost sixteen years old I lived in Christchurch, New Zealand. One of my favourite places to go was the Canterbury museum, a beautiful building that seemed enormous to me at the time, which stands right beside Christchurch’s wondrous botanical gardens. Though not as substantial as some of the more famous museums round the world, it was good-sized museum for such a small city, with a diverse and well-displayed collection (at least to my young mind). I was most fascinated with the extinct flora and fauna of New Zealand, and especially quite enamoured with the cultural remains of her earliest settlers.
During the 1980s, as part of Māori recovery programmes, Māori language (known as te reo “the language”), music and art were beginning to be taught in school, at least it was at the primary school I went to. All children were given the opportunity to participate in the Māori choir (which I did and loved), take art lessons and learn te reo, albeit an elementary study of the language. Whenever we went on a school excursion or camp we were treated to traditional Māori folktales, which added a great deal to the history of the place. I can still remember a friend of mine telling me a story about the local dragon or tanewha (pronounced tanifa) during one school camp, whose ground we stood on. Such things have always left deep impressions on me. There’s a reason specific places and spaces are imbued with deeper meaning, why we talk of the essence or spirit of a place and why some spaces are described as sacred. All of New Zealand felt that way to me and the art and folklore of her first people only adds to the sense it is other-worldly.
Te reo has declined over the years, but efforts have been renewed to revive it. Māori is one of New Zealand’s three official languages – the other two being English and New Zealand Sign Language. In contrast, Australia has no official language. English is the language of the majority, with over 300 distinct languages spoken in Australian homes (information from the The Australian Bureau of Statistics 2016 Census data).
New Zealand is a geographically beautiful country with deeply rooted Maori heritage and cultural influences from around the world.
Three species of Adonsonia. In most parts of the world the common name for these bottle-like trees is Baobab – the first two sketches are the African Baobab (A. digitata) and the Giant Baobab or Grandidier’s Baobab (A. grandidieri) respectively. In Australia they are mostly known as Boab’s (A. gregorri), but it is also known by a number of different names in different Australian Aboriginal languages. The Boab is native to the Kimberly region in the far northwest of Australia and is a wonderfully mysterious tree. No one really knows how or why it came to be in Australia, as they were not considered to be part of the Gondwana supercontinent. The three possible scenarios put forward by scientists for their occurrence is either they were brought here by the first people in Australia; the seeds floated across the Indian Ocean from Madagascar, or, while unlikely, it is still possible, the genus Adonsonia started in Australia and migrated to the rest of the world.
I will defer to First Australian wisdom in this one: Boab’s have always been here.
I’m loving working in this sketchbook. Of course, the subjects are engaging, personally significant and keep me interested and motivated, but I also like the no fuss approach of limiting colours and not worrying about “ruining” an expensive sketchbook (this is an economical brand from my local office supply store). Most pages have sepia ink with only the shading of a sepia coloured pencil. They take anywhere from less than an hour to several hours or more if I’m really engaged and reading up in between drawing. Occasionally I’ll throw in another coloured pencil for emphasis. The rules are simple with this one: do what you love and love what you do. It doesn’t have to mean anything to anyone else.
Coloured pencil and ink go well together, especially in sepia. I decided to test them out in a sketchbook by sketching some artefacts – things that got me started in archaeology and human prehistory that still inspire me. The UNESCO World Heritage site of Catalhoyuk was a game changer for me when I first read about it in the 1990s. The site was discovered in 1958 and was excavated between 1961 and 1965. Those summer seasons of digging revealed a lot about ancient Anatolia that wasn’t previously known. Unfortunately excavations were halted until 1993 due to controversy. In 1993 archaeological excavations reopened and continued to 2018. While it is not the oldest Neolithic site, its excellent state of preservation and long occupation period has facilitated a better understanding of the transition to settled life and how people occupied the spaces within.
The site of Catalhoyuk is a settlement in Anatolia, Turkey. It’s almost continuous occupation spanned a period of almost two thousand years, making it one of the most important and abundant early settlements in human history.
Stepping much further back in time I decided to sketch some of the earliest evidence of stone tool-use. It’s a good way to refresh the memory and practice ink and pencil sketching techniques. I quite like the old school look the sepia colours imbue.
