Day 18, #30daysketchbookchallenge

Day 18, reptile. Well I don’t own any, but I remembered having a tortoise when I was little. I have a vague idea of what the shells look like. I added some gold glitter. I have given it some lettuce to eat.

I probably haven’t made it three dimensional enough, but it was starting to look overworked…

Long distance call!

I’ve just spoken to someone I’ve been friends with online for the first time. After fifteen years we just spoke. It was lovely. I am so pleased we could chat. I didn’t realise it was possible.

Maybe it was an inconsequential chat, but I think we both were pleased to

have talked. I introduced my hubby to him. It’s good to have long distance friends. Perhaps I will ring Australia next!

In memoriam

Remember the family, remember their lives

Young people, taken before their time, in their twenties.

Ninteenth century losers in the lottery of life.

How did they die? Illness? Industrial accident? Food poisoning? TB? Who knows, but three people from the same family were lost.

Before antibiotics, before modern medicine. Life is precious. You never know when the grim reaper will strike?

And now? Death rates you would imagine during the black death. Loss of life and illness greater than World Wars. We can only hope that life will continue. But maybe changed? More peaceful, less stressful? We can only wait and see.

Penkhull church

I did a quick sketch from a photo I took today. Wish it was drawn from real life but I was walking so I didn’t get the chance to sit and draw….St Thomas’s Church, Penkhull, Stoke-on-Trent. The Wassail starts out from the village hall which I’d just across the road to the right of the church. At the top of Trent Valley Road. #bandofsketchers today’s prompt was religious building..

Penkhull’s Apple Tree

A song for the Apple Tree. To an ancient tune….thanks to my friend Bruce for the words!

Old Apple Tree, We are Come to Wassail Thee
Wassail Song
Old Apple tree, we are come to wassail thee,
All for to bloom, and to bear thy flowers and fruit so free.
Wassail! wassail! all round our town;
Our cups are white and our ale is brown.
Our bowl is made of a good ashen tree,
And here’s kind fellows as will drink to thee.
Hats full, caps full, five-bushel bags full,
Barns full, floors full, stables full, tallats full,
And the little hole under the stairs, three times three!
Hip, hip, hurrah! shout we.

Butterfly

Through the dark night a butterfly flits, grey and green, not a moth. Looking for night-time flowers, like night scented stock.

The ghostly wings drop tiny scales, dusting the flowers with small droplets of white and grey.

Wings like snowflakes, flying through the cold dark, settling in a crevice at dawn. Sleeping till sunset arrives again….

Doodles

I think I was trying to do abstract faces with lines here. Somehow the doodles at the bottom of the picture seem to fit with the contours above. I don’t remember the canvas so I probably painted over it. Sometimes what you paint is not what you want and you have to scrap it. Sometimes you fool yourself into thinking somethings OK when it really isn’t. I like some things and they just won’t work…. I may try and alter this in a digital app? Don’t know. I think this image is about three or four years old….

Not that bad…

Lockdown, I can only go out for exercise and do essential shopping.

But when you think about it, it’s not that bad. I’m not stuck on an island in the middle of nowhere with no one to talk to. I am warm, I have food, I cn talk to people on the phone or online. I might be getting a bit bored. But it’s not like in the past, when I was a child. On Sundays everywhere was closed. No one that worked in simple, low paid jobs, could afford a car. Very few eople had tv’s and there was only one channel and a few radio stations. Computers didn’t exist except in universities or in the armed forces. The air was dirty and polluted, coal fires were the norm to heat houses. It was a different world.

Now we are linked? Possibly too much. But if we stay away from each other as much as we can? Things might just get better…