No, I didn’t really go to Hardangerfjord to draw this jug but I needed a grassy backdrop so I reached for the Tui Lakes and Mountains brochure that was on the top of a pile on my desk.
I didn’t have much success photographing the minnows in the jug but I used this blurry shot as the basis for my drawing.
I needed an illustration of the results of a childrens’ river-dipping expedition in Wensleydale for a forthcoming article in the Dalesman. On a perfect summer’s morning in August last year my sister’s grandchildren netted dozens of minnows and a stone loach in the River Ure. The fish were all released before we headed back to the holiday cottages for lunch.
How do you get text to flow around the edges of an image?
Until today I hadn’t quite worked it out but, after a couple of hours of watching videos and searching through the online help, I’ve finally found a way of doing it in Adobe InDesign, the program that I use for designing my booklets and magazine articles.
I use the ‘Pen Tool’ to draw a box around the image but some of the settings that you need to make it work are hidden away in menus so, for my reference, and for anyone else searching on Google, I’m writing a series of step-by-step instructions (see link below).
The Pencil Tool
Having worked out how that’s done, I’ve discovered an even easier method: using the ‘Pencil Tool’, you can draw around your image freehand using a mouse or a graphics tablet. InDesign converts this into a clipping path, which you can set to have the text flowing around it.
Making a start on the pen drawing, watercolour to follow.
I’m going back to pen and watercolour. I was looking at the sketch that I made in 1972 for my Greenhouse Mural, which I featured in my previous post. The drawing is rather messy and the media rather mixed – dip pen, watercolour and a touch of acrylic – and is applied with more enthusiasm than skill but the sketch has a lot of life in it. Coming back to it after over forty years, I can remember the exhilaration of the challenge that I’d been presented with.
This month’s Wild Yorkshire nature diary in the Dalesman.
After a year of practicing drawing on my iPad I’ve got to the stage where I can illustrate my Dalesman magazine articles with digital versions of my regular drawings, so I think it’s good time go back to traditional media and try to apply what I’ve learnt.
Meadow photographed in the walled garden at Nostell, as were the hoverfly, bumble bee and vapourer moth caterpillar. The other insects were photographed on a Wakefield Naturalists’ Society meeting at the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust Thorpe Marsh reserve, near Doncaster.
But that doesn’t mean that I’m not making use of my iMac. Ideally, I’d sit in a sunlit meadow with my sketchbook and draw whatever came along but in this case I’ve got dozens of photographs taken last summer to bring together in a double-page spread. This Photshop CC 2019 collage looks disjointed but I’m convinced that I can make it all flow together as I draw. It’s not intended to be a snapshot of life in the meadow, instead I’d like to evoke the experience of strolling through the grasses on a summer’s day.
There are some excellent new field guides around including one on hoverflies and another on bees. When I’ve completed my illustration, I’ll drop it into a page layout in InDesign to check that my text will fit in, which will hopefully run to about 600 words. Being able to identify the insects means that I can be more specific in the stories I tell about their habits.
I’d painted the Java doves in my ‘Greenhouse Mural’ during the previous week
I prefer lurking in the background . . .
Thursday morning, 17 October, 1974, the Blue Room, Illustration Department, Royal College of Art, Exhibition Road:
“And what do you think, Richard?”
I prefer lurking in the background, but illustration tutor Quentin Blake is keen to bring me into the group discussion. Dennis Leigh, another student in our year, has been telling us the stories behind his work-in-progress. Put on the spot, I fall back to my default position and ask him:
“Don’t you ever go out into the country? All your subjects take place in the mind. Don’t you ever think of drawing from Reality, from Nature?”
Fellow student Colin West’s pithy answer when I suggested that there wasn’t much drawing from life in his Degree Show (from my diary, Saturday 14 June 1975). It’s not surprising that I had so few friends at College!
“The countryside makes me feel uneasy,” Dennis explains, “It’s human relationships that I’m interested in, taking place in situations, in rooms . . .”
But one of his stories starts with a couple who are taking a walk in the country:
“They find the partly decomposed remains of an angel on the moor and take it home and put it in the attic, but the man gets . . .”
And frustratingly, that’s as far as I got in my diary in recording Dennis’s story.
It had been a busy day for me:
My initial sketch for the greenhouse mural. I thought that I might finish it in six weeks . . . it took me three years!
Goodnight to Flamboro’
My illustration for “. . . Poppies gleaming by moonlight . . .”, opus 136, the fifth of ‘Seven Preludes’ for Piano by William Baines.
‘Mother Baines would have approved of the illustrations.’
Roger Carpenter
I’d had a good reaction to my illustrations to Goodnight to Flamboro’, the biography of Yorkshire composer William Baines (1899-1922), in a letter that arrived that morning from its author, Roger Carpenter, so I arranged to meet up with the one-man-band publisher Lewis Foreman of Triad Press to discuss what would be my first book illustrations to be published. I was also ploughing on with my Greenhouse Mural, struggling with one of the life-size birds that I was painting, the singing finch.
Darwin’s Old Studio
If I was to design the perfect London penthouse studio for myself, I couldn’t do better than this: after a day at work in the rooftop greenhouse (to the left of the studio) I could go and listen to legendary performers such as Arthur Rubinstein, Leopold Stokowski, John Ogdon or André Tchaikowsky at the Albert Hall next door. Apple Maps 3D city view
Quentin Blake and head of illustration Bryan Robb photographed by Colin West at the Kensington Gore building.
Because of the Blue Room meeting, I’d missed out on a visit that the college’s general studies environment group had made to the Geological Museum but when I met up with my natural history illustration tutor John Norris Wood later, he had some encouraging news. There were just two of us in John’s department: botanical illustrator Gillian Condy and myself, and we’d been slotted into temporary corners of the Textiles Department but John had found us a room right next to the college greenhouse, on the top floor of the Kensington Gore building.
The room had been the studio of Sir Robin Darwin (1910-1974), who was Rector of the college for more than three decades. The last appointment he made was to put John in charge of the greenhouse and of encouraging the study of natural form throughout the college. John thought that Sir Robin’s decision when designing the Kensington Gore building to put nature at its centre must have been the result of the genes of his naturalist great-grandfather, Charles Darwin, coming through.
On the reverse side of my sketch for the ‘Greenhouse Mural’ John drew suggestions of how I could incorporate the greenhouse’s frogs and lizards into my painting.
Landscape into Art
Lunchtime, 17 October 1974, Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore Building:
On quick visit the Landscape into Art exhibition I met Michael Lloyd a student in the silversmithing department. Like me, he’d headed for the hills during the summer vacation but had also taken his narrow boat up to Rochdale and down to Bristol.
I was so impressed with his narrow boat, which he’d fitted out himself for his accommodation before he started his course at college. By the autumn of 1974 he’d moored it on the Grand Union Canal at Rickmansworth. Rickmansworth featured in the London Transport Book of Country Walks, so it was one of the places that I used to head off for on a weekend, along the Metropolitan Line from St Pancras.
Also at the exhibition I saw Jill Bloodworth from painting, who joined me on my regular lunch-break walk around the Serpentine. One of the plans in the Landscape into Art exhibition was for a farm in Hyde Park. Jill wasn’t convinced by this idea:
Jill made this sketch to explain to me one of her paintings of the windmill: a sort of x-ray, looking up and down simultaneously.
“Wouldn’t that be rather impractical? You’d have to keep the public out. But some people haven’t seen a farm.”
I liked the idea of putting people in touch with where their food comes from so I included a suggestion for an urban farm in my first book, A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield. But I’m so glad that the Park hasn’t been ploughed up or turned to pasture.
Jill was working on large canvases of the moody, ruinously disarticulated interiors of Northumbrian castles in the Mural Room at Exhibition Road. The grey skies and autumn colours in the Park prompted her to mention that she intended go and sketch at the Tower of London.
A Walk in the New Forest
The next day, after a morning sketching birds in the greenhouse, I headed off to Southampton to see my friends from one of my stints as a volunteer warden at the RSPB Loch Garten Osprey Reserve, Tony & Jutta Manser. We took a walk in the New Forest where we spotted a fallow stag in dark autumn pelage and later found ourselves on the fringes of a fox hunt.
As I mentioned, one of my favourite escapes from London on a weekend was to take the Metropolitan Line towards the Chilterns in the north, but I’d sometimes head for Epping Forest or Broadstairs to the east or to Boxhill or Darwin’s Down House to the south. Even nearer my base in South Kensington, were the open spaces of Hampstead Heath and Richmond Park.
Illustration picnic, Cookham, Thursday 26 June 1975, with me at the prow, and Quentin astern.
Where are they now?
Ian Pollock takes the oar in a boat hired from Turk’s Boatyard, Cookham.
My sketch of one of Liz Butterworth’s scarlet macaws, this must be either Lou or Oscar.
Jill Bloodworth’s award-winning degree show the following summer featured the wrap-around, and, when I attempted to draw it, disorientating, interior of the Brixton Windmill. She’s since gone on to work in printmaking, constructed collage and historical re-enactment.
Gillian Condy, was awarded the Royal Horticultural Society gold medal for her botanical illustration. In 1983 she became resident botanical artist with the National Botanical Institute in Pretoria.
Dennis Leigh became the lead singer in Ultravox and later had a solo career as John Foxx but he never gave up on illustration.
I last saw Michael Lloyd’s work on a visit to the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood: in 1999 he was commissioned to make the mace, which was presented by HM The Queen to the New Scottish Parliament.
Poet and children’s author Colin West has written and illustrated sixty books. Thank you Colin for looking out the photographs for this article. Apart from a degree day photograph where I’m wearing a gown, I think they’re the only photographs taken of me during my time at college, so I’d been quite successful at lurking in the background.
Sadly my natural history illustration tutor John Norris Wood died in 2015. At the Wings and Feather’s exhibition that I mentioned in my last post, I was saying to Elizabeth Butterworth (who graduated in painting in 1974) how much I missed him. She agreed:
“I think we all miss John.”
Links
Colin West, 26 June 1975. Colin had already written and illustrated ‘Winslow and the Bath Tub’, which had been published in a first black and white edition as an Inkling by the Illustration Department.
