As an exercise in the Open University’s FutureLearn ‘Start Writing Fiction’ course, we were asked to write a story based on the first subject that we heard when we turned on the radio.
There was a bit of user bias in my starting point, as I knew that it was tuned to Radio 3 and that I was about on schedule for the afternoon concert. Sibelius’s 5th Symphony was described by his old friend Granville Bantock as bringing the listener ‘face to face with the wild and savage scenery of [Sibelius’s] native land, the rolling mists . . . that hover over the rocks, lakes and fir-clad forests . . .’
Perfect!
You can download the whole story, all three pages of it, via the link below. I used the ‘Modern Novel’ template in Pages and dropped in my text and the drawing of pine and juniper from my April 1977 sketchbook.
This weekend’s homework in the University of Southampton’s ‘Exploring Our Ocean’ FutureLearn course. Some of the figures we had to work out for ourselves, so please let me know if I’ve gone wrong with them. For instance, the figure that I found on the internet for tons of rubbish going to landfill was 1.3 billion tons per year.
Comic strip designed on my desktop in Clip Studio Paint and drawn with an Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro in Procreate.
I’ve got to thank another FutureLearn course, the University of Dundee’s ‘Making and Understanding Web Comics’ for a few useful tips that I’ve used here: I’ve hand-lettered the strip but based on free fonts from the Blambot Comic Fonts and Lettering website. I set up the captions using two fonts from the site: Anime Ace 2.0 BB Italic and Noteworthy then used this as a guide, tracing the letters freehand, using the same pen tool in Procreate that I used for the drawings.
The sea is fed by the rivers which run into it. These rivers by gradually wearing away all kinds of soft rocks which contain salt and limestone, carry the salt to the sea. Owing to the action of the sun, the sea is continually evaporating. The sea becomes more and more salty by this process of gradual evaporation by the sun and the continual deposits of salt from rivers
Card no.22 in the ‘What do You Know?’ series of tea cards published by Lyons, 1957.
Apologies for the state of these tea cards but they got a lot of handling when my brother and sister and I collected them in 1957.
I remembered the image on the tea card when I got to the section on salinity in the University of Southampton’s FutureLearn course Exploring Our Oceans.
There’s a rhythm to his brisk walk but it’s not a sassy swagger. His outfit is understated: blue jacket, grey trousers, so just a regular guy? But then there’s the flat cap: once a cliche of the down-to-earth Yorkshireman – along with whippets and racing pigeons – today it’s as likely to be an ironic touch.
Retro eyeglasses and a messenger bag complete the ensemble. He steadies the bag with his left hand as he walks amongst the shoppers on the precinct.
His innate rhythm and understated style make me think of jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk. Rather like Eric Morecambe, Monk insisted, “The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.”
But after an improvisation session that didn’t turn out well, he came to the conclusion: “I’ve been making the wrong mistakes.”
My character, like Monk, seems like someone who’ll take things in his stride, accepting that occasionally we all need to make the right mistakes.
I’ve just started an Open University FutureLearn course, Start Writing Fiction, and our assignment for the first week has been to describe a character from our writer’s notebook (or, in my case, sketchbook), so I’ve chosen a man who I glimpsed crossing the precinct as I waited for an appointment last week.
‘A long time ago in a galaxy very, very close to us . . .’
Well, I’m not aiming for Stars Wars visuals here, in my illustration of the formation of Planet Earth, 4,600 million years ago. I’m trying out the airbrush in Procreate on my iPad Pro, but I don’t want it to look too smooth, so I’m using the pen tool to make it look hand drawn.
I’ve set up the illustration in three layers: sky, molten planet and surface crust. I painted in the crust as a featureless brown-black ball hanging in space, yellow highlights on one side, blue reflected light in the shadows on the other. I then used the eraser tool with a 6B pencil setting to scratch through to reveal the glowing lava beneath. Finally, I added spatters and pen lines.
As I drew the planet, I realised that I’d drawn something similar years before. This was part of the ‘Cosmic Zoom-in’ that I used to introduce my home patch in A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield (Lion & Unicorn Press of the Royal College of Art, 1979).
I still have the bigger picture in my mind when I get close to local wildlife. During my time at college in London, I’d often call in during my lunch break to spend half an hour in the new Story of the Earth exhibition in the Geological Museum in South Kensington. I can see that exhibition’s influence here.
Link
Procreate: I’m looking forward to the new version Procreate 5, which will be launched soon.
This female garden spider, Araneus diadematus, has spun her orb web in the greenhouse. The pattern on its abdomen gives it the alternative names of cross spider or diadem spider.
‘The Sea and its Wonders’ by Mary and Elizabeth Kirby, T. Nelson and Sons, Edinburgh and New York, 1871 and the frontispiece to an 1890 edition of Charles Darwin’s account of ‘The Voyage of the Beagle’.
“For the Victorians the voyage of the Challenger between December 1872 and May 1876 was akin to the Apollo astronauts’ trips to the Moon – it was a journey into the unknown.”
Exploring our Ocean, FutureLearn course, University of Southampton 2019
In the Exploring our Ocean FutureLearn course that I’ve just started, Emeritus Professor Howard Roe describes the significance of the HMS Challenger expedition. I wondered if the Challenger would feature in The Sea and its Wonders but the book dates from 1871, the year before it set out on its four-year voyage.
Dr Kane was an American explorer who launched two expeditions in the Arctic in an attempt to rescue Sir John Franklin.
The book captures the excitement of the latest discoveries.
“Wonders abound in the Ocean. It is a world in itself, and is subject to its own laws.
“The fantastic forms and shining creatures that people the recesses of the Deep are here placed before [the reader].”
Mary and Elizabeth Kirby, Preface to ‘The Sea and its Wonders’, 1871.
The Last Great Auk
With its lively engravings, The Sea and its Wonders reads like a combination of the National Geographic and, in places, The Pirates of the Caribbean but the scenes of turtle hunting, harpooning whales and driving albatrosses from their nests are hard to take, given what we know today about the effect this was going to have on wild populations.
The authors, sisters Mary and Elizabeth Kirby had crowd-funded a Flora of Leicestershire in 1848. It’s interesting to learn in Mary’s autobiography that for The Sea and its Wonders, the pictures came first:
” . . . our engagements with the publishers were increasing, and we were obliged to devote two hours or more every morning, and a couple of hours in the evening, to pens and paper. We had a number of plates from Mr. Nelson, suitable for a volume he wanted to bring out and to call The World at Home.
“This was a very pleasant book to do, for it required us to hunt up all the information that was applicable to the subjects, and there was so much latitude allowed us, that we were at liberty to range from the North to the South Pole.
“As soon as this task was finished, more plates arrived for Beautiful Birds in far off lands, and also for the Sea and its wonders.”
Mary Kirby, ‘Leaflets from my Life’, 1888
The last great auk had been seen just nineteen years earlier on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, but two of them appear in an illustration in the chapter on penguins. To confuse things still further, in the chapter on St Kilda, the great auk is described as if it is still resident on the remote Scottish island but the illustration shows a king penguin. As the pictures came first, we’ll blame Thomas Nelson Jr. rather than the Kirby sisters for the mix-up.
As you can see from the end papers, I bought this book so long ago that it was priced in pre-decimal currency, ten shillings, reduced to seven shillings and sixpence.
I’ve looked up John Taylor in the 1871 census for Leeds but unfortunately this was a common name, so, apart from us knowing that he was doing well in the French class at the YMCA, I can’t tell you anything more about him. He didn’t leave any annotations in the book.
The herald moth, Scoliopteryx libatrix, feeds after dark on flowers and overripe berries, which probably explains why this one is hiding amongst our raspberry canes. Its larvae feed on willows, aspen and poplars.
I’m aware that what to me seems like a neglected corner is home to some of the creatures that I try to encourage in our garden. As I clear the chicory from the mint bed, I disturb a common frog.
Garden snail
The frog is outnumbered by slugs and snails, spiders and harvestmen.
My next task is to clear my little meadow area which is overrun with chicory. I want to make a fresh start and sow a cornfield mix to flower next spring and summer. I’ll clear it again at the end of the season in attempt to discourage the chicory.
I drew my brother-in-law John’s newsagents in the 1980s, stage directing his wife and one of his boys, along with Barbara (on the phone in the background) so that I could take a Polaroid for reference.
At the time, I had plenty of natural history and landscapes in my portfolio so I was making efforts to include more figures. I worked in A4 in pen and ink because photocopies were a useful way of posting out samples to publishers or advertising agencies.
No one commissioned me to draw a corner shop but I was kept busy illustrating a children’s book set in a Dales village, a couple of wildlife stories and a Dickens adaptation, so the effort I put in to my sample illustration paid off.
Like so many corner shops, this one closed and it’s now a private house, so I’m glad that I recorded the details of its interior.
To ease myself back into book design, I’m trying out Pages, Apple’s word-processor, which you can use to create e-books. I’ve gone for the ‘Traditional Novel’ template and, to keep things simple, I’m sticking to the design as far as possible. So far, I’ve only had to change the colour of the title, so that it shows up against my photograph.
I took the photograph on a visit to Sewerby Hall on Wednesday. I’d already decided on my subject, so I was on the look-out for a vintage armchair. Most of the furniture in the Hall is on loan from the Victoria & Albert Museum and has been carefully chosen to recreate the interiors as they appear in photographs taken in the Hall’s Edwardian heyday.
My holiday reading during our short break at Bridlington was a paperback of a Vera novel by crime-writer Ann Cleeves. The paperback’s cover features a glowering monochrome landscape, so I’ve gone for a similar treatment for my photograph, using various filters in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CC 2019.
The book works well as a PDF in Apple’s Books app.
I’ve used Lightroom’s ‘black and white split tone’, with added grain and some vignetting. When I took the photograph (having first checked with the attendant that photography was allowed), I had to crouch down to get the angle on the chair that I was after. This meant that the perspective of the paneling in the background was skewed, so I’ve used Photoshop’s ‘Edit/Transform/Skew’ command to straighten it up.
The author’s name was randomly generated in my favourite writing program, Scrivener. The original story, The Chair, is by my sister. It appears in an old school magazine which I came across recently.
