Month: July 2020

Shape-changer

Continuing with the simple animations from the Cartooning book, here’s an exercise in shape changing. Hissey and Tappenden didn’t specify that these mysterious events should be taking place above the little town of Horbury in the Calder Valley, but why not? This is a Shape Tween in progress.

Adobe Animate Shortcuts

keyboard shortcuts

As with any Adobe software, you can speed up your workflow in Animate by learning the keyboard shortcuts and Hissey and Tappenden include a helpful list (in Flash, but the keyboard shortcuts have been retained in Animate). Getting really familiar with these by sticking a few labels to my Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard also helps me grasp the basic workings of the program.

Dog-eared

Another simple animation from The Professional Step-by-Step Guide to Cartooning by Ivan Hissey and Curtis Tappenden. This is about as simple as animating gets: one layer is the paper background, then there’s the puppy, minus its left ear, and finally the ear itself, pivoting up and down on an anchor point on the puppy’s head.

You convert the ear into a Symbol and the book mentions that in Flash you can store as many as 16,000 symbols in the library! Probably more now that Adobe has replaced Flash with Animate, but I intend to keep things as simple as possible. One Symbol is a start though.

Flying Saucer

After quite a break I’m launching myself back into animation with this tutorial from The Professional Step-by-Step Guide to Cartooning by Ivan Hissey and Curtis Tappenden. Writing in 2010 they used Adobe Flash but I’m using its replacement Adobe Animate.

We have lift-off!

E C Axford, Ossett Headmaster

E C Axford

You wouldn’t think that The Wicker Man would make a suitable subject for a school play but our headmaster E. C. Axford’s plays were dark dramas with a similar theme.

A People Apart was a tale of everyday village folk who practise pagan sacrifice while in Black Bread the inhabitants of a recently discovered remote island are forced to keep to their medieval lifestyles to please visiting tourists.

My sister Linda had a long speech, standing by the village cross, discussing the philosophical implications of holding back progress but the line that I remember was from one of the island’s disgruntled peasants, played by Clive Simms, who grumbles: “They threw my Morris Minor off the cliff!”

Mr Axford’s literary efforts also included a novel, A Stranger in Allanford, 1960, and a poem that was set to music by the school Madrigal Society.

As a retirement project he wrote about Bodmin Moor for a David & Charles topographical series.

At morning assembly Mr Axford would dip into his notebook of suitable readings. One of them, a tale of charitable deeds, ends with the hero arriving at a musical gathering, probably after giving away his cloak or his shoes. After explaining his late arrival he says to his friends: “And now, let us tune our instruments.”

A great closing line.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Mr Moore, General Science, Ossett Grammar School

Mr and Mrs Moore

“Carbon dioxide turns limewater milky, excess turns it clear again.”

“I put my teeth in my back pocket one day and they bit me!”

“You’ll end up in the ‘B’ form with all the other Charlies!”

Mr Moore, General Science teacher, Ossett Grammar School, c. 1963

Mr Moore’s lessons at Ossett Grammar School in the 1960s were a mixture of science, musical hall jokes and outrageous opinions, hence his nickname ‘Loony’. He had a particular fondness for the Isle of Man, where I assume he grew up.

Most memorable incident: phosphorous igniting during one of his demonstrations . . . which then set fire to the rest of the phosphorous as he attempted to put it back in the jar.

His wife taught science at Highfield School, Horbury. I remember that she always wore her hair coming down across one side of her face and I’m told that this was because she had been badly scarred in a laboratory accident while carrying out research during World War II. I’m told that, of the two of them, she was more highly qualified. I knew her to say hello to but the little that I’ve heard about her background comes to me secondhand.

Ossett Grammar School, 1962-67

Ossett teachers

Having drawn all my form teachers from infant and junior school, how could I not continue and include my teachers from Ossett Grammar School, from 1962 to 1967.
Miss Eves had her classroom at the right-hand end of the prefabricated classrooms, opposite the school dinners kitchen. Her specialist subject was religious education.
Mr Foster’s classroom was down the slope from Park House, the oldest part of the school, in a recently-built block of single-story classrooms. He was a mathematics teacher.

Teachers

Mr McGrady, the music teacher, was based, as you might guess, as far out of earshot of the rest of the school as possible, in the music room in the other, smaller, block of ‘temporary’ prefabricated classrooms overlooking the school playing field.
Mr Mason’s classroom was in the brick-built block of the school, towards the art room end. I can’t remember what his specialisation was. English perhaps. At the end of summer term he left the school and went to teach in Africa.
Mr Beaumont was the woodwork teacher. Again his classroom was in the brick-built block, this time at the gymnasium end.

I didn’t stay on into the sixth form. I was ready and eager to start at art college.

Back to Backs

sketches
profile
market folk

This feels like getting back to some kind of normality: sitting with a latte at a table outside Bistro 42 overlooking Ossett’s Friday market and watching the world go by. I want to just draw what is in front of me rather than, as I often do, taking a mental snapshot of a passing figure, so I draw people who look as if they might stay in position for a few minutes. The men waiting on the bench are the most obliging. I find back views expressive. Rather than slapping a facial expression on a character, you can leave the viewer to work out for themselves whether a character is feeling relaxed or slightly; tense, bored or curious.

Grappling the Graphite

grappling the graphite

Take a break, keep fit, Mattias Adolfsson advises us on his Art of Sketching course . . . and draw some exercises suitable for illustrators.

soft lead

It’s a while since I’ve tackled graphite and certainly I’m not ready for H pencils yet.

HB pencil

I can just about manage HB.

nib muscles

The problem is that I’ve spent too long working with pens.

pencil pusher

I was never cut out to be a pencil pusher.

pencil sharpening

I remember the rare pleasure of being appointed pencil monitor at school. With all thirty of the class’s pencils to sharpen there was a tendency for us to push the machine to its limits and turn too fast, result: broken leads. This meant you had to start over and the pencils rapidly decreased in size.

pumping ink

I’m better sticking to what I’m used to, but I’m drawing so much that I’m regularly having to top up my Lamy Vista with De Atramentis ink. Quite a workout and I have to mop up the mess with paper napkin afterwards. Perhaps I should go back to cartridges, you just pop them in and you’re ready to go.

St Peter’s School, Horbury, 1958-1962

teachers
plan of school

My form teachers at St Peter’s, Church of England controlled, Junior School, Horbury, 1958-1962.

  1. Miss Andrassy, a relative of the Andrassy family who ran a butcher’s shop on Queen Street. I remember her being keen on art.
  2. Mr Harker had his classroom in the prefabricated block in the school yard. Organised a class walking group, The Travel Club. Walking must be good for you, because it’s only last autumn, a few weeks before he died, that he managed the two-mile walk around Newmillerdam.
  3. Mr Thompson, who I’ve written about before in this blog, had his classroom in the Ebenezer Hall, a few hundred yards away from the rest of the school in Ring O’Bells Yard. He was a great storyteller.
  4. Mr Lindley, back at the lower corner of the main school, encouraged us with drama and making little booklets. I still have my booklets on Bible stories, birds of prey and, from the last weeks of our time at junior school, a short summary of the history and myths of Ancient Rome. I was a bit over ambitious with that one!
  5. Mr Douglas, our pipe-smoking headmaster, worked from a small office in the main school which he shared with his secretary. Mr Douglas, like Mr Harker, was a keen fellwalker.

Art, walking, storytelling and writing and illustrating booklets: St Peter’s gave me all the basics I needed for my subsequent career!

Clifton Infant Teachers, 1955-58

Infant teachers

‘Draw your first teacher’ is the next prompt from Mattias in the ‘Memory Lane’ section of his Art of Sketching course.

I remember a surprising amount of details of the first couple of terms of my school life, in Mrs Clegg’s class at Wrenthorpe Infants, but we moved to Horbury before the end of the year and my sister Linda and I started at Clifton Infants, a newly-built school at the far end of Manorfields Estate.

Clifton Infants School

plan
  1. Go in the main entrance and turn left and you’d find yourself in Mrs (or Miss?) Birdhouse’s class.
  2. Mrs Wallis‘ class was nearest the school entrance, overlooking an oak tree and, beyond the school grounds, ‘The Reck’, Green Park recreation ground. In my sketch Mrs Wallis is holding a couple of the large, light greyish, wooden building bricks that we used. I remember building a model church with them and surrounding it with smaller wooden bricks to represent gravestones. I was into history even in my second year at infants school.
  3. The teacher holding the flash card had the classroom that faced you as you came in the main entrance. Unfortunately, I can’t remember her name. This was my penultimate class at Clifton. She’d made several of these flash cards, on sheets of sugar paper, each with a photograph from a magazine stuck at the top to give us a clue what the first word was as she held them up for the whole class to read.
    One sheet had just one word in place:
    “You like this one don’t you?!” she chuckled as she held it up.
    I believe that she was the teacher who specialised in music and, now that I’m remembering a bit more about her, I think that she had darker, longer hair than I’ve shown. She drove a car, which resembled a smaller version of the Austin Princess. The bonnet reminded me of the Rolls Royce. I remember this because she explained musical notes – minims, crotchets and semibreves – in terms of children, adults and her in her car, making their way to school.
  4. Finally Miss Marsh, our final class teacher, who became headmistress during my time there.