Colour added using the neural filters in Photoshop.
Today, for the first time, we’re visiting – snow over Sheffield permitting – what was the Swift family home on Nether Edge Road, Sheffield. Number 77 was where my mum, Gladys Joan Swift spent her childhood but 82 years ago tomorrow, on the evening of the 12th December 1940, it was damaged beyond repair by an incendiary bomb in the Sheffield Blitz.
The Rolls Royce in the driveway looks impressive but the explanation for that is that my grandad was a funeral director.
Here’s my mum (on the right) with her neighbour Marjorie from number 81.
Living next door was my mum’s grandma, Sarah Ann Swift. She didn’t join my mum and her parents, Maurice and Ann Swift, in their stoutly built concrete air raid shelter at the end of the garden on the night of the raid, preferring to stay in her cellar, but unfortunately her side of the semi-detached house, number 79, was so badly damaged in the raid that she had to be rescued through the coal chute, along with her little dog Queenie.
To judge by the photographs, those two went everywhere together. She bought herself a house in another part of Sheffield when she was made homeless by the raid . . . a house that would cause a bit of a stir when she didn’t leave it to her son Maurice (my grandad) in her will. He felt as he’d paid off her mortgage he would be in line to inherit it. Why he didn’t I’m still not entirely sure . . .
My grandparents Ann and Maurice get the Photoshop neural colorisation filter treatment. I wonder what colour Ann was wearing?
My mum gave the impression that Maurice could be a difficult character and I think that is borne out by the fact that on my mum and dad’s wedding photograph, taken at the end of the war, he is the only guest who isn’t smiling!
Like Great Grandma Sarah Ann, he’s a character I would have liked to have got the chance to get to know. I remember him and I was fascinated by his interest in home movies – wish we still had those.
He had some talent as an artist and, I believe, as a designer of furniture. Here’s watercolour drawn when he was aged 13, which I think would have been in 1890.
I’m rounding off the William Baines centenary year on a suitably seasonal note with this article, A Composer’s Christmas in the December edition of The Yorkshire Dalesman.
From the diaries of William Baines, the Yorkshire composer who died 100 years ago, and from reminiscences of his relations and friends, Richard Bell has sketched this impression of Christmas early in the last century.
View from the first floor Barbara Hepworth sculpture gallery looking down on the weir on the River Calder. Drawn in Procreate, using Román García Mora’s set of brushes from the Domestika course, Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate.
I’ve just started a Domestika course, Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate and illustrator and 3D modeler Román García Mora has asked us to choose an animal or bird and put together a reference sheet about it. As we were heading for the Thornes Park duck pond yesterday I decided to go for Canada geese, a bird that I can guarantee being able to find if I need to go back for further reference.
Photographic reference is fine but Román believes that the way to understand your subject is to draw it yourself, preferably from life in its natural habitat. Failing that the zoo or a natural history museum gives an opportunity to learn more.
I’d be surprised to find a stuffed Canada goose in any of our local museums but I do have a Victorian stuffed bird that I can use for the purposes of the tasks we’ve been set in this exercise so I’ve drawn this juvenile great-crested grebe.
The unfortunate grebe was shot on Bretton Park Lake at a time when the species was all but extinct in the area because its plumage was valued as ‘grebe fur’ in the fashions of that time. Unfortunately I don’t have an exact date.
I’m following Román’s technique for sketching in Procreate, working on a light grey background and starting with what he calls a ‘stain’, a rough tonal outline of the bird. I’ve downloaded the Procreate brushes that he used in the online demonstration and used them as you might use chalks, tonal washed and pencil.
No, this isn’t a maze for Swaledale sheep, it’s a cut-away view of the smelting flues used by lead mines in Swaledale: hearth for the smashed up ore on the right, outlet chimney centre and the maze of corridors in between where various minerals settled out from the vapours as they precipitated out.
I suspect that this drawing was a rough for my book Yorkshire Rock, a Journey through Time published by the British Geological Survey in 1996 but still in print today (see link below).
If it was intended for the book, it didn’t make it into the final cut, which instead featured the less technical but more dramatic process of hushing.
