Questions about Drawing

My thanks to Henrietta Goodden, senior tutor, in Fashion at the Royal College of Art, 1991-2010, for the questions and prompts

Why is it that some people can draw naturally?

Drawing does seem to be with some people from a very early age, and the same seems to be true about music. My nephew could follow a tune before he could talk and he went on to make a career of performing, composing and arranging music.

I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t fascinated by drawing. My older sister Linda once said that as a child as soon as I woke up I’d have a pencil in my hand.

There are cases of people taking up art later in life but I think that for most of the illustrators and painters that I’ve known the urge to draw started very early but I’d struggle to say why.

My mother was keen on drawing, painting and various crafts. On on her side the family I had ancestors in Sheffield who made and designed spring knife blades, so perhaps there’s a genetic element.

In some ways I don’t find drawing and painting easy as I’ve got shaky hands and a mild red/green colour blindness. Perhaps pushing against those physical disadvantages made me a bit more determined and fascinated by the process than my school friends who could draw straight lines and match colours with a greater facility than I could.

Is it from a wish to record observations?

There’s an element of that. I’ve got a notebook from 1960, written and illustrated when I was eight or nine years old and it’s full of observations of birds, flowers, fish, rocks and landscapes. I even wrote a little article on how to keep an nature notebook and how to set up a little museum of natural history finds: feathers, shells, seaweeds etc.

But the other strand in my work was creating imaginative worlds, although I wasn’t drawn to fantasy and fairy stories instead I tried to create comic strip versions of films and books I’d been inspired by including Moby Dick, Ben Hur and The Long Ships.

Illustrators often seem to be good narrators

I tend to go blank when I try to think up an imaginative story but I soon get into writing mini-scripts if I start with a vivid character first. During the first lockdown, when ‘non-essential’ shops shut down and we couldn’t go browsing for suitable birthday cards for relatives, I took to drawing homemade cards.

Once I’ve got a few starting points I can start to create a character and a world for that character to inhabit. Apart from the fun of drawing the characters and settings, the fascination is in trying to get a gag to work in a clear way, in effect to tell a little story in one cartoon or a few frames of a comic.

For me drawing seems to relate to memory. I always feel that I tend to remember details from years ago that some of my friends and relatives forget. I kept a diary from my secondary school days, through college and in a way I’ve continued that through my Wild Yorkshire blog.

And do you think it can be taught from scratch? It’s such an important part of a designer’s tools and nowadays I get the impression that art schools don’t consider it important.

My first job on leaving college was teaching life drawing and illustration to a class of graphic designers at the local art school. I couldn’t believe how little interest most of them took in drawing. They were enthusiastic about graphic design but seemed to consider a morning drawing from life as a side issue.

If people have the manual dexterity to write I don’t see why they shouldn’t be able to learn to draw. I’ve tried going through the exercises in Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and I think that should work as an introduction to drawing. I also tried John Ruskin’s Elements of Drawing. And today I picked up two attractive large format Dorling Kindersley books from the library, Sarah Simblet’s Drawing for the Artist and Botany for the Artist.

Drawing is a great subject as a child can just wade in and produce characterful drawings without any training but, if you want to go deeper, there’s always more to learn.

Do you remember who else was on your course when you were there, and who else was teaching?

From my year at the Royal College of Art, I’m still in touch via social media with printmaker John Ross and illustrators Colin West, Jacqui Atkinson, Hazel MacIntosh and Shelagh Wozniak (formerly McGee?). In recent years I’ve also heard from painters Elizabeth Butterworth and James Horton.

My main illustration tutors were Brian Robb, John Norris Wood and to a lesser extent Quentin Blake. I met up weekly with graphic design tutors Malcolm Winton and later Doug Coyne.

As I was painting the ‘mural’ for the greenhouse, I also had advice from Bateson Mason, Leonard Rosoman and Colin (surname escapes my memory). In printing I think the main tutor or technician who advised me was Harry Greenway (?), but one of his colleagues was equally helpful.

When working on projects involving fossils I was able to speak to some of the experts just across the road in the Natural History Museum, particularly fossil plant expert Cedric Shute.