My first homemade birthday card with a greeting in Manx.
Manx Myths
Author: Richard
Squid Game
The new Netfish drama Squid Game proves a hit with the Cuttlefish family.
1967
In 1967, aged 16, I’d just finished my O-levels and was looking forward to starting a foundation course at Batley School of Art. I used homemade scraperboard (wax crayon covered with india ink, which I then scratched into. You could buy a special nib) for the historical characters, which were inspired by a day trip to York but I soon turned to a dip pen with the finest nib I could find.
At the V&A and at Oxford, I was on the look out for illustrations to Dante’s Inferno, which I’d decided to illustrate as a comic strip. Looking back, it’s a shame I didn’t try illustrating it with the scraperboard technique. It would have been more expressive but more difficult to control.
Homemade Water Plant Basket
Our purple iris in the pond is top heavy, as we haven’t transplanted it from the small pond plant basket it came in.
We cut down an old plastic plant pot and drilled extra holes on its sides. We put a few pebbles in it for ballast before adding ordinary garden soil and planting the iris.
We used an off cut from an old tea towel, spread around the iris to hold the soil in place and added a few more pebbles to hold that in place.
Pheasant Duel #2
I decided that I needed a little sequence of sketches of the pheasants fighting, this is them squaring up to each other.
They circled, trying to outflank each other then they’d both leap up, sometimes striking out with their feet like a pair of heraldic beasts, then coming back low to the ground.
Pheasant Duel
Back in January, we watched these cock pheasants squaring up to each other in Coxley on a slope in Sun Wood between the upper and lower dams. It started like a Sumo contest with the rivals bowing as low as possible but simultaneously fluffing out their feathers to look intimidating, all the time nodding menacingly and occasionally making a rapier-like thrust with the beak at the opponent’s throat.
This would bubble up into sparring a foot or two from the ground. Considering how vocal male pheasants can be, there was surprisingly little grockling to accompany the bluster, just a short call as they came back down to the ground.
Poplars
Pools have formed in the lower corners of fields, one of these temporary lagoons has a small muddy island with just enough room for the three mallards that are standing on it.
Trees were slow to turn colour this autumn but now there’s an ochre harmony to the foliage and increasingly they’ve lost there leaves. These poplars in a shelter belt at Dobbies Pennine Garden Centre, Shelley, on the 210 metre (656 feet) contour, overlooking the valley of Sheply Dike, are just clinging on to their topmost leaves, which is the opposite to maples and ash that I’ve seen that have been losing their top leaves first.
Yellow Brain Fungus
For my winter Dalesman spread, I needed a spot of colour so I’m including yellow brain fungus, Tremella mesenterica, which, as here, can also be orange. I photographed last January at Emroyd Common, growing on elder, but it doesn’t feed directly on wood: it’s parasitic on species of a crusty fungus, Peniophora, which grows on dead twigs and branches.
Acorns
I’ve added watercolour to the acorns that I drew earlier this month.
Freehand Perspective
I’m drawing our sparrow nestbox for a forthcoming article in The Dalesman and, rather than draw it from life or trace it from a photograph, I’m trying freehand perspective. I didn’t draw an horizon line or plot vanishing points, I just drew as near to the way they appear in a photograph.
Having used ruler and set square for the pencil, I’ll use my usual freehand fountain pen for the drawing itself, so hopefully it will looked relaxed but plausible.