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.
Drawing on an iPad is ideal when you’re visiting the Hepworth as wet media aren’t allowed. I wanted to put into practice the tips that I’d picked up at the Procreate session at the Apple Store yesterday so I took a photograph as my starting point, not only as a guide to drawing as but also in order to extract a palette of autumnal colours from it.
The ragged shapes of willows didn’t give me much form to simplify so when I stopped for coffee I started again with a line drawing of the willow that I looked out at from the corner table by the window.
A heron stood motionless at the foot of the weir but didn’t seem to be having much luck in the middle of the foaming torrent. It evidently had an amazingly efficient heat exchange system to be able to tolerate the rush of water around its feet but it did eventually pause to lift its legs from the torrent and to briefly preen through its feathers.
It grows on you. This double album, from the original television soundtrack composed by Benjamin Merrison and Will Slater, is my favourite when I want to settle down to a session of drawing plants (or any other subject else for that matter) as it flows so organically, like the impressive time-lapse sequences in the Green Planet television series.
But it stands on its own too; I like the lightness of touch; it’s not too ponderous but it does evoke the sense of wonder that you get from being in green spaces and observing nature. It’s good on plants behaving badly too – strangler vines*, I’m thinking of you! – described with humour and sometimes a sense of impending menace in the music.
I’m looking forward to revisiting the series to see how the now-familiar music fits with the sequences.
* Looking at the tracks list, I’m not sure that the notorious strangler fig actually makes an appearance but the tracks on cholla buds and ancestral grasses have a similar thrusting dynamic about them.
A random selection of inks – and Tipp-Ex – from the plan chest drawer but the kind that I’m re-ordering today is my regular De Atramentis Document Ink – one Black and one Sepia Brown, which is what I’ve used in this drawing. The advantage is that I can add watercolour to the drawing after just a few minutes without the ink running.
Watercolour doesn’t give me the flat colours that I like when I finish off the drawing on the iPad, but I like the messiness, subtlety and luminosity that I can get with the watercolour. Plus it’s quicker than the scanning and setting up involved in the iPad approach.
Blotty Gulls
I like the quick pen and wash effect that you can get by blotting non-waterproof ink with a dab of water, which is what I did this morning with my Lamy Safari with a Lamy ink cartridge. The table on the balcony at the Boathouse Cafe at Newmillerdam was dappled with dew after a cool (and probably frosty) night, so I dipped my finger in a drop and used that, but the disadvantage of water soluble ink for me is the danger of accidentally blotting a drawing, as I did this morning as I opened my sketchbook, causing a slight blot on yesterday’s treacle tins drawing.
When my order arrives from The Writing Desk I’ll be filling up my various pens with brown and black and going back to waterproof De Atramentis.
A bit of practice before I go out drawing figures on location next week. I want the speed of drawing I can get by drawing in fountain pen rather than with an Apple Pencil on the iPad.
I’m using a Lamy Safari filled with a Lamy Black cartridge, which I find flows slightly more freely than the waterproof De Atramentis. But the Lamy Black doesn’t dry waterproof, so I’m adding colour to the scanned drawing in Clip Studio Paint on my iPad.
Flat colour isn’t as subtle as watercolour but in this case that’s not what I’m after; it’s supposed to be a simpler graphic element – along the lines of a lino cut – to contrast with the busy-ness of the pen line.
Those scribbled initials are my colour notes, which I’m leaving in place to give a bit of animation to the drawing.
Dame Barbara drawn in pen and wash in a real sketchbook.
An exhibit at the Hepworth Wakefield shows the method Barbara Hepworth used to cast a small bronze sculpture.
I could draw vice, mallet and hammer at home but I’m taking the opportunity to practice using my iPad Pro on location so the well-worn tools in the display here are suitably familiar subjects to get me started.
I’m sticking with Clip Studio Paint, drawing with the ‘Textured Pen’ for an occasionally blotchy varied line. The colouring is all from the ‘Lasso Fill’ tool. The possibilities for different pens, brushes and textures in Clip Studio are endless but I want to keep things simple to get into the process of drawing on location.
Parkinson’s Patent Perfect Vise (that’s the US spelling)
This is the first time that I’ve used the Sketchboard Pro iPad drawing board on location and I find that it works well. Usefully, the gallery has a supply of comfortable folding stools and the spaces are so light and airy that you can set up without getting in anyone’s way. Well except the people who particularly wanted a close-up view of stage 4 of Barbara Hepworth’s bronze casting process.
The hammer was my first drawing and you can see that I got off to a shaky start pre-coffee break (I can highly recommend the Hepworth blackberry and apple flapjack and sitting at a table by the window looking out at a foaming weir and autumnal willows on a mid-river island makes a suitably relaxing break from drawing). But the great thing about iPad drawing is that you can correct mistakes without scratching away at the paper or touching them out with white gouache.
When I was drawing the bronze casting process I discovered that I’d run out of room on the right-hand side of my virtual canvas. I simply selected the whole drawing and moved it slightly to the left.
