You couldn’t accuse me of lacking in ambition. As a seven year old my first attempted book project was to write and illustrate Prehistoric Animals, my own take on the history of our planet.
My plans for a Prehistoric Museum, which I reckoned was ‘not hard to make’.
My homemade dust-jacket for one of my favourite books, Prehistoric World by Carrol Lane Fenton.
I enthusiastically drew Tyrannosaurus striding past a tree fern. So far, so good, but now for the difficult bit. With my wobbly lettering the text was going to be a challenge.
‘Tyrannosaurus,’ I wrote and – phew – I got the spelling right, but then I continued: ‘had 200 theet.’
In my efforts to produce my neatest writing I’d misspelled ‘teeth’.
I never got further than the title page for the Tertiary era.
Boris Romantschenko, a survivor of the Buchenwald, Mittelbau-Dora, Bergen Belsen and Peenemünde concentration camps, who died aged 96 during Russian shelling of his apartment block in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on Friday.
In Holmfield Park, adjoining Thornes and Clarence Parks in Wakefield, this old beech has so far escaped damage in storms. So many beeches in the area are getting to that 150 to 200 year old stage when they start shedding boughs. Let’s hope that this one still has decades of life left in it.
On Saturday we met up with family at the Holmfield Arms, in Holmfield House, a Victorian mansion which was once gifted to the city and housed the local museum.
The cross-bedded sandstone is the wall of what is now an orangery style room in the Brewers’ Fair restaurant. It overlooks a terrace surrounded by shrubs and trees, including a lime (lower left on my sketch above). Varieties of lime that grew in a columnar shape were popular with the Victorians.
I drew more Victorian trees in Horbury. Some of these are getting to the end of their natural lives and have shed branches, or on the odd occasion been blown down in storms.
For my brother-in-law John’s big birthday plus one, a cartoon of our regular walk around Newmillerdam, which would be a quiet place if it wasn’t for all that birdsong and – on her My Yorkshire show last week – Jane McDonald singing Jessie Ware’s Remember Where You Are on the slope behind the Boathouse.
The Wakefield Naturalists’ Society had their first AGM since the pandemic on Monday but it was a case of blink and you’ll miss it, as the main event of the evening was Ron Marshall talking about Ardnamurchan, the Outer Hebrides and the Shetlands.
These sketches were drawn with a Lamy nexx with a B – bold – nib. I’m getting towards the end of my bottle of De Atramentis, an ink which soon dries, allowing me to add watercolour.
We bought a pack of uni ball Signo gel pens, designed specifically for writing, so naturally I had to try one out for drawing these marigold seed heads.
I’m delighted to have made it onto the cover of this month’s Vis News, the Visual Narratives Academy Newsletter.
‘This issue we interview a fine British comics maker and illustrator,’ writes editor David Haden, ‘who cleverly combines digital methods with traditional looks. It’s a long and informative interview.’
My comic strip experiment for this month’s Dalesman didn’t make it into print – editor Dan Clare and I decided that Dalesman readers would prefer a more traditional format for the nature diary! – so I’m delighted that Vis News has featured the strip and the process that I went through in creating it.
I started a new A6 Hahnemühle watercolour sketchbook last month and now spring’s here, I’m making a point of carrying it with me in this Trespass A6-sized bag, along with a small box of Winsor & Newton professional watercolours.
At the Coffee Stop again, which is newly extended with some stylish hand-painted graphics and decorations.
Our lunch stop was the Ego Mediterranean, our first visit since before the pandemic and our first during the subsequent event, a pointless war in Europe.
As the library specially ordered in a copy of Stan Lee’s How to Draw Superheroes for me, I thought that to try out his suggestions I should draw some library superheroes.
Carnegie
Troubled millionaire philanthropist Andrew Carnegie himself came to Wakefield to open the Carnegie Free Library that he funded in the city, so each episode opens with him materialising at a secret rendezvous to deliver cryptic instructions for a mission impossible that will be a real challenge even for his astonishingly talented team (so his job description is very similar to that of the current head of libraries).
At the end of each episode he appears again to round off the adventure to with a suitably wise epigram, such as ‘Knowledge is Power’, a phrase incorporated in gilded Arts and Craft lettering on the iron gates of the Carnegie Free Library in Horbury.
So how does he manage to drop in to the present day? Carnegie also funded a Institute of Technology. Unfortunately course our understanding of the space time continuum was rather limited in 1900, so in his enthusiasm to try out the steampunk prototype, built for him in Wakefield by the illustrious Victorian engineering firm, Brown’s Comptometers (it was going to be the real life Green’s Economisers, but they’re very much still in existence, and I don’t want to hear from their legal team) he’s got locked into a chronosynclastic infundibulum so his corkscrew path through space time means he’s in sync with his superhero team only at odd, but predictable, occasions.
Stax
Arcane cult knowledge? Long lost special editions? Martial-arts trained hooded mystery woman Stax is a legend down in the archives deep below the secret library headquarters in a boarded up retail store in the city centre.
Every superhero has an Achilles heel and problems in their everyday lives and for Stax it’s that she classifies her friends and family in Dewey Order.
Bookman Bold Italic
The muscle-bound action hero is Bookman Bold Italic, in real life the van driver who’s developed his strength through lugging around those heavy boxes of requests and returns.
Thanks to doing the rounds, his local knowledge is extraordinary and no-one suspects that the local cheery van driver had a double life as Bookman driving the alarmingly powerful Bookmobile on daring missions. And causing a lot of mayhem along the way.
Stampa
When you return books to headquarters library, do you ever think that checking in scanner has a life and a character all its own?
Of course it does, because when the superheroes spring into action it transforms into Stampa, the Dating Agency Droid, providing comic relief in the story but also often saving the day through its plucky and practical ingenuity.
