Yes, he has turned out looking rather like Ralph Vaughan Williams in my drawing but this is rumpled Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby, Neil Dudgeon’s lead character in ITV’s Midsomer Murders.
Hopefully the good inspector won’t have any trouble from these characters, Riz Ahmed’s Omar and Kayvan Novak’s Waj, the hapless northerners in Four Lions who attempt to train crows as bombers. I love the expression on the crow’s face.
And I’m sure that no crows were harmed during location filming in the hills around Sheffield.
These were all drawn from photographs in last week’s Radio Times, as was Sunny, played by Sajeev Bhaskar, another character from Unforgotten. Professor John Wright is a clinician and epidemiologist at the Bradford Royal Infirmary.
Step 2 in my attempts at Dermot O’ Connor’s LinkedIn animation tutorial.
There are 32 frames in this 24 frames per second animation. I like the way the rabbit’s expression changes with just a few changes to the lines. The blue and green shapes in frames 1 and 4 are a feature called onion-skinning. Blue represents the previous frame – as if seen through tracing paper – and green the next frame. By drawing an ‘in-between’, halfway between the two, it should be possible to get a smooth movement. The difficulty is keeping details consistent.
O’Connor suggests starting off a simple animation with a beginning and an end quick sketch of the action and one at the halfway stage.
Once you’ve drawn those key frames you get an idea of where the action is going and you plot arcs, so that things move smoothly.
I plotted an arc for the rabbits right ear but thought that I wouldn’t need one for the left. As a result it flops about aimlessly!
In a photograph in this week’s Radio Times, Maria Schrader’s character Lenora has the detached, intense look of one of a woman in a Stanley Spencer painting. Deutschland 89, a German-American spy drama, is currently showing on More4.
Emil Hostina is a Securitate agent, hunkered down with her in a safe house in Timisoara, Romania, at the time of the fall of the Ceausescu regime.
I love the theatricality of the production. I wouldn’t want to stay with these two if they opened and bed & breakfast in Scarborough, but they’re wonderful characters to draw. Perhaps Deutschland will be looking for an artist in residence for their next series?
Fiona Grayson, Liz White’s character in Chris Lang’s crime drama Unforgotten looks very much like the bobble-hatted people we’ve been meeting right through the winter on our regular lockdown walks. In the photograph in last week’s Radio Times that I’ve drawn her from she’s on location in the Peak District. Some of the scenes were filmed at Winnat’s Pass. We’re hoping that, before too long, as restrictions slowly ease, we’ll be able to walk there again.
Fiona is described by RT’s Alison Graham a character who ‘has been trapped by her guilt for most of her life and knows time is running out.’
Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon.
Linton Kwesi Johnson
That makes it sound as if his work could be a bit tough, but he’s just as likely to get audiences laughing and applauding as he is to get them fired up with indignation or empathic and thoughtful.
Linton Kwesi Johnson, poet and best-selling reggae artist, is only the second living poet and the only black British poet to have his work published as a Penguin Classic.
Mary Creagh was Wakefield’s first woman MP, elected in 2005, so she’s one of my local Women in History. She’s invariably more upbeat than in my drawing but this is from a still from a Channel 4 interview, live from the Palace of Westminster, in December 2019, a week after she lost her seat to Imran Nasir Ahmad Khan, our current MP, who was literally parachuted in – yes, really, landing on a school playing field – to stand for the Conservative Party.
In the interview she reflected that the then Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn had been guilty of ‘preening narcissism’, so here she reminds me of a distraught character in a Samuel Beckett play or as Cordelia, banished by the folly of her father, in King Lear.
Mary Creagh has always taken a keen interest in environmental issues and during her time at Westminster she was chair of the Environmental Audit Select Committee. She’s now chief executive of the national walking charity Living Streets.
Chiwetel Ejiofor directed and starred in his 2019 film The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind and wrote the adaptation of William Kamkwamba & Bryan Mealer’s tale, which was based on a true story. For his role he learnt Chichewa, the local Bantu language of Malawi.
As with the Sherlock drawing, this is from a photograph in this week’s Radio Times.
There are plenty of pristine-looking sheds about, but I’m not drawing in technical pen with a ruler and set-square, so this much-patched, leaning shed suits my freehand dip pen and Chinese brush better.
I tried four different nibs when starting this drawing but the one I preferred was the Clan Glengarry. I also filled in a bit with bamboo pen.
In the last of this series of live sessions on Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Week, current Portrait Artist of the YearCurtis Holder drew dancer Oti Mabuse.
Also briefly appearing, Curtis’s sleepy whippet and Oti’s little terrier.
The Miss Mosleys make an appearance in my Wakefield Women in History Month series of sketches, as representatives of the women naturalists, often on the botanical side, who have made such a contribution to our local natural history records. In the days before local and national government departments were set up to monitor the environment we relied – and still do rely to a large extent – on the observations made by amateur naturalists, the original citizen’s science.
As I understand it, the Mosley sisters were natural history royalty, the daughters (correct me if I’m wrong) of an outstanding naturalist of his day, Seth Lister Mosley (1847-1929), curator of the Tolson Memorial Museum in Huddersfield. He pioneered an ecological approach to understanding the natural environment. In October 1923 he was invited to the opening of Wakefield’s museum in Holmfield House, in the city’s park.
For many years, the Wakefield Naturalists Society held an unpublished manuscript of British butterflies and moths illustrated and written by Mosley, which has now been added to the archives at the Tolson Museum.
In 1999, Miss A Allen, former leader of Wakefield Naturalists’ Plant Section, recalled the Society’s meetings of half a century earlier:
After the opening formalities at each of our monthly winter meetings, and before we settled down to enjoy the illustrated talk, individual members would tell us of any interesting observations – one of my friends likened this to a Prayer Meeting! We took ourselves seriously, guided by the 60 and 70 year olds in charge.
The summer outings were less formal. The leader for the occasion would have walked the route a few days earlier to ensure that we missed nothing of interest on the Saturday afternoon. Apart from that we just among ourselves and made our own observations.
I was 40 when the 1951 survey was made the Naturalists’ was only one of many leisure pursuits. Looking back, I marvel that I was able to do so much.”
Miss A Allen
Wakefield Naturalists at St Aidan’s last autumn (we were actually more socially distanced than I’ve shown here!)
So Nats meetings were pretty much the same then as they are now! Sadly because of restrictions, we managed just two indoor and two outdoor meetings last year.
In recent years a Wakefield Flower Group was started by the late Pauline Brook. Pauline really would deserve a post of her own. What particularly fascinated me was that, in her younger, hippy years, she had for a while lived in a cave below The Acropolis, Athens. A fascinating and funny lady.
