Just in case you were wondering how I conjured up my cartoon character, head gardener Rhuben Cushstead, here’s the inside story, as seen in a timelapse video of the whole process of drawing in Adobe Fresco, from importing some of my sketchbook drawings to create the scene in the Rhubarb Patch, to isolating elements of Rhuben, such as his left forearm, for my animation.
The video lasts one minute. If only I could work at that speed!
In the next section of my video, I’ll draw portraits of Prophet Wroe and Adam Hood, forester, who will then introduce their own corners of the Rhubarb Triangle.
The male wood pigeon’s display as he follows the female around the lawn, includes short bunny hops, jumping an inch in the air and an inch forward. He then makes a series of deep, polite bows.
How can she resist him? She glances at him with embarrassed coyness and goes on pecking at the spilt sunflower hearts beneath the feeders.
Arboretum
On our regular walks around Newmillerdam Lake, I’ll often take the upper path via the arboretum, while Barbara and her brother stick to the lakeside. We were a bit later starting today, so, change of plan, I headed straight for the Lakeside Cafe, where I sketched the stone-built house over my latte and flapjack, before heading clockwise past the war memorial and meeting up with Barbara and her brother at the boathouse, near the end of their anticlockwise circuit of the lake.
Most in evidence today, tufted ducks dotted ten or twenty yards from the shore, hunkering down from the cool breeze blowing up the valley, in an area where we often see them diving for freshwater mussels.
Prophet Wroe is said to have based his mansion, built 1856-57, on old Melbourne Town Hall. Some of Wroe’s followers believed that the 144,000 elect of the Lost Tribes of Israel would gather here to await the Apocalypse.
I used Adobe Premiere Rush for this sequence of illustrations from the ‘Melbourne House’ walk from my booklet of Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle (currently out of print). There’s no sound, so that’s one of the next things that I’m going to work on, along with adding some movement using Adobe Character Animator and Adobe Animate.
After a month of working almost exclusively on the iPad, going back to pen and watercolour is like settling into a favourite armchair. In fact, I drew the pen and ink on a visit to Barbara’s brother John’s last autumn and today, after our regular walk with him around Newmillerdam, I added the watercolour.
It’s second nature for me now to head for the colour wheel in Adobe Fresco, so it was good to remind myself that it’s equally easy to find my way around my pocket-sized watercolour box.
You can still see where the Roundhead artillery hit Richard III’s Octagonal Tower, also known as the Well Tower, at Sandal Castle. I’ve also drawn one of the forty cannon balls that were found on this slope during the excavations. The tower was already in a poor state of repair before the siege of 1645 but the bombardment reduced much of the keep to rubble.
The rectangular structure immediately to the left of the impact was a garderobe chute.
An account from 1322 records what was being stored in the larder at Sandal Castle. This includes carcasses of beef, sides of bacon, casks of herrings and measures of salt.
Googling for ‘measure of salt’, I found a Market Scene by an van Horst, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, with a tub of salt which I thought looked just right for how I imagined the larder at Sandal, even though it was painted two centuries after the inspection of the castle.
A Saint in Pontefract
A miracle at Thomas of Lancaster’s tomb in the Priory Church at Pontefract: in 1359 it was recorded that ‘blood ran out of the tomb of Lord Thomas, formerly Earl of Lancaster.’
Seige of Sandal Castle, c. 1317, from my roughs for ‘Walks in Robin Hood’s Wakefield’.
As I discovered when I researched my booklet of Walk in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire, 1322 was a momentous year for Sandal. On Monday, 21st March, the Lord of the Manor of Wakefield, Thomas of Lancaster, was sentenced to death by beheading after a trial for treason at Pontefract Castle at which the previous Lord of the Manor, John Earl de Warenne, was one of those who sat in judgement. John got his castle back – presumably along with the casks of herrings, sides of beef and legs of bacon in the inventory.
But a year later, after miracles there, the tomb of Thomas of Lancaster in Pontefract’s Priory Church was attracting huge crowds, and Archbishop Melton of York was concerned that people had been killed in demonstrations there.
My latest drawing for my Sandal Castle spread if of some of the jars found during excavations.
To quote a caption from Wakefield Museum:
Many small jars or bottles made of pottery and glass, probably for medicines and ointments, were found in the building that used to be the kitchen of the castle. This suggests that wounded soldiers were being treated there in the Civil War.
I’ve added a few more figures to my illustration of constructing defensive earthworks at Sandal Castle and now I’m adding flat colours, using a vector brush in Adobe Fresco and the paint-bucket tool to fill in larger areas. I can see why people find colouring relaxing.
I was going to go for red for the cavalier directing operations but I discovered that Cromwell’s New Model Army was issued with red shirts, so I’ve gone for blue instead.
Storyboard for section one of my ‘Rhubarb Sketchbook’ animation
Speeding along the motorway, you can cross West Yorkshire’s Rhubarb Triangle in five or ten minutes but put on your boots and get out walking and there’s so much to discover. For a Creative Digital Challenge for next month’s Rhubarb Festival, I’m putting together a proposal for a short animation. I’m trying to pack a lot into it:
8 picture maps
3 comic strips
60 pen and watercolour sketches
Section one is A Brief History of Rhubarb: From mammoths to Marco Polo; Chinese medicine and herbal cures; Victorian gardens and the Rhubarb Special night train from Ardsley Station, which, until 1966, carried 200 tons of rhubarb to London.
