The cars in the car park were the final details that I added to my Sandal Castle illustration. The car park looked too empty without them but I tried to draw them fairly sketchily so as not to distract attention from the main subject, the castle ruins. Also included a few visitors – dog walkers and a lone pushchair pusher – in the positions they were in when I took my reference photographs.
The advantage of having drawn this in Adobe Fresco is that if I change my mind about the figures and cars, I can delete them and redraw them as I like because they’re on a separate layer.
It’s hard to believe that we’re already two decades into the twenty-first century.
Six long-tailed tits visit the feeders at breakfast time. They tend to come as a group either early or late. Before Christmas we had eight of them gathering around the edges of the two half coconuts, pecking at the fat as the light faded.
Too Many Swans
Obelisk Lodge, Nostell
It’s that time of year again: the Mute Swans are starting to establish their territories. On Nostell’s Middle Lake this morning, the resident pair with their six cygnets are up at the top, shallower end of the lake but they’ve got competition because at the other end of the lake two pairs of swans are circling each other, wings raised in a threat display.
Twelve swans on one small lake isn’t going to work. In the next two or three months, the grown-up cygnets will spread their wings and leave, or be persuaded to leave, and the three rival pairs will have to fight it out.
There are another eight swans on the Upper Lake, one standing by the sluice that connects with the Middle Lake. Another possible contender in the contest to claim the territory.
Beneath the hollies near the house, the first winter aconites are beginning to show. A nuthatch investigates the branches of a lakeside tree.
Middle Lake, path to Menagerie, Nostell
A few gadwall have joined the regular mallards on the Lower Lake and we see a single drake wigeon there. Goosanders seem to prefer the deeper waters of the Middle Lake and we’ve noticed that they sometimes dive alongside the swan family. I wonder if they’re attracted by the chance of catching small fish that have been disturbed by the activities of the swans.
Small Tortoiseshell
Ichneumon wasp
On one of the colder days last month we had a small tortoiseshell butterfly fluttering around in the dining room and decided that the best place to release it would be in the cool shelter of our garage.
A few days later it had emerged and it perched motionless for a day or two on the outside of the up-and-over garage door. It must have eventually flown because I then saw it fluttering about at the back of the house, caught on a strand of spider’s silk in the top corner of my studio window. I released it and it flew off across the garden. Ideally I should have offered it sugared water, to allow it to replace some of the energy that it has lost.
There was no frost this morning and today a few insects were active. A tiny black fly drifts around in the kitchen and a small ichneumon wasp (or possibly a sawfly?), perhaps a centimetre long, climbs up the bedroom window. I catch it in a bug box and take a few macro shots as it goes through a grooming routine.
December was a warm month and I regularly noticed an orb web spider run out to despatch some tiny insect that had been trapped in its web in a corner on the outside of our living room window.
Keep & Barbican
Working in from the edges, I’ve finally made it to the centre of my Sandal Castle aerial view, finishing off the Barbican: an impressive internal gatehouse between the castle’s bailey and the Keep.
I’ve been working on this illustration as if it was a jigsaw, making a point of going around the edges of the Sandal Castle site, drawing the trees and hedges before turning my attention to the centre. This afternoon I’ve made a start on finishing off the centre by redrawing the ruins of the Great Hall. That’s working pretty much as I imagined it, although I think that it now needs a suggestion of a shadow, to look more three-dimensional.
Sandal Castle is rarely this lonely, so I also need to add those cars, dog walkers and visitors. And perhaps a table or two outside the cafe.
I’ve been adding shading and hatching to the aerial view of Sandal Castle to create a more three-dimensional effect. I had intended to fade out the hedgerows around the perimeter but as the earthworks are looking so solid, I think that might be too much of a contrast.
I’ll probably add a few figures for scale and a few cars in the car park. I’m drawing with an Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro, using the program Adobe Fresco.
If I was working from life, I’d want to indicate every bramble bush in the moat and every hawthorn growing on the motte at Sandal Castle but, as I’m more interested in the structure of the earthworks, I need to simplify.
I’ll add shadows and highlights to build up a three-dimensional effect. For the stippling to represent the vegetation I’ve used a virtual brush with the appropriate name of ‘Seurat’ in the Adobe Fresco drawing app. I’ll use a dry brush following the contours to further emphasise the form.
Remains of the gardrobe shafts – medieval toilets – attached to the great chamber at Sandal.
My brief, for this illustration of life in a castle, is to draw ‘someone using a well’.
Following the restoration of Pontefract Castle, there’s now a scheme to improve access and restore the ruins at Sandal. I’ll be illustrating various features including the twelve-metre deep well, excavated in the bailey, conveniently close to the privy chamber, the castle’s private apartments.
I’ve tried to imagine the kind of servant who would have been assigned the task of hauling buckets from the well. Although the shaft of the well has been preserved, we can only guess at the arrangement of pulleys or rollers that were used but I’m sure that it would have involved a bucket and rope.
Wooden Poses
I’ve drawn the character on my iPad Pro using an Apple Pencil in the Adobe Fresco drawing program but for the pose I’ve used a 3D figure in Clip Studio Paint, tweaking the pose and the proportions. I felt that he would have developed broad muscular shoulders because of all that heavy lifting.
I’m still at the rough stage but this should give the team designing the interpretation a clear idea of what I have in mind. Just fourteen more illustrations to go . . .
In the days before computers, I’d occasionally use a Polaroid camera to take a photograph of a friend in a particular pose or I’d establish the proportions by setting up an artist’s lay figure, an articulated wooden doll.
Both these methods had disadvantages: under my direction, the friend would be likely to adopt a static self-conscious pose and the lay figure inevitably looked stilted and wooden.
My favourite way to draw people is to go out with a sketchbook and to try to capture their movement and character.
Virtual Brushes
I’ve got a bewildering number of virtual brushes available to me in Fresco including instant cross hatching and screen tones (left).
For the Sandal rough, after tracing the 3D figure with a virtual pencil, I’m going for a quick pen drawing – the one I used here is ‘vintage inks’.
The flat colour goes on a layer below the pen and ink. I outline each area of solid colour with a vector brush – such as ‘basic round’ – then fill using the paint bucket tool.
‘We know that time spent travelling and in wild places, with the people that matter most is precious.’
It might sound like Thoreau or John Muir, but it’s a quote from this year’s Rohan Christmas catalogue. If I wrote a mission statement, that would have to be part of it. Rohan’s soft-sell marketing must have worked on me because I’m going to try out their new Nordic Jeans, ‘with innovative infrared technology’. That would have been perfect yesterday at St Aidan’s RSPB nature reserve.
It’s the nearest you can get to wilderness and wet within ten miles of Leeds City Centre and we head there when we need wide open spaces. On a clear day you can see the moors of the Peak District moors twenty miles to the south but on Sunday morning mist filled the Aire Valley and the pattern of lagoons and reedbeds as seen from the visitor centre over a latte and flapjack resembled the floating world of Chinese brush paintings.
There’s just one bird, a coot, in my photograph of Fleakingly Reservoir, in the north-west corner of the reserve, but I’ve managed to position it behind the topmost seed-head of the knapweed. Coots were probably the most abundant bird with several hundred on the various lagoons. A smart drake goldeneye dived repeatedly on the main lake and a stonechat perched on a seed-head of dock alongside the track at the foot of The Hillside.
The silhouette of the woman in headscarf and long coat made a welcome contrast to the men in jacket & jeans and anorak & cords that I’d just drawn. A woman walked briskly by, clutching a cake box, mug and a potted artificial succulent, adding a touch of drama in comparison with most of the shoppers who went for the easier options of a trolley or a basket.
I drew in pen, making brief notes about colour, which I added later when we stopped for a cup of coffee and a Debenhams’ orange and cranberry scone.
Twenty Twenty
WordPress themes ‘Twenty Nineteen’ and ‘Twenty Twenty’.
I’ve just updated my blog to the latest version of WordPress and couldn’t resist trying out their latest theme, Twenty Twenty. It’s a contrast to all the themes that I’ve tried previously as it’s got a tinted background – a neutral creamy shade – instead of the pure white that I’ve always used, but I like the way this sets off the watercolour in my drawings.
It’s easy to read too. I like the variable typeface Inter, designed by Rasmus Andersson.
The drawback of the Twenty Twenty theme for me is that by default it shows a reduced version of images, so I’ve soon gone back to the Twenty Nineteen theme.
As I was drawing my self portrait, this fly settled on the page.
If portraits were postcard size, you’d be able to fit the shortlist of the BP Portrait Award into Horbury’s telephone box art gallery. This self portrait, from forty years ago, is from one of the ‘Bushey’ 7 x 4½ inch landscape sketchbooks that I used in the late 1970s, as are all but one of the fourteen sketches in this post.
The red pullover was knitted for me by my old friend John Blackburn’s mum, Barbara. Mrs Blackburn was a thrifty knitter and, when you’d grown out of a jumper, she could unravel the wool and use it again. In this way, a batch of wool could be recycled through several generations of jumpers.
In the background, you can see my home-made bookshelves in the alcove. When I drew the portrait, I sat at my work bench on a utility Windsor kitchen chair, which is why I look as if I’m leaning on a gate.
My room in a shared flat. I assembled my work bench – complete with vice – in the room so when I moved out a few years later I had to saw through my built-to-last mortice and tenon joints in order to bring it down the stairs! Now in a cut-down version, it is hinged to our garage wall.
