It’s too hot to do much work in the back garden but, as it’s in the shade until lunchtime, the front stays cool. I finish weeding the narrow bed below the lounge window. Welsh poppies would happily take over here but, much as I like them, we’ve got other plans.
Inevitably, as I go, I keep digging up spring bulbs. I replant all the smaller ones. The tête-à-têtes are doing well but I pick out the larger daffodil bulbs because, in this shady bed, they grow too leggy and keel over. I’ll replant them at the end of the back garden. I’ll need more than a hand fork and trowel to get to grips with the chicory and bindweed down there.
The drawing process
I drew these on my iPad using Procreate. I wanted the entire process to be visible in the finished drawing: the false starts, the construction lines and the multiple attempts to get a shape in proportion. I limited my use of the eraser. There was a detail on the trowel that I’d painted too dark, which I took back a bit with a soft, semi-transparent eraser.
As with yesterday’s view of the back garden, I used only one layer. Because of this I had to paint over my line work, so I needed to go over it again with the ‘Gesinski ink’ pen.
My homework for the final week of my web comics course. This little animation was produced in Adobe After Effects. I did try to add a falling snow effect too, but at least I managed to add a bit of movement.
Boris Karloff, drawn in Procreate on my iPad Pro. I’m trying to echo the style of the original 1964 ‘Thriller’ comic.
From my homemade comic from January 1965
Boris Karloff makes an appearance in my homework for my latest free online FutureLearn course, Infinite Canvas: Making and Understanding Web Comics from the Comics Studies department at the University of Dundee.
We spent the first couple of weeks defining web comics and discussing how they might be used. There were also practical tutorials, including a run-through of my favourite comic-making program, Clip Studio Paint, plus suggestions for getting started with free programs, notably Madefire, where you can compile and publish your web comic, complete with animations.
Now, in the final week, we’re given the opportunity to develop our own web comic.
The Broken Leg
We’ve been looking at a few medical public information comics, which got me thinking about the first time that I landed myself in hospital. On Boxing Day 1964, when I was aged thirteen, I was hurrying home to watch Fred Hoyle’s Universe when I slipped on the icy pavement and broke my leg.
My spell in Ward G gave me a fresh insight into the world of comics. As a child, I’d always read a weekly comic, starting with Playhour during my infant school days and moving on to the Eagle at junior school. Shortly before starting at the grammar school, I’d been wowed by the use of colour photography and illustration in the new educational magazine Look & Learn, so I’d moved on to that.
The newspaper trolley, which made a daily round of the wards, gave me the chance to dip into American comics for the first time. The black and white Weird Tales was a favourite, because of the variety of stories packed into one issue but it had a rival in Boris Karloff’s Thriller, illustrated in colour.
I’d love to draw a web comic which combined my experience in hospital, as illustrated here in my ballpoint pen and crayon drawings from 1965, and combine that with the escape that I was able to make into the world of comics and science-fiction short stories (I borrowed books from the hospital library trolley). I can still remember a dozen of these stories: performing ants, hypnotic pebbles, post-apocalyptic New York (yes, even back then New York was the go-to city for apocalypses), a dimensionally unstable house, a time-travelling mystery hound, space age weather manipulation, assorted aliens . . .
Our G ward art class
I’ll draw a few sample frames but I won’t have time to illustrate the whole comic because a week from today I start my next FutureLearn course, Invisible Worlds: Understanding the Natural Environment, based on the Eden Project’s Invisible Worlds exhibition.
Link
My father in his office at the National Coal Board,Newton Hill, Wakefield
Looking back at this rough for the cover of my Walks in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire, I think that I prefer the drama of the arrowhead design to the oak tree dotted with characters that I finally went for. The king, Edward II really at the centre of things, trying and failing to keep the peace between two of his barons, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster and John, Earl of Warenne. One of them was destined to lose his head to the executioner Hugh de Muston, a villain of London, on a hill to the north of Pontefract Castle.
Adam Hood, forester.
In my booklet, eight walks follow in the footsteps of Robert Hode of Wakefield, who we guess was the son of Adam Hood, a forester, charged with protecting the lord of the manor’s deer. As a forester, like Robin’s outlaws, Adam wore a livery of green in summer, grey in winter.
From Wakefield’s Manor Court Rolls, we know that in 1316 Robert and his wife Matilda rented a plot, 30 x 16 feet, at Bichil, Wakefield and built a house of five rooms. This was in what we now call the Bull Ring, which in medieval times was the town market’s Butcher Row. Bichil probably means ‘beech hill’. Beech was used to make butcher’s blocks because beech acts as a natural antiseptic.
I’ve been re-reading my 2010 booklet Walks in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire, because Radio Leeds invited me to be interviewed about the Yorkshire Robin Hood. It was so difficult in two or three minutes to strike a balance between a brief summary and going into the arcane details that bring the subject to life.
Nine years later some of the walks have changed, particularly ‘The Pinder of Wakefield’ walk, as there’s been a lot of house building to the north-east of the city.
The runner beans have yet to flower but we’re picking dwarf French and broad beans.
It’s got to that time of year when the veg beds are at their most productive and we can wander down the garden and gather beans, lettuce, beetroot and herbs.
We’ve done well with a selection of seeds that came bundled with the April Gardeners’ World magazine in an offer at Sainsbury’s: coriander, mixed lettuce, zinnia, cosmos mixed and black-eyed Susan. The zinnias have done well, they’ve now been planted on and are filling up the border, but we’ve yet to sow the Sarah Raven calendula, which were also included, as we already had plenty of those: in the spring as I weeded the lower veg bed I found a cluster of calendula seedlings from a few plants that had been growing there last year. I transplanted them to grow on (in the corner of the L-shaped bed in my photograph, above) and we’ve now got at least a hundred flowering and attracting hoverflies.
De Monica broad beans
The Gardeners’ World offer also included a decent pair of lightweight gardening gloves (Barbara’s size, but I can’t have everything) and a half-price garden pass, which we’ve already used at St Andrew’s Botanic Gardens, so in effect, we’ve already saved the cover price.
Here’s a preview of my July Wild Yorkshire diary for the Dalesman, that’s July 2020 because after three months of work concentrating on my articles, I’ve finally got to the stage where I’m a whole twelve months ahead of schedule.
This article will describe a visit the Wakefield Naturalists’ Society made to Staveley Yorkshire Wildlife Trust nature reserve earlier this month. Migrants included black-tailed godwits heading south for the winter and painted lady butterflies still heading north for the summer. We also had our best ever views of sedge warbler and reed warbler from one of the hides on East Lagoon, which are built on raised platforms so that you can see down into the reed bed.
We saw common spotted orchid and one of the outstanding specialities of Staveley, the marsh helleborine but we didn’t spot the less conspicuous common twayblade. Something to look out for when we’re next there.
Pencil drawing of the pottery room, which was at the far, top end of a now-demolished range of buildings behind Batley School of Art. Here I’m looking out towards the far end. As far as I remember, a long work bench and the kilns were on the right. In the previous year the workshop had moved here from one of two huts across the road.
Looking for a suitable bowl to stand my ginger beer plant in yesterday afternoon, I remembered these bowls that I threw on the wheel at Batley School of Art in 1969 and I brought them down from the attic.
These were the rejects; somewhere I’ve got one bowl which was slightly more successful but my ultimate ambition had been to make a teapot. Mr MacAdam, our ceramics tutor, talked me through the process, which involved throwing a spout separately and attaching that with slip (watered-down clay) to the teapot. He was keen that the handle should appear to grow naturally from the pot.
Unfortunately I never got that far. Several, if not all of these bowls, were originally intended to be teapots but they wobbled on the wheel and, in order to salvage something from my efforts, I cut them down and repurposed them.
I had some limited success with mugs. You can drink from them, but my idea of randomly blotching them with manganese powder didn’t work: they just look as if someone with blue powder paint on their hands has picked them up.
But I do like the glaze on these bowls, I just wish that I’d used the same glaze on the mugs. Mr MacAdam keep a grey, A4 hardback, which he referred to as his ‘Dirty Book’, to keep a record of recipes for glazes that he tried. He claimed that he could always tell which students had done life drawing by the shapes of the pots they threw on the wheel.
I treasured a demonstration mug which Mac made to demonstrate the process. There were subtle features, like a sharper edge on the inside of the rim to prevent tea dribbling down the outside of the mug. I used the mug right through college but sadly it got broken decades ago.
The first of the month seems like a good time to try to get back to drawing from nature, even if that’s just fifteen minutes by the duck pond while Barbara, her sister and brother take a walk around the walled garden here in Thornes Park. When the resting Canada goose eventually got up, it limped along awkwardly, struggling to drag along its left leg. Even though it had stayed put as people walked within yards of it, it was continually looking around, so I found myself drawing its head from three different angles. As usual, adding a bit of watercolour helped bring things together as I picked out one of the outlines.
Adding the chocolate brown to the black-headed gull sketches also makes a difference, as did adding a wash of light grey – raw umber and french ultramarine – for its back.
2 p.m., Broad beans and rainbow chard are doing well in the bed at the back of the car park by the Cluntergate Community Centre, Horbury. The blue flowers of borage are attracting a hoverfly.
As I draw, I can hear the clack of heels in the centre as couples dance to what sounds like a karaoke version of ‘Putting on the Style’. As I sit on the corner of an old stone wall, I’m attracting attention because I’m NOT moving:
‘Are you all right?’ A woman asks me.
‘Fine, thank you.’ I reply, trying to work out if it’s someone that I know.
‘I was watching you and you weren’t moving’, she explains, ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
I’m so pleased with our potato patch. I usually try to cram in more than recommended to save space in the veg beds. This year I gave them the recommended space, which meant that I was able to earth them up when the first shoots appeared. I was expecting small new potatoes but two of these would be large enough to bake. As far as I remember, they’re a variety of Maris. They have red markings and the flesh is white and doesn’t fall in the water (i.e. start to disintegrate) when you boil them.
Another success that is that I’ve managed to grow a lot of Calendulas for free. There were perhaps two hundred little seedling clustered around where a single self-sown plant had grown last year. I grew them on by planting them in rows in the veg bed and I’ve since moved them on to any space that needs filling, in the border, the raised bed and even around the runner beans in the veg beds.
Thinking ahead to our apple crop, I’ve made a start on thinning out the little apples to just two per cluster. Both cordon apples – the golden spire and howgate wonder – suffered from leaf curl this spring but they seem to be recovering and hopefully we’ll have as good a crop as we had last year.
No, I didn’t really go to Hardangerfjord to draw this jug but I needed a grassy backdrop so I reached for the Tui Lakes and Mountains brochure that was on the top of a pile on my desk.
I didn’t have much success photographing the minnows in the jug but I used this blurry shot as the basis for my drawing.
I needed an illustration of the results of a childrens’ river-dipping expedition in Wensleydale for a forthcoming article in the Dalesman. On a perfect summer’s morning in August last year my sister’s grandchildren netted dozens of minnows and a stone loach in the River Ure. The fish were all released before we headed back to the holiday cottages for lunch.
Making a start on the pen drawing, watercolour to follow.
I’m going back to pen and watercolour. I was looking at the sketch that I made in 1972 for my Greenhouse Mural, which I featured in my previous post. The drawing is rather messy and the media rather mixed – dip pen, watercolour and a touch of acrylic – and is applied with more enthusiasm than skill but the sketch has a lot of life in it. Coming back to it after over forty years, I can remember the exhilaration of the challenge that I’d been presented with.
This month’s Wild Yorkshire nature diary in the Dalesman.
After a year of practicing drawing on my iPad I’ve got to the stage where I can illustrate my Dalesman magazine articles with digital versions of my regular drawings, so I think it’s good time go back to traditional media and try to apply what I’ve learnt.
Meadow photographed in the walled garden at Nostell, as were the hoverfly, bumble bee and vapourer moth caterpillar. The other insects were photographed on a Wakefield Naturalists’ Society meeting at the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust Thorpe Marsh reserve, near Doncaster.
But that doesn’t mean that I’m not making use of my iMac. Ideally, I’d sit in a sunlit meadow with my sketchbook and draw whatever came along but in this case I’ve got dozens of photographs taken last summer to bring together in a double-page spread. This Photshop CC 2019 collage looks disjointed but I’m convinced that I can make it all flow together as I draw. It’s not intended to be a snapshot of life in the meadow, instead I’d like to evoke the experience of strolling through the grasses on a summer’s day.
There are some excellent new field guides around including one on hoverflies and another on bees. When I’ve completed my illustration, I’ll drop it into a page layout in InDesign to check that my text will fit in, which will hopefully run to about 600 words. Being able to identify the insects means that I can be more specific in the stories I tell about their habits.
