Category: Drawing

The Blue Room and the Greenhouse

java doves
I’d painted the Java doves in my ‘Greenhouse Mural’ during the previous week
Richard
I prefer lurking in the background . . .

Thursday morning, 17 October, 1974, the Blue Room, Illustration Department, Royal College of Art, Exhibition Road:

“And what do you think, Richard?”

I prefer lurking in the background, but illustration tutor Quentin Blake is keen to bring me into the group discussion. Dennis Leigh, another student in our year, has been telling us the stories behind his work-in-progress. Put on the spot, I fall back to my default position and ask him:

“Don’t you ever go out into the country? All your subjects take place in the mind. Don’t you ever think of drawing from Reality, from Nature?”

Blue Room
Colin
Fellow student Colin West’s pithy answer when I suggested that there wasn’t much drawing from life in his Degree Show (from my diary, Saturday 14 June 1975).
It’s not surprising that I had so few friends at College!

“The countryside makes me feel uneasy,” Dennis explains, “It’s human relationships that I’m interested in, taking place in situations, in rooms . . .”

But one of his stories starts with a couple who are taking a walk in the country:

“They find the partly decomposed remains of an angel on the moor and take it home and put it in the attic, but the man gets . . .”

And frustratingly, that’s as far as I got in my diary in recording Dennis’s story.

It had been a busy day for me:

greenhouse sketch
My initial sketch for the greenhouse mural. I thought that I might finish it in six weeks . . . it took me three years!

Goodnight to Flamboro’

poppies
My illustration for “. . . Poppies gleaming by moonlight . . .”, opus 136, the fifth of ‘Seven Preludes’ for Piano by William Baines.

‘Mother Baines would have approved of the illustrations.’

Roger Carpenter

I’d had a good reaction to my illustrations to Goodnight to Flamboro’, the biography of Yorkshire composer William Baines (1899-1922), in a letter that arrived that morning from its author, Roger Carpenter, so I arranged to meet up with the one-man-band publisher Lewis Foreman of Triad Press to discuss what would be my first book illustrations to be published.
I was also ploughing on with my Greenhouse Mural, struggling with one of the life-size birds that I was painting, the singing finch.

singing finch

Darwin’s Old Studio

Kensington Gardens
If I was to design the perfect London penthouse studio for myself, I couldn’t do better than this: after a day at work in the rooftop greenhouse (to the left of the studio) I could go and listen to legendary performers such as Arthur Rubinstein, Leopold Stokowski, John Ogdon or André Tchaikowsky at the Albert Hall next door.
Apple Maps 3D city view
Quentin Blake and head of illustration Bryan Robb photographed by Colin West at the Kensington Gore building.
John

Because of the Blue Room meeting, I’d missed out on a visit that the college’s general studies environment group had made to the Geological Museum but when I met up with my natural history illustration tutor John Norris Wood later, he had some encouraging news. There were just two of us in John’s department: botanical illustrator Gillian Condy and myself, and we’d been slotted into temporary corners of the Textiles Department but John had found us a room right next to the college greenhouse, on the top floor of the Kensington Gore building.

The room had been the studio of Sir Robin Darwin (1910-1974), who was Rector of the college for more than three decades. The last appointment he made was to put John in charge of the greenhouse and of encouraging the study of natural form throughout the college. John thought that Sir Robin’s decision when designing the Kensington Gore building to put nature at its centre must have been the result of the genes of his naturalist great-grandfather, Charles Darwin, coming through.

reptile and frogs
On the reverse side of my sketch for the ‘Greenhouse Mural’ John drew suggestions of how I could incorporate the greenhouse’s frogs and lizards into my painting.

Landscape into Art

Lunchtime, 17 October 1974, Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore Building:

On quick visit the Landscape into Art exhibition I met Michael Lloyd a student in the silversmithing department. Like me, he’d headed for the hills during the summer vacation but had also taken his narrow boat up to Rochdale and down to Bristol.

I was so impressed with his narrow boat, which he’d fitted out himself for his accommodation before he started his course at college. By the autumn of 1974 he’d moored it on the Grand Union Canal at Rickmansworth. Rickmansworth featured in the London Transport Book of Country Walks, so it was one of the places that I used to head off for on a weekend, along the Metropolitan Line from St Pancras.

Jill

Also at the exhibition I saw Jill Bloodworth from painting, who joined me on my regular lunch-break walk around the Serpentine. One of the plans in the Landscape into Art exhibition was for a farm in Hyde Park. Jill wasn’t convinced by this idea:

Jill made this sketch to explain to me one of her paintings of the windmill: a sort of x-ray, looking up and down simultaneously.

“Wouldn’t that be rather impractical? You’d have to keep the public out. But some people haven’t seen a farm.”

I liked the idea of putting people in touch with where their food comes from so I included a suggestion for an urban farm in my first book, A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield. But I’m so glad that the Park hasn’t been ploughed up or turned to pasture.

Jill was working on large canvases of the moody, ruinously disarticulated interiors of Northumbrian castles in the Mural Room at Exhibition Road. The grey skies and autumn colours in the Park prompted her to mention that she intended go and sketch at the Tower of London.

A Walk in the New Forest

fox hunt
New Forest

The next day, after a morning sketching birds in the greenhouse, I headed off to Southampton to see my friends from one of my stints as a volunteer warden at the RSPB Loch Garten Osprey Reserve, Tony & Jutta Manser. We took a walk in the New Forest where we spotted a fallow stag in dark autumn pelage and later found ourselves on the fringes of a fox hunt.

As I mentioned, one of my favourite escapes from London on a weekend was to take the Metropolitan Line towards the Chilterns in the north, but I’d sometimes head for Epping Forest or Broadstairs to the east or to Boxhill or Darwin’s Down House to the south. Even nearer my base in South Kensington, were the open spaces of Hampstead Heath and Richmond Park.

Illustration picnic, Cookham, Thursday 26 June 1975, with me at the prow, and Quentin astern.

Where are they now?

Ian Pollock takes the oar in a boat hired from Turk’s Boatyard, Cookham.
My sketch of one of Liz Butterworth’s scarlet macaws, this must be either Lou or Oscar.

Jill Bloodworth’s award-winning degree show the following summer featured the wrap-around, and, when I attempted to draw it, disorientating, interior of the Brixton Windmill. She’s since gone on to work in printmaking, constructed collage and historical re-enactment.

Gillian Condy, was awarded the Royal Horticultural Society gold medal for her botanical illustration. In 1983 she became resident botanical artist with the National Botanical Institute in Pretoria.

Dennis Leigh became the lead singer in Ultravox and later had a solo career as John Foxx but he never gave up on illustration.

I last saw Michael Lloyd’s work on a visit to the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood: in 1999 he was commissioned to make the mace, which was presented by HM The Queen to the New Scottish Parliament.

Poet and children’s author Colin West has written and illustrated sixty books. Thank you Colin for looking out the photographs for this article. Apart from a degree day photograph where I’m wearing a gown, I think they’re the only photographs taken of me during my time at college, so I’d been quite successful at lurking in the background.

Sadly my natural history illustration tutor John Norris Wood died in 2015. At the Wings and Feather’s exhibition that I mentioned in my last post, I was saying to Elizabeth Butterworth (who graduated in painting in 1974) how much I missed him. She agreed:

“I think we all miss John.”

Links

Colin West, 26 June 1975. Colin had already written and illustrated ‘Winslow and the Bath Tub’, which had been published in a first black and white edition as an Inkling by the Illustration Department.

Colin West

John Norris Wood, obituaries in The Independent and The Guardian

Supercharged Meadow

chicory and chickweed
Chicory, well established in the meadow area (below), is continually sending its white runners under the edging board and colonising the veg bed.

We’ve been fighting a constant battle with chicory, which I unwisely introduced to my little meadow area twenty-five years ago, when someone offered me a plant. With its blue flowers, it’s attractive but invasive. Its white runners, some threadlike, others tough and chunky, are continually making their way from their stronghold in the meadow, under the timber edging and into the veg bed.

meadow area
Chicory in the meadow area.

The chicory soon spreads to any bare patches in the meadow, swamping most of the wild flowers that I attempt to introduce, such as bird’s-foot trefoil. It loves the damp, rich, disturbed soil at the bottom end of our garden.

I’ve decided that after years of struggling to keep it under control, I’m going to abandon my dream of creating a traditional wild flower meadow and go for a more managed version, a supercharged meadow. It worked well when I tried a similar approach in the raised bed behind the pond; in place of the clumps of perennials, which were regularly getting infiltrated by coltsfoot and other weeds, I cleared the whole bed then put in a variety of flowers which were recommended by the Royal Horticultural Society as Plants for Pollinators (see link below for a useful list).

meadow area

Fiskars Digging Spade

Fiskars spade

Unlike the raised veg beds, the meadow has had very little cultivation so it’s going to need some heavy digging. My regular spade, which my dad bought for us when we started gardening, is a smaller border spade, with a small head for getting in between plants but with a proportionately short handle, which means that, as I’m 6 ft 4 inches tall, I’m doing too much bending as I dig.

So I’ve just bought a Fiskars Xact Digging Spade, with a lightweight extra long ‘soft grip’ ergonomic ‘Fiber Comp’ handle and a pointed boron steel head, which means that if I hit a stone while digging, I shouldn’t get such a jarring shock as I might with the straight-ended border spade.

spades

I’ll let you know how I get on when I start digging the meadow turf.

Link

Plants for Pollinators, recommended by the Royal Horticultural Society

Fiskars Xact Digging Spade

Published
Categorized as Drawing

The Revenge of Gnome Tony

Gnome Tony

Here’s my finished gnome comic strip with speech balloons added and, a final flourish, a couple of subtle glows. I’ve still got a lot to learn about Clip Studio Paint but at least I’ve gone through all the stages of Kamakiki Mai’s tutorial, plus a few extras such as the speech bubbles.

Gnome Tony is the first gnome that you meet on the Gnome Roam at Newmillerdam Country Park and this strip is based on an incident I saw on a morning’s walk during the last half term holiday. Beware the Wrath of the Gnome! Tony has friends dotted around throughout the park . . . you have been warned!

Links

Kamakiki Mai’s Clip Studio tutorial, creating an illustration

Gnome Roam at Newmillerdam Country Park

Textures in Clip Studio

textures

I used my iPad to photograph these textures in the garden: wood grain on the shed, wood chip on the path and lichens on sandstone. There’s also a swatch of watercolour paper and one of our dining room carpet.
By importing an image into Clip Studio Paint, I can superimpose the texture on my artwork.

textures on artwork

I superimposed the watercolour paper over the whole image then scaled the lichens, vertical wood grain, wood chip and carpet onto the individual panels. The horizontal wood grain was superimposed on the title. I used the ‘Overlay’ setting for each layer and reduced the opacity to about 50% except in the case of the wood chip on the falling boy panel, which worked better on the ‘Screen’ setting, probably because there is more contrast in the wood chip image.

Just the speech bubbles to go in now and I’m finished! I’ve learnt so much from Kamakiki Mai’s tutorial.

Link

Kamakiki Mai’s tutorial

Painting in Clip Studio

adding colour

It seemed a long process, building up the flat colours each in its own layer – trees, figures, gnome, ground – but when it comes to painting with a virtual watercolour brush to add light and shade, I can see the point of all that preparation. There’s a ‘lock transparent pixels’ button, which sounds technical but it means that, if, for instance, you’re painting a shadow on one of the figures, your shading won’t spill over onto the background.

I’m working on the big screen of my iMac Retina desktop computer, painting using my Wacom intuos 4 graphics tablet. To change colour I’ve been selecting the eye-dropper tool from the menu in Clip Studio. How useful it would be if I could alternate between watercolour brush and eye-dropper by clicking the lever on the Wacom stylus. I tried clicking it and discovered that the lever is already set to activate that particular shortcut!

Wacom stylus, with that handy shortcut lever, which I’ve just started to use today after I’ve had my intuos 4 tablet for seven years!

That speeds things up a lot and the other refinement that I’ve been able to include, thanks to my large screen is to float a large version of the Colour Wheel Palette on my workspace, so that I can easily select lighter, darker or more colourful versions of any flat colour that I sample.

One final improvement is that I’ve specified and saved a virtual watercolour brush, which I’ve called ‘My Even Watercolour’. Unlike the default ‘Transparent Watercolour Brush’ that I’d normally use, it doesn’t lift a small amount of colour from a previously painted background, as a real-life watercolour brush would. To adapt this new brush with a few tweaks from the regular ‘Transparent Watercolour Brush’, I followed Kamakili Mai’s instructions in the step-by-step tutorial that I started going through yesterday.

Link

Kamakili Mai’s tutorial

Flat Colours

flat colours

Adding flat colours is one of the pleasures of creating a comic in Clip Studio Paint but I found setting it up for the first time a bit technical so I needed to do a bit of searching online and watching YouTube videos to find some of the features which can be ‘hidden’, lurking in sub-menus. But once I got going the paint bucket worked well. It has a ‘paint unfilled areas’ options for getting the odd spots that inevitably get missed on the first pass.

The next stage is to add more colour using a virtual watercolour brush to get a bit of light and shade into the frames and I also want to try adding texture and a gradient.

There are also a couple of speech bubbles to add. The story seems to me to be self-explanatory without them, but it’s another technique that I want to practice.

Back to the Drawing Board

Roughs

Rather than drawing well, it’s important to draw what you enjoy.

Kamakiri Mai

In a step-by-step guide to creating an illustration in Clip Studio Paint, the Tokyo-based designer Kamakiri Mai suggests that it’s important to enjoy creating the rough draft for your illustration and not to worry too much about drawing well. She’ll even do a bit of writing to help create a back story for the imagined world of her illustration, even though that isn’t going to figure in the final artwork.

You can see that I’m not worrying about drawing well as I work out a four-panel comic based on an incident that amused me as I walked along the Gnome Roam trail at Newmillerdam a few weeks ago. My aim is to go through the process of telling a simple story as clearly as I can.

I’ve been doing a lot of drawings on my iPad recently but I’m surprised how many illustrators alternate between drawing on paper and designing on the computer. For example, my workflow so far has been:

  • draw the pencil rough
  • scan the rough into Clip Studio and draw the panels using the panel border tools
  • print out the blank panels at exactly the same size as my roughs
  • put the roughs on my light pad and trace the figures in pencil
  • ink over the pencil

The next stage will be to scan the line art into Clip Studio and start adding areas of flat colour

Link

Professional illustration process: Kamakiri Mai, Clip Studio Tips

No Great Shakes

I wouldn’t want my drawings to look too perfect but I’m frustrated when they turn out too shaky so, since we got back from Rome a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been trying to do something about that and I decided to see if cutting down on my caffeine would make any difference. So far it seems to be working well. I can’t give up my morning coffee but most places can now offer a reasonable decaffeinated version.

My Home Gym

home gym

I’ve also been keeping up with the suggestions for exercises in the books that I read recently by Dr Chatterjee, which I’m hoping are improving my posture when I’m sitting at my desk or drawing. They should also help with movement as they’re designed to activate muscle groups, in my shoulders for instance, that might otherwise be neglected.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve bought myself an aerobic step, as recommended by Dr Chatterjee for improving balance. It sits in the corner of my studio under the bookshelf along with some dumbbells. The step was just £12 from Argos, the dumbbells £5 from Aldi, which makes them a bit of a bargain compared with gym membership. I do only about five minutes exercise a day so I couldn’t even get to my nearest gym in the time that it takes to go through a simple routine.

Eighteen months ago, I had a brief suspected TIA (transient ischaemic attack), which I now suspect might have been an unusual migraine or just the result of getting up too quickly after an overlong session on the computer. Because it was transient even the experts can’t say for sure. As a result I got myself a FitBit fitness tracker. I’m giving it a break now because I feel that it’s done it’s job of making us aware of how many or how few steps we might do in a day and it hasn’t shown up any problems with my heart rate.

During our three and a half days in Rome two weeks ago, we walked the equivalent of a marathon, according to Barbara’s iPhone: 70,000 paces, 43 km (0ver 26 miles), so I think that we’re fine for walking and, for me, it’s slouching at my desk and shaky hands that I want to tackle next.

Just my Cup of Tea

Blacker Hall

So at Blacker Hall farm shop this morning we both went for decaffeinated lattes and, it might just be coincidence, but my drawing of the old beams seemed that bit steadier than when I’ve drawn them on previous occasions.

I do feel a bit calmer. I’d describe the difference, when I need to perform a smooth movement, such as drinking from a full cup of coffee or starting a drawing, like this:

  • Before: I’d tense up and attempt to rigidly control my movement
  • Now: I feel more relaxed and happier to go with the flow

It’s early days so there’s no way of knowing whether it’s cutting down on caffeine or doing the exercises has been of any benefit. Perhaps it’s just getting over the excitement of our break in Rome and recovering from a cold. Whatever it is, I think it’s worth carrying on for a while.

Fountain Pen Sketches

fireplace

I’ve gone back to ink cartridges in my Safari fountain pen. The Lamy Ink is freer-flowing than my regular Noodlers, but I don’t have the option of adding a watercolour wash. This fireplace is at my niece Hannah’s Victorian terraced house and I wondered if it was original, but no, it’s a modern gas fire replica, which goes well with house, as does the tile surround.

Sofa at my brother-in-law John’s house
tree
Tree at Blacker Hall farm shop, Monday.

I feel that I have to press on just a bit to get the line that I’m after with the Noodler’s but in contrast with the fountain-pen ink, I can glide the nib lightly over the surface and pick up some of the texture of the cartridge paper in the line.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Victor Ambrus

Victor Ambrus

I’ve mentioned before how much of an influence the springy pen and ink illustrations of Victor Ambrus were on me as a student and I’ve just come across a brief account that I made in a student notebook of an occasion when I was lucky enough to get to speak to him.

sketch
Doodle from my notebook/sketchbook where I’m trying out Ambrus’s technique of adding finger prints to a drawing.

At the Leeds Children’s Book Fair, on Tuesday 16 November 1971, I slipped in at the back of the audience of children for a talk given by Victor and another historical illustrator/writer Ian Ribbons. As I walked in, Victor had just fired the flintlock pistol that he’d brought along with him; a sure way to get everyone listening!

As the smoke cleared, he explained:

“I like drawing historical pictures because I am able to go to town on the costumes and more interesting things seemed to happen in those days.”

Ian Ribbons was the author and illustrator of a series of books about events around the world on one particular date in history. As part of the research for Monday, 21 October 1805, The Day of Trafalgar, he’d climbed the mast and drawn from the crow’s nest of HMS Victory:

“The point is that you never know what you might be doing next.”


fox sketch
Ambrus-inspired drawing from my diary a couple of days after the book fair. I studied his illustrations in books that I borrowed from the children’s section in Leeds City Library. This was my impression of a character in Barbara Leonie Picard’s Twice Read Tales, illustrated by Ambrus.

But coming back to Victor Ambrus, as I’ve said before, I was convinced that if I could use the exact same nib and paper that he used, I too might be draw like him, so when it came to questions from the audience, I asked him about art materials:

“I use ordinary layout paper for my drawings so that the printers can copy it but of course for colour you have to experiment a little but I use the same sort of paints that you would use at school.”

The real ‘secret’ of Victor’s work is that he can draw.

Quentin Blake, Blue Peter and Big Chief I-Spy

Quentin Blake

The previous day I’d seen, for the first time, Quentin Blake in action, drawing animals on request for a group of children. His giraffe ran to three sheets of his A2 layout pad. I sat quietly at the back, so unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to request a drawing. A year later, he would be one of my tutors in the Illustration Department at the Royal College of Art.

I was so lucky with my tutors right through college. On the morning of the day that I saw Quentin at work, I ‘talked with Derek Hyatt about composition’ and the following day before my return visit I had a music tutorial with Alan Cuckston (I was working on a project about the Yorkshire composer William Baines, 1899-1922).

After the Ambrus talk I saw another familiar face at the book fair:

Big Chief I-Spy
Peter Purves

‘As I walked away I saw someone smiling at me – it was Peter Purves of Blue Peter.’

And was there someone else?: ‘Also nearly walked into Big Chief I-Spy? I don’t think so.’

The I-Spy books were one of my early influences, with their encouragement to children to get out spotting, jotting and drawing. I won several prizes in the I-Spy summer holiday competitions. There was a daily I-Spy column in the Daily Mail and during August the Big Chief set something to find and to write about every day. I’ve still got my prize-winning books and I’ve never grown out of the habit of getting out and just looking.