At first glance I can’t see why the brown cat is sitting motionless at the end of the veg bed, fluffed up like a teddy bear.
There’s tension in the air; the female pheasants have left off preening and pecking and they’re just standing there, looking startled and anxious, although that’s pretty much their normal look.
We seem to be getting all the movie cliches you’d get in a western shootout as the tension builds: the Clint Eastwood stare from the bristling cat, the gaggle of townsfolk, we’ve even got the ineffectual sheriff, looking on from a safe vantage point as the cock pheasant watches from the top of the hedge.
Finally the greenhorn – in this case the athletic-looking tabby that’s trying to muscle in on the brown cat’s territory – emerges from under the hedge, trying to look as cool and unconcerned as it can under the circumstances.
We don’t have a saloon in the meadow area for the final shootout but the newcomer went for cover under my homemade bench. The brown cat followed him, slowly and menacingly then with a final spurt to drive home his message.
Just one more movie cliche: the victor walked away in slow motion, pacing confidently along the top of the timber at the edge of the veg bed. It reminded me of the opening titles of Walk on the Wild Side. I’ve never seen the movie, but the titles, with Elmer Bernstien’s sassy score, are rightly celebrated. It features an alley cat patrolling its territory in slow motion.
I’ve drawn our Ikea Ektorp sofa using the Milli Pen fineliner in Clip Studio Paint. I’m trying to improve my watercolour technique in the program, to make it resemble my regular sketchbooks, so this time I went for the Running Watercolour Brush. To take away the airbrushed smoothness that I’m trying to avoid, I added a texture on the final top layer, to give an impression of paper.
Even with those tweaks, I can’t recreate the organic line of this little Safari Fountain Pen drawing of cushions from a couple of weeks ago. The original is three inches (8 cm) across.
Barbara’s bag
This drawing of Barbara’s bag was in my A5 landscape sketchbook, so it’s about four inches square. I don’t have the skills to recreate the unpredictable nature of ink on paper in Clip Studio Paint, but I’ll certainly continue with it, if only to keep emphasising to myself what a pleasure it is to draw with real pen and ink.
This gouache-on-paper painting dates from my time at Batley School of Art, 1967-1969, and I’m guessing that this was Christmas 1968. I remember my Dad grumbling that although people had been invited for seven, they had yet to turn up as it approached eight.
“They’ll be watching The Val Doonican Show!”
I was frustrated at my ineptitude when I painted this but, looking back at it now, I love the awkwardness of it and I wish that I’d done more paintings of the people around me. I made a sketch in pencil, which I’ve still got somewhere, and worked this up, most probably at college. The black may well be poster paint. It wasn’t until my time at Leeds that I made a start with watercolours.
The kidney-shaped coffee table and the hand-turned lamp base were designed and made by my Mum at Mr Bailey’s evening class in the secondary school woodwork workshop in School Yard, by the gates of St Peter’s Junior School.
It’s good to see Thelma Littlewood posing so elegantly, wine glass in hand. Mr Littlewood, as usual, looks a little reserved. Is that supposed to be their son Adrian with the half pint? Perhaps I’d be able to identify the figure if I looked out the original sketch.
Even from this back view, I can tell that my Dad, looking relaxed and genial in his cardigan, is launching into an animated conversation. As you might be able to tell, he trimmed his own hair with clippers.
The glow of the lamp on the pianola and the brilliant white gloss-painted door instantly bring back memories of those drinks-and-nibbles gatherings. I probably reached for those salted peanuts several times during the course of making my drawing. Very often there’d be party games, such as the Drawing Game, but I suspect this was meant to be a more sophisticated social soiree.
Carr Lodge Park, powder paint on grey sugar paper: a familiar subject to children at St Peter’s Junior School, Horbury. Probably painted when I was in Mr Lindley’s class, so about 1961, when I was ten years old. The reflections in the water are from my imagination, as I never remember there having been water in the ha-ha at Carr Lodge, although they did still fill the paddling pool, just up to the left, in the days before there was a danger that someone would leave broken bottles in it.
The view looks rather open without the avenue of trees along the path on the right but I suspect they hadn’t been planted at the time. I guess that we went along and sketched the scene in pencil, as powder paints would have been impossible on location.
You can see how fascinated I was by the texture of stone. I remember the sandstone of the wall in the school yard, which was weathered into crevices and crannies. One lad had discovered that you could put a marble in one hole and it would roll down through unseen passages and pop out from another hole lower down. He must have been a trustworthy boy, as I leant him one of my marbles for his demonstration.
I found the painting while retrieving a little sketchbook that had slipped down the back of my plan chest.
In his latest book The Stress Solution, Dr Rangan Chatterjee describes the ‘Micro Stress Dose’ that you’re likely to get when you check into your Facebook feed and see your friend enjoying the holiday of a lifetime, when you’ve recently returned from yours. There’s your friend, sitting by the pool with a pina colada in their hand, while . . .
“you’re looking out of your office window watching a pigeon drink out of a dirty puddle on the roof of a vandalized bus stop.”
That wouldn’t be a problem for me of course, because being forced to sit by a pool with a pina colada would be my idea of purgatory; I’d be much happier drawing that pigeon!
The Arboretum, Newmillerdam
I’m lucky that my day job includes many of the elements that Dr Chatterjee suggests for trying to combat stress: a daily dose of nature, getting out on a walk or just staring at a tree.
Ikigai
Ideally, he says, you should be trying to find what the Japanese call your ikigai, which translates loosely as ‘a reason for being’, but it’s something more than that. It should be something you love – yes, drawing is definitely that for me; something that you’re good at (OK, the jury’s still out on that one in my case) and, ideally, something that you can make money from. Well, I’ve survived for forty years as an illustrator, so I can tick that last box.
It should also be something that the world needs. Does the world need illustration? I can’t speak for the world in general, but I know how much I feel the need for art and illustration in my life.
Brain-boosting
The Boathouse, Newmillerdam
It seems that learning to paint is good for you. In an experiment on last week’s Twinstitute, on BBC 1, one group of volunteers were given a month to learn to paint, draw and throw pots on the wheel. This resulted in a reduction in their brain age of, on average, six years, with one of the participants reducing her brain age by nine years. A control group of twins who went on a diet of ‘brain-boosting’ foods for the same period saw no change in the their brain age.
A study by psychologist Myra Fernandes and colleagues at the University of Waterloo, Canada, suggests that the act of drawing something has “massive” benefit for memory compared with writing it down, so getting into a habit of drawing might help people who suffer from dementia.
One Small Step
But being an illustrator brings its own problems and Dr Chatterjee’s previous book, The 4 Pillar Plan, convinced me that it was about time that I did something about my posture. The hours that I spend hunched over my computer or my sketchbook aren’t ideal. He suggests plenty of simple solutions to bring movement into your daily routine and, in particular, his exercises for reawakening ‘lazy glutes’ convinced me that I should buy an exercise step. It’s in the corner of my studio so, once or twice a day, when I need to take a few minutes break, I can go through a short, simple work-out. No aerobics involved, thankfully, just getting those neglected muscles into action again.
I like the use of graphics and photography in Dr Chatterjee’s books which (along with his clear explanations) gives them an accessible, friendly feel. I’ve tried to echo that by using Adobe Spark Post to add some suitably inspirational captions to my photographs of Newmillerdam Country Park, all but one of them taken on Monday morning. Newmillerdam is always suitably inspirational whatever the weather, but the winter sun on Monday gave it an extra sparkle.
Drawing and memory: a study by psychologist Myra Fernandes and colleagues at the University of Waterloo, Canada
Frost whitened rushes, dark iced water, isolated in the mist in warm winter sun the Strands looked at its best
Calder Valley, Addingford, 26 January 1997
Twenty-two years ago this weekend, in 1997, I was busy painting the scenery for the Pageant Players’ production of Dick Whittington at Horbury School but, instead of driving there, I put on my wellies and walked through a pristinely frosted Calder Valley, following first the canal, then the river.
In my a new page-a-day diary I’d decided a that I was going to try, every day, to make a note of the wildlife I’d seen and to add quick sketches in colour. In the following year this diary became the basis of my online Wild West Yorkshire nature diary, which was originally intended to be just one strand of a more ambitious website, which would include sections on geology, history and villages.
Comet, 28 April, 1997.
I was keen to immerse myself in natural history because for the previous seven years I’d been working pretty intensively on geological projects. I was just finishing my illustrations for Steve Cribb’sWhisky on the Rocks and I’d also made a start on an educational publication, What is Coal? for the National Museum of Coal Mining but I was starting to get further afield as I set about planning and testing out the routes my first walks book, Village Walks in West Yorkshire.
A couple of weeks later, I sold my first computer, an Amstrad 386, to friends and upgraded to what then seemed like a suitably powerful PC but my self-publishing business, Willow Island Editions, didn’t get going until after I’d invested in my first scanner, a Umax Astra 1200-S. I remember that it cost hundreds of pounds, £350 I think, but included in the package was a full version of Adobe Photoshop 4.0, so it proved to be brilliant value.
It’s strange to look back and read a note that I received my first e-mail, from a birdwatcher friend in Plymouth, on the second of April, 1997. However did we manage before that?!
Looking towards the M62 motorway junction from the Showcase Cinema, Birstall.
Here are a few quick sketches from my A6-size pocket sketchbook. Barbara was asking me which I preferred, drawing on an iPad or drawing in pen and watercolour. For pleasure, pen and watercolour are what I feel most at home with, but I always like learning something new. I think of iPad drawing as being something akin to printmaking, it’s undeniably drawing but with technical considerations which might be considered limitations but which can also contribute to the character of the artwork.
The original of this sketch of the old scouring mill at Horbury Bridge is just two inches, five centimetres across. Seen in close-up, the unpredictable effects of real ink and real watercolour on the slightly textured surface cartridge paper are, I feel, more convincingly organic than anything that I could have concocted on the iPad.
All these sketches were drawn as we paused for a coffee. When no view was available, when we sat in the corner at the Filmore & Union in the Redbrick Mill, Batley, last week, I attempted to draw a chair.
Silver birch, the Red Kite, Calder Park, Wakefield.
Inspired by a video I’d been watching of a virtuoso South Korean comic artist, I attempted to increase my speed when I drew the timber framework of the barn at Blacker Hall Cafe this morning. I’d normally try to keep my trembling hands under close control but it’s good to try and let myself go occasionally.
This tuft of Evernia prunastri, a common grey-green foliose (leaf-like) lichen was growing on a twig at the edge of the copse alongside the Balk at Netherton. Its branching pattern, always dividing into two, reminds me of fronds of seaweed. Evernia means ‘branched’.
The fronds (the branches of thallus, or body of the lichen) are strap-shaped (not cylindrical, as in a similar-looking lichen, Ramalina), usually paler underneath. You’re probably thinking that if this is a lichen where are the spore-producing bodies? They’re rarely seen and reproduction is often via those granules – the soredia – dotted all over the surface, which can eventually break off to form new lichens.
From Twig to Wig
In Lichens, an Illustrated Guide, Frank S Dobson lists the numerous uses that this lichen has been put to: as wadding for shotguns and as powder for wigs; as a flavouring in bread in the Middle East; as a fixative for perfume; and as an antibiotic, although Dobson adds that it has been known to trigger an allergy in woodcutters. Long-tailed tits use it to camouflage their nests.
It is distributed throughout Britain and is very common on twigs, rocks, fences and even on consolidated sand dunes and it can cope with a moderate amount of pollution.
In the spring of 1996, I took my easel to the car park at the bottom of Coxley Lane and painted, in acrylics, a small canvas of this stile. I like the informal way the stile invites you to step over and explore.
As a subject, the variety of simple shapes is appealing to draw. Unlike the more user-friendly metal kissing gate fifty yards along the path that goes up to the right, this homemade stile is something that has grown from the landscape with those two blocks of local sandstone and the self-sown ash tree.
The ash saplings appear to have grown from the stump of a tree which has been felled. The one in the foreground has grown over the past twenty-two years to engulf a third sandstone block, clearly visible on the right in the original painting.
The Coxley Stile canvas is now in the private collection of an astute and discerning couple (have to say that as they read this blog) in Cumbria.
This billy goat at Oughtershaw in Langstrothdale, photographed in September, had something that he wanted to tell us, bleating away urgently and even standing up on his hing legs, leaning on the drystone wall, so that he could get a better look at us. I went over to the gate and he soon stuck his head through. With a little gentle help from me, he was able to extricate himself but I think that he would have been all right on its own because it’s probably something that he’s in the habit of doing: his horns have been cut back to just the right length for him to be able to free himself with a tilt of his head.
I’ve used flat colour beneath the pen and ink layer in this iPad drawing, drawn in Clip Studio Paint.
