I was drawing sandals yesterday so this evening I’ve moved on to feet. I often draw my hand if I’m stuck somewhere waiting but what I can’t do is draw one of my hands clasped in the other (how would I move my pen?!), so I tried different ways of drawing my two feet together.
These feet look elongated but that’s the shape my feet are. Greg Davies, who is 6 feet 8 inches tall and has size 13 feet was grumbling in this week’s Radio Times that the author of his Wikipedia article had increased that to size 17: ‘I’d be a human right angle.’
I’m only 6ft 4in but I’ve got size 13 feet, so I guess that I’m on my way to being a human right angle.
These four sketches took 70 minutes and 54 seconds to draw. I know that because we were listening to Abba Gold. I needed music that would help keep my pen moving and most CDs have a slow number in them somewhere: not Abba Gold!
Yesterday was the hottest of the year so far, a chance to wear sandals again.
Drawn with my Lamy Safari fountain pen with the broad nib, as I wanted a bold inky line. I went for an A4 sketchbook, larger than the sketchbooks that I normally take on location because I didn’t want to start putting in detail, and consequently tending to work larger, and then find that I was running off the edge of the page.
Lamy Safari with Z24 converter and broad nib, filled with Noodler’s Black ink.
I was going to add colour but then decided that I like the line just as it is. The everyday but for me rather challenging subject brings back memories of art homework from school days: going back to the rudiments of drawing.
In Holmfirth restoration work has started on the former premises of Bamforth & Co in Station Road. For a number of years as we drive I’ve been thinking that I really ought to stop and take a photograph of the sign because I remember it from the early 1960s when, for a while, we used to drive this way on Sundays to visit my grandfather in a nursing home in Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire.
As we drove past today the sign had finally been removed so these are images from Google Maps street view. In my memory, the sign was a vertical one that you saw on the corner of the building as you approached down the hill:
BAMFORTH & CO. LTD., ILLUSTRATORS AND PUBLISHERS
Even aged nine I wanted to be an illustrator, so I assumed that this was the kind of office/factory in which an illustrator would work. I’d be intrigued to know more about the building’s history. Bamforth’s started in 1870 as a portrait photographers, so that could be a Victorian photographer’s studio running along the second story of the building.
Bamforth’s later specialised in producing magic lantern slides and later saucy seaside postcards. Between 1898 and 1915 they produced black and white silent films, so perhaps this was used as a studio.
There’s just enough room in my new one litre bag for an A6 pocket-sized sketchbook, bijou watercolour box, pack of crayons, Safari pen, water-brush, Olympus Muji Tough camera and microfibre buff (‘a bandana with attitude’) plus an attached key fob compass/thermometer. As it says on the label:
‘So pack up . . . and get out there on your next big adventure.’
Or in this case mini adventure as this is the bag that I’ll grab when we’re setting out on our errands and appointments, for instance this morning when we had a few things to do in Ossett and I spotted the brown sporangia of a hartstongue fern growing in a crevice in an old stone wall on New Street.
Usually those furry caterpillar sporangia would be arranged in a feather pattern on the back of the frond but here the frond has shrivelled and curled inwards along the midrib, exposing the spores to any passing breeze, so no doubt thousands of them will find their way into suitable crevices.
May Sketches
Cuckoo flower growing on my friend Roger’s wild flower lawn.
It’s only a month ago that there was snow on the hills but since then the spring has burst into action. We’ve made efforts to get the garden up to speed and to plant all the veg beds so I haven’t had as much time as I would have liked to draw but here are the few pages of sketches from my A6 pocket book.
1 p.m.: I sketch this mullioned window at Blacker Hall Farm shop during a break in wintry showers. The mullion is the upright between the windows; the horizontal stone above is a dripstone.
Mrs Durrell’s Dandy Dinmont, Indian ink and dip pen, drawn in 1967 (when I was 16).
The Sunday evening ITV series The Durrells prompted me to take another look at a comic strip of My Family and Other Animals that I drew in my school days. I was so lucky to have Gerald Durrell’s account of a naturalist’s childhood in Corfu as the set book for my O-level English Literature exam.
11.20 a.m, mid-height stratus, cool breeze: I’m reminded of the piece of childhood writing that I re-read the other day (Blue Remembered Hills):
‘I found a dry bog plant and a stone with water trickling down the middle and green on the stone around it’
That was when I was aged nine and here I am, over half a century later, still fascinated by the plants and rocks of millstone grit moorland. No wonder I feel as if I’ve come back down to earth every time that we get out here.
I add colour using watercolour pencils but, once again, I’ve forgotten to bring my water-brush so I dab it with a finger moistened in a puddle on the moorland track.
Giant Club Moss Fossil
I draw the club moss fossil in the comfort of the Bank View Cafe at the end of the walk. I’ve spotted a few impressions of Carboniferous plants in the millstone grit blocks that make up some stretches of the path at Langsett and someone has brought together a small selection of plant fossils on the windowsill in the cafe. Shouldn’t every cafe should have a collection of local fossils, rocks and minerals?
I’ve drawn my hands a couple of times waiting by the changing rooms in one of the stores in the White Rose shopping centre, Leeds, but just as I start sketching the shoppers – by trying to take a mental snapshot as they walk away – Barbara gets fitted up and we head off to find a likely place for lunch.
At the car park at Cannon Hall a gaggle of about a dozen farmyard geese, mainly white, graze on the grass verge until a couple of walkers arrive with a bag of breadcrumbs.
The domestic goose is descended from the greylag but stands more upright than its wild relative because it has been selectively bred to be three times as heavy and to accumulate fat around its rear end. One of the geese had a dewlap and a similar flap hanging between its legs. This is a feature of the Toulouse, an old French breed.
In the American Pilgrim goose, males are always white and females grey.
‘Denied the opportunity to forage [geese] are uneconomic,’ writes John Woodward in The Field Guide, ‘for they have large appetites . . . the income derived from geese rarely justifies the use of valuable pasture.’
A toddler with a large bag of breadcrumbs is next in line to feed them.
Jumbo Grip Pencil
Oak at the corner of the car park, Cannon Hall (pen and watercolour).
My drawing is a composite as these geese never keep still. I started with the head and worked down. When the birds set off in a different direction I kept adding to the sketch, transposing the shapes as if I was mirror-writing. Sometimes I’d be drawing one of the white geese, sometimes the one with the dewlap but the greyish-brown geese did have the white rear end, as I’ve drawn it here.
I drew the goose with a Faber-Castell Jumbo Grip pencil (below). With its triangular cross section and its rubberised ‘SoftGRIP’ stipples, this is one pencil that you’re not going drop even if you’re working in gloves. The matching pencil sharpener is easier to use on location than a craft knife. There’s a pencil-thin slot in my art bag that it fits neatly into so it’s not going to lose it’s point by getting jammed in with my pens and watercolours.
I’ve used various clutch pencils, otherwise known as propelling pencils, but they don’t have the bite of a real pencil. The Jumbo Grip is rated B for hardness and is described as ‘ideal for learning to write’. But I like it for drawing too.
This polypody fern is growing as an epiphyte on a crooked old hawthorn on by the nature trail at the National Coal Mining Museum, Caphouse Colliery. Epiphyte is simply a plant that grows on another plant: the fern isn’t parasitic on the hawthorn. This reminds me of the mysterious Wistman’s Wood on Dartmoor where old stunted oaks grow up amongst massive tumbled slabs of granite and every surface, rock and tree, is covered with moss, lichen and fern. This is on a much smaller scale of course but it has the advantage for me that its just a couple of miles up the road.
As I shelter under an umbrella, I realise that to draw all the pinnate indentations on each leaf is going to take me a lot longer than the time that I’ve allowed, so I outline all the fronds and decide to come back another day to complete the drawing and add some colour.
I was drawing sandals yesterday so this evening I’ve moved on to feet. I often draw my hand if I’m stuck somewhere waiting but what I can’t do is draw one of my hands clasped in the other (how would I move my pen?!), so I tried different ways of drawing my two feet together.
These four sketches took 70 minutes and 54 seconds to draw. I know that because we were listening to Abba Gold. I needed music that would help keep my pen moving and most CDs have a slow number in them somewhere: not Abba Gold!
