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.
My new camera, the Olympus OM-D E-10 MarkII, a mirrorless ‘micro four thirds’ which is a sort of lighter, scaled down version of a digital SLR, a middle of the range camera but with almost all the features of its big brothers. It has a smaller sensor but there wouldn’t be any problems printing out a photographs at A4 size. You can film HD video and even 4K on a time lapse setting.
Jessops are currently doing a deal on a kit that includes the camera body plus an everyday kind of zoom lens and another that is more powerful, which I look forward to trying the next time we visit a bird reserve. I’ve also treated myself to a macro lens as at least 50% of my photography involves close-ups of flowers, fungi and fossils.
Welsh Poppy
It’s certainly one up on my previous bridge camera, which has given me a useful way of getting into more serious photography over the last three years.
Germander Speedwell
When it comes to throwing the background out of focus, for instance in this close-up of germander speedwell taken with the new camera on our front lawn, the bridge camera was rather limited as you were given a choice of only two apertures. You need a wide aperture, which lets in more light but gives you correspondingly less depth of field, and a faster shutter speed to isolate a subject in this way.
I was inspired to take the plunge and finally go for the camera by our walk around Askham Bog with members of the Wakefield Naturalists’ Society last weekend. Several of the Nats had flip up viewfinders on their cameras which made photographing a flower at ground level a whole lot easier. I was using my little Olympus Tough, which is the size of a bar of soap, on the day and, with the viewfinder hidden down amongst the grass stems the process involved a lot of guesswork. My bridge camera was also lacking in this respect.
The viewfinder/touchscreen also tilts downwards so that I was able to hold the camera above my head and take this close-up of a clump of moss on the garage roof.
Rowan blossom.Bleeding Heart, Dicentra formosa
The Olympus E-10 also gives you the option of a regular viewfinder. When you put your eye to the viewfinder it switches on and the touchscreen viewfinder on the back switches off. Perhaps holding the camera braced against my eye will help me keep it steady.
I feature that I’ve yet to drill down through the menus to activate is the 5 way image stabilisation, which is reviews suggest works even better than the 3 way image stabilisation in the previous model of the E-10.
My drawing, in dip pen, Pelikan Special Brown Indian ink and cell paint on an overlay for a scene from ‘The Trek’ sequence of Watership Down. This version wasn’t used in the film.My impressions of the main characters.
Nearly forty years since its release, the film version of Richard Adams’ rabbit saga Watership Down is stirring up a bit of controversy (see below). It brings back memories of when I worked on the film for five or six months starting in the autumn of 1976 when a creative controversy was coming to a head at the Nepenthe Productions studio in Suffolk House, tucked away behind the Tottenham Court Road, near Warren Street tube station.
Producer Martin Rosen was, I guess, aiming to tell the story in a gritty and compelling way, getting as near as he could to the immediacy of a live action drama: a road movie come war film.
This was probably one of the causes of friction with John Hubley, his director, who was going for a more playful, graphically inventive approach by introducing the folk tales and myths of Adams’ rabbit world as stories within a story. The creation myth at the start of the film is about all that survives of this interpretation.
At my interview, John Hubley looked through my sketchbook and picked out a pen and watercolour sketch of a hawthorn branch: “I’d use this just as it is, with a white background and have the rabbits moving through the drawing.”
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.
Yesterday was the hottest of the year so far, a chance to wear sandals again.
