Waiting for a haircut gives a chance to settle down and draw, which isn’t something that I’ve much chance to do on the run up to Christmas, a week from today.
Category: Art
A Restless Cat
Visiting our friend Diana gives me a chance to try to draw PC, a seven year old black cat who leads quite a busy life.
He came in as we arrived, had a bite to eat, gave me an imperious look, groomed himself, flopped down and rolled about a bit then made a request to go out again before eventually settling down in the corner behind the television.
Meanwhile the birdlife of the cul-de-sac flew over or perched on the rooftop opposite; starlings, collared doves, carrion crow and black-headed gull.
Sketches with a Lamy Safari with an extra fine nib filled with Noodler’s brown ink drawn in my little yellow Moleskine.
Cane Armchair
I drew this bent cane armchair as we caught up with Barbara’s sister Susan this morning. Given the chance, I could quite get into drawing, drawing anything; chairs, mugs, trees, houses, sheds, a Victorian pump.
But I do hope I’ll be able to give myself a lot more opportunities to draw from nature in the new year.
Bird Shapes
10.20 am, looking south-east; as I drew the view of Coxley Valley from my studio window, the last traces of the overnight frost faded from the meadow and the pearly hint of mistiness in the air dissolved away.
I decided on a change from my usual pen first, then watercolour technique and tried looking at the great tits, blue tits and greenfinches coming to the sunflower heart feeders as coloured shapes. I watched each bird until it moved then tried to get the whole pose on paper with a freshly sharpened HB pencil. If I could practice this a bit more, I think it would give me a grasp of the shapes of birds which I don’t take on board in the same way when I’m adding details in pen.
Punto
Perhaps the reason that I find cars so difficult to draw is that they’re almost human. Headlights can be like eyes, so, as when drawing a portrait of a human, if you don’t get the shapes or proportions right, you can lose the likeness. If I drew cars often enough, I might get to the stage where I could take liberties and come up with a caricature.
The first car got driven off just before I got a chance to add colour. As I added colour to the second, a Fiat Punto, I realised that because a car is so shiny it mirrors its environment with a reflection of the sky highlighting the roof and the reflection of the tarmac adding to the shadows below.
Pens, Pencils & Rulers
The knife, fork and spoon slots of a cutlery drawer divider are ideal for pens, pencils and rulers. The section where you’d store your corkscrew and corn-on-the-cob skewers comes in for compass, Pritt sticks and pencil sharpener.
This A2 sized drawer is one from a six drawer unit from Ikea but every one of these drawers had sagged over the past three years. Last weekend I dismantled them and glued all the grooves that support the hardboard base. While I was at it, I sprayed some WD40 on the metal runners. And I even went to the effort of testing each pen on scrap paper to whittle down my collection.
There was no lead in this propelling pencil, but it’s definitely one to keep. It was either given to me, or I claimed it from my mum in my school or student days, so my guess is that it could date from the 1930s.
Book End
A carving that I made in the woodwork class at grammar school has come in useful for stopping my current reading collapsing over onto the modem on my bookshelf.
A windy day disrupted the railways when we went into Leeds yesterday. On the return journey I drew bare trackside trees, a birch hanging on to the last of its ochre leaves and a gull weaving its way into the headwind.
The Waiting Game
Two hours is a long time to spend in a waiting room but on the other hand . . . this is the most time that I’ve had for a sketching session for months. That is, sketching as opposed to sitting at my desk working on a comic strip. I have done plenty of that.
My habit of drawing my hand when there’s nothing more inspiring to draw (or when it seems socially unacceptable to gawp at people, as in this waiting room) paid off when I was drawing my comic strip. It wasn’t easy to draw all those hands but at least alarm bells would ring if I drew something that didn’t look quite right, for instance the time when I was so wrapped up in my drawing that I drew a hand with one thumb and five fingers!
Capital at the Casbah
I did manage to get out for a brunch break and headed for the Cafe Casbah where I had time, after demolishing the eggs Benedict, to draw the cast iron capital of one of the pillars in the Redbrick Mill.
Link: Cafe Casbah, Redbrick Mill, Batley
The Palace of Curiosities
I’ve spent so much time during the last three months sitting at my desk drawing men in top hats, so what do I do now that my contribution to the Waterton comic is finished and I can get out to social events again?
This is Mr Oxley, proprietor of the Palace of Curiosities, a Victorian Traveling Sideshow that has rolled into town as part of the celebrations to mark the centenary of the death of Charles Waterton 150 years ago.
To rival Squire Waterton’s Nondescript, John Bull and the National Debt and the Noctifer, Mr Oxley is showcasing a ‘completely genuine’ mermaid, mummies and a grisly selection of Grand Guignol horrors.
Link: Palace of Curiosities
The Papal Ring Master
Today’s frame from my Waterton comic; Edmund, son of Charles Waterton, has gone into a Frodo-like trance as he examines a papal ring. The pope, Pius IX, looks on; is that a blessing or is it the gesture used by a hypnotist when he takes control of his subject’s mind?
I find myself wanting to yell out ‘Don’t trust him Edmund!’ but, with his waxed moustache, Edmund himself looks like a smooth-operating Victorian villain.
In my original rough I’d imagined the pope as a distant figure but, when I googled Pius IX, I found portraits of a shrewd looking character who I’m guessing was very hands-on in his Papacy. I’m sure that he would have known every member of his staff, and known how to handle them. You can see in his portraits that he could project a good-natured spiritual radiance, but he doesn’t come over as a reclusive monk-like figure. I think that he would have had no difficulty winning the day at the First Vatican Council, which established the doctrine of papal infallibility.
Edmund rose as far as a layman could in the Catholic hierarchy, so the two men must have known each other. Pius died in 1878, one year after the death of Edmund who was thirty-eight years younger than the pope he served.
Pius reminds me Marlon Brando in The Godfather but not as sinister. Perhaps he acted as mentor to Edmund, rather like the relationship between Professor Dumbledore and Harry Potter.
Victorian cartoonists could see that Pius was as capable of raising two fingers in admonishment as easily as in benediction.
Edmund became a collector of rings and part of his collection will be on display at Wakefield Museum towards the end of this year. One of his interests was in papal rings. These are oversized, apparently designed to fit over a glove, and made of base metals. They typically carry the coat of arms of a pope, or sometimes those of a king.