Category: Art

The Broken Leg

Richard with broken leg

With a bit of help from the Adobe Illustrator this is me in January 1965 with my leg in a cast after breaking my leg hurrying home on an icy Boxing Day evening to watch Fred Hoyle’s Universe.

My mum had added a long zip to my trousers to fit over the cast. I rather liked the new ash-wood walking stick which Pinderfields Hospital had loaned me so I was not pleased when some of my classmates used it for an improvised game of golf, scratching the handle 😮

Richard in black and white

I’d like to say that the grainy quality of the photograph was deliberate but it was probably caused by thermal shock to the film in my early attempts at developing it in a Paterson’s developing tank.

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The Broken Leg, my comic strip diary from that time

My Little Brother

Bill at Smeath House

Like the semi-fictional teenage Steven Spielberg in his movie The Fabelmans, in 1964 my brother Bill and I spent hours planning and making the props for mini Standard-8 cine movies. I would have liked to have made a King Kong-style movie of some giant beast lurking over our house but it was beyond the resources we had available at the time.

I tried it out in this shot from my Ilford Sprite 127 but it didn’t work because – in the original – Bill’s hand didn’t quite rest on the corner of the house because the view from the camera’s viewfinder didn’t quite match the view through the lens.

Thanks to Photoshop I’ve been able to nudge Bill into position. And the Photoshop Neural Filter has done a great job of colourising Smeath House.

The Hospice Gardener

hospice staff cartoon

A final round-up of hospice staff for my project and the last one, the gardener, is my favourite, probably because I’ve had so many uniforms to draw. This is my third of fourth attempt at the gardener. Originally I had him wielding a chainsaw, which wasn’t really suitable for a group photograph, then I tried him with a pair of shears, which didn’t work because he then needed a little shrub to trim, which I didn’t have room for. The potted plant, garden fork and olive body warmer work fine for my hospice staff group.

The Hospice Team

hospice staff

I’m aiming for a fairly generic version of the hospice staff but inevitably the individual characters keep asserting themselves.

Chairs

The view from the waiting room is of a blank pebble-dashed wall, so I get another chance to practice drawing chairs. The blue chair was drawn using my usual method, lifting my hand from the paper frequently to check proportion and having a couple of goes at a line where necessary. The red chairs were drawn (almost) without lifting my pen from the paper. The disadvantage of this method is that for most of the time most of the drawing is covered, but I do like the wayward wobbly line that this results in.

Pelargonium

Pelargonium

After a year, our zonal pelargonium is beginning to look a bit leggy.

Drawn in Procreate on the iPad using the Tinderbox virtual pen from the Inking section. Having got through all three of my PenTips 2 soft Apple Pencil tips, I’m now back to a plain Apple Pencil tip but the canvas texture of the PenTips Magnetic Matte Screenprotector is working well for me, an improvement on drawing on the iPad’s glass screen.

Stitched Up

I struggled to identify this flower, photographed with my iPhone as we walked around Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust’s Idle Valley reserve a couple of weeks ago. I think what’s happened is that greater stitchwort flowers are growing up amongst the foliage of some kind of cranesbill.

It was drawn in Procreate on the iPad but if I’d been drawing from the actual plant in my sketchbook I might have realised that they’d got mixed up.

Unless you can suggest the identity of a plant with stitchwort-type flowers and cranesbill-style leaves?

Spires

Spires cartoon

From crocketed to classical, gothic to plastic, happy birthday to superfast sketcher (and meticulous painter) Helen.