Category: Art

Pentax Spotmatic

IT’S A BIT of a wrench, parting with my Pentax Spotmatic 1000 and its Takumar Macro lens but I’ve gone over to digital photography, so I put them up on e-Bay today.

I bought them in my last year at the Royal College of Art in 1975. I’d been won over by this combination of lens and camera when I’d taken the three-week photography course at college, run by Tom Picton and John Hedgecoe.

Macro Lens

London Plane leaf.

Until then all the cameras that I’d used could focus no closer than 3 or 4 feet so the macro lens, the first I’d used, opened up up a whole range of subject matter that had previously been beyond my scope.

Seeing precisely through the viewfinder what would appear in frame was also a big advantage. The closer you got to a subject with a non-SLR camera, the greater the difference between viewfinder and lens-view.

The photography department was then in the basement of a building at Cromwell Place directly opposite the Natural History Museum. I used the heavy studio camera stand and set up a raking light to bring out the textures of any suitable subject that I had to hand, like the pens in my pocket and the label of my parka jacket.

South Coast

For me the highlight of the course was the opportunity to try out the camera on location. A group of us went off in the college minibus, passing Box Hill and the Snow-Drop Inn on our way to a small seaside town.

There were no cliffs, dunes or rock-pools for me to explore but a sandy, shingly bay was a more likely source for the kind of subject that attracted me than the streets of South Kensington.

I wandered off along the coast to the west of the town, photographing fungi and fences, pebbles and pigs.

Even from these low res scans from my contact strips from the Kodak Tri X Panchromatic film that I took that day, you can see that there’s some quality about black and white film that you don’t get with digital. Yes, you can use a filter in Photoshop to add grain to ape the effect of film, but that’s not quite the same as having that limitation imposed by the medium when you go out hunting with your camera.

On a lane about half a mile out of town I came across this old weather-boarded barn (below) with a decaying thatched roof. It could well be a building that no one thought to record at the time, so, if I could remember the name of the town, I’d contact the local history society to see if they’d like to include it in a photographic archive. The winter, early spring of 1973 is very much a part of history now.The camera kit gave me the chance to photograph the kind of subjects that I included in the sketchbooks of my travels. Well, most subjects; bird photography was still well beyond my scope!

 

Sword Dance

SWORD DANCERS or rapier dancers were once part of the Christmas festivities, going from house to house and giving short performances which included a lot of sword-fighting.

The shading on this might look a little different to my normal style. I realised that I’d drawn the swordsmen as left-handed so I’ve flipped the drawing horizontally. Now it looks as if I’ve drawn it with my left hand with most of the lines sloping top left to bottom right.

I did a preliminary little sketch to work out the poses of the dancers but I was happy to launch straight into a cartoon version of a Brown Rat. Notice that we’re back to to right-handed shading for the ground.

I had wild black plums on my ‘to draw’ list, so when we saw some that had fallen onto a grass verge, I selected a few to draw from life, taking a small leafy twig to help put over the idea that these are plums and not, as you might guess at a glance, black party balloons. Once again, I was able to go straight into the final drawing with no rough and no pencil construction lines. This is my preferred option considering that I might need 240 illustrations for the book and more if I decide to up the number of pages from 64 to 96.

The View from the Sofa

12.15 p.m.; There’s a sad tale behind this drawing of a semi-detached house. It looks as if we might have sold Barbara’s mum’s house (Betty died in January) and we’ve popped up there to wait for some relatives who have said they’d like to take the two small sofas.

As I sat on one of the sofas drawing the view across the road I thought of all the Boxing Day parties, all the afternoon tea and Betty’s homemade scones that we’ve enjoyed while sitting here but this is the last drawing I’ll be able to do sitting on one of the sofas looking out my mum-in-law’s front room.

Autumn Landscape

A RED ADMIRAL flies in a sheltered sunny spot in the co-op car park. The other day we saw a large dragonfly hovering over the edge of our pond, its abdomen curved down, apparently laying eggs, dipping down to deposit each one.

I hope the oxygenating pondweed is doing its job and that the pond life is recovering from our drastic clear this summer.

After a long summer break – some say too long – the schools have all gone back and autumn seems to have started decisively. Trees are changing colour, conkers are lying about on pavements and grass verges. The House Martins are still about, for now.

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Categorized as Drawing Tagged

Pictures on a Page

I ALWAYS like the stage where I’ve got sufficient illustrations and text together to start laying out the pages of a book. I’ve been worrying about whether this or that illustration is the best I can do and naturally I’ll continue to fret over that but it’s worth dropping them into a page layout to remind myself that they were never intended to be works of art, to be scrutinised in isolation. I need to see how they work as part of a spread.

Seeing them on-screen in my desktop publishing programme isn’t enough; I need to print out one or two sample spreads. My laser printer isn’t going to give me the look of a real paperback but it serves as a guide. I feel that books should be tactile but, with its line artwork, it occurs to me that this would a good title to try publishing as an e-book.

The pen and ink lines have a crispness about them in print that I can’t show you on a 100 dot per inch screen. My commercial printer advises me to scan line work at 1200 dots per inch, which is the maximum my desktop CanoScan 8800F is capable of.

Whatever my misgivings about each cartoon, I’m pleased with the way they do the job of illuminating the definitions of Victorian Yorkshire dialect words and expressions that are the subject of my book. I’m going a bit over the top by including so many cartoons but if the book was a text-only list of definitions it would run the risk of looking rather academic.

The variation in style in the illustrations, as I struggled to find the best approach, isn’t a disadvantage as it adds some variety but I do have my favourites: the drinkers on a bench in the first spread and the beetle and mole in the second.

Freehand Folk

I’M DRAWING a motley crew of folk; ‘an assemblage of odds and ends of people, a rabble’. This rabble has yet to be roused but they’re a sufficiently motley assortment.

I used ArtPen on layout paper, filling in with a Cotman watercolour brush and Calli ink, making up the characters as I went. With no sketched pencil line to follow and no rough to trace I felt as if I had more freedom. The result looks perfectly idiotic, so I quite like it.

The actual size that I’d be printing this would be only an inch or two across, so you’re seeing the widescreen version here.

The Lawn Ranger

11 a.m.: A neighbour’s ginger cat is paying close attention to one particular spot on the lawn, sniffing it with intense interest.

What is it up to?

It turns around and sticks its paw into a hole –

a vole hole – reaching right down, like someone trying to retrieve keys from the back of a sofa.

It reminds me of a friend of my mum & dad’s, Denny from Dovercourt, who once saw a man lying by the side of the road with a look of agony on his face;

“Are you all right? Shall I send for an ambulance?”

“No . . . ugh . . . I’m fine . . . ugh . . . I’m just . . .  trying . . . to turn off this stopcock.”

Like the ginger cat, he had his arm down a hole.

Starl-ink

THIS DRAWING of a Starling was made with my ArtPen and inked in with a Sakuyo Japanese brush using Calli Jet Black India ink. It’s on Goldline layout paper, which is 50 gsm bank paper; very smooth and semi-transparent.

With no bleed the bank paper isn’t letting the ink lines run into the fibres of the paper, which was a problem with the soft cartridge I was using the other day, but because layout paper is so thin it’s just about on the limit of being able to take a dense wash of India ink. There’s some cockling but very little sign of the ink soaking its way through the thin paper.

Pies

I’M DRAWING a proverbially Thieving Magpie and a boy snaffling pies today and, after a busy day of appointments unrelated to artwork of any description, I’m trying a different approach from my roughs first, then pen and Indian ink final artwork regime; I’m simply doodling these as Barbara and I sit and relax after dinner. I don’t get off to a good start and I think that I might have to draw these two later, but two so-so drawings are better than nothing.

Working this way a drawing takes about as long as some of my roughs. And, as I say, I can still redraw it if necessary, I don’t have to stick with my first attempt.

My drawing of Old Nick himself has turned out about as well as I’d have managed in the studio. The hand and trident are a bit shaky but the the face and figure will do.

His horns have the simplicity that I’m aiming for but my everyday sketchbook lets me down a bit here because the cartridge paper in it isn’t bleed-proof so I can’t get really crisp woodcut style lines.

Drawing a self-important Victorian gentleman wearing spectacles for my next illustration I, not surprisingly, end up with someone resembling Mr Pickwick.

I’ve used a Rotring ArtPen with a fine-nibbed sketch nib filled with ArtPen ink, not my usual Noodler’s, for these drawings and an ArtPen with a larger ‘M’ nib for thickening outlines and filling in. The hatching on Old Nick’s cloak and my Pickwick character’s coat introduces a messy sort of animation to the drawing, which I expect adds a bit of hand-drawn charm, but I’ve got something a little more sharp, graphic and punchy in mind for the images in my book, so I’m going to go back to Pentel BrushPen for the fill-in, or to watercolour brush and black ink.

And it’s got to be bleed-proof paper!

Bright Ideas

THERE’S SOMETHING special about a Saturday morning in the studio. I don’t manage it every weekend but it does happen now and then because there is less of a chance of being called away on errands, appointments and deliveries than on a weekday. I feel more relaxed because it’s a bonus session of work on my book. A gift.

A Saturday morning wouldn’t be quite complete without CD Review on Radio 3. As I write this, they’re playing a new recording of Mozart’s Haffner Symphony. Perfect!

First on my list this morning is an illustration of a blazing fire, the sort of blaze you’d get if you were burning wood-shavings. I realise how much I rely on colour because I always reach for the brightest yellow in my palette when I’m drawing flames but here I’m limited to black and white line, I can’t even add a half tone, nor can I stipple to my heart’s content because that would be just like a laborious, hand-drawn half-tone and it would be equally prone to clog up in the printing.

The perspective on the bottom of the casserole needs some attention.

Flames and explosions are a staple of comic strip illustration so I could refer to my copy of the Step-by-Step Guide to Cartooning or to one of the comic strip books on my shelf but really it’s more fun to come up with my own simple home-spun solution rather than copy the best examples. That way I can keep some of the intimacy of the homely Victorian world that I’m building up in the illustrations, even though in this case there are no period details. I don’t want Batman style special effects. This sketchy version of a woodcut should be just fine.

My next subject, a skinny-ribbed person eating a local variety of porridge, prompts me to draw Oliver Twist with a touch of Stan Laurel. His second course could be this potato and onion stew.

The other day, untangling wool was my subject, today it’s picking twigs from a fleece. The people of Victorian Wakefield must have spent a lot of time preparing fleeces for combing and spinning.

News Story

I always dread being in the newspaper. I ramble on to reporters – this week it was the Wakefield Express Horbury reporter Victoria Turton – and then worry that I’m going to sound as rambling and incoherent in the article as I do in real life.

No worries; Victoria has summed up the story about the controversial proposed changes to planning legislation clearly and concisely and the Express photographer has illustrated the concept of concern for a local patch of ordinary, undesignated but much-loved countryside effectively in his picture. I did my bit by preparing a visual aid specially for this photograph; my sketchbook map of the local countryside that could be at risk if the government’s preferred option of ‘presumption in favour of development’ becomes law (see my post from last week; The Undesignated Countryside).

Crumbling Stone

Two more little drawings and that’s enough for a Saturday; a mole and a crumbling block of stone.

I need to start laying out some sample spreads for the book to see how these are going to work on the page of a B format paperback (130mm x 198mm, 5.12 x 7.8 inches).

Fisticuffs

As you can see in the unfinished figure on the left, I start my figures off as stick-men with a small circle around each joint.

THE VICTORIAN world of my forthcoming book isn’t always so cosy and nostalgic. This morning I’ve got a fight on my hands.

The golden rule about illustrating a fight, according to the advice given by several comic strip artists, is not to show the moment of impact of the fist. It weakens the action. I imagine that the reason for this is that if you show the moment before or after the impact, the viewer has to supply the missing action, making the reading of the cartoon more interactive.

The blow has dislodged the victim's hat while I made the assailant hatless to enable him to be more dynamic. The bowler hat made him look too much like a Dr Watson-type action guy, a goodie.

But in my first pencil rough (above, left) there isn’t enough contact between the two protagonists for the kind of full on, sustained volley of punches that I’m illustrating.

Once again, I can’t avoid a bit of characterisation working its way into my finished pen and ink and Pentel Brush pen wash drawing and I find myself taking sides with the victim. The man who’s just dealt the decisive left-hook looks like a bit of a bruiser to me. I wouldn’t like to meet him in the tavern on a Saturday night.

Weeding

I’m back to the agriculture in my next illustration of hand-weeding a cornfield, then, appropriately, a worker takes a well-earned break for a drink.

Well, yes, he has ended up looking a bit like a pirate. I wanted a change from giving him a hat so I went for a

headscarf, thinking of the heroic labourers in Work by Ford Madox Brown. But I might have to change that.

 

Frivolous or worse

Now this one really is difficult. I have to draw a woman who is ‘frivolous or worse’. As I have so few female friends who fall into that category I’ve gone for a cross between Nancy from the film version of Oliver! and a coquette from half a century earlier. And, come to think of it, there’s something of the flapper about her too. All the clichés.

It doesn’t work; she looks just a shade too sophisticated for the bawdy frivolity that I had in mind, as if she’s a toff slumming it (in the words of one the songs from Oliver!) rather than the bar being her natural habitat. She’s turned out a bit too much like Helena Bonham Carter hamming it up in one of the louche roles she enjoys so much. But I’m going to have to leave her for now.

 

A Bunch of Five

HERE ARE this afternoon’s little bunch of illustrations. The problem with drawing this schoolmaster’s breakfast (another of the odd subjects that I need for my book), is that at this scale – a scale sufficient to make a plate of bacon and eggs recognisable – the characters begin to take over. Well, the schoolboy is reasonably bland but the schoolmaster seems to be taking on a personality of his own. All that is needed here is an archetypal Victorian teacher.

‘What did he (or she) eat for breakfast?’ is one of the questions a novelist is supposed to be able to answer when creating a character. In this case the breakfast is the subject and anything else is a distraction.

I could have drawn this tangle of wool (left) just by itself but to make it appear truly knotty, I decided to include a figure trying to unravel it.

On the other hand this split-pin latch is distinctive enough not to need the help of a cartoon character to demonstrate it.

Crunchy wheat-cakes are next on the menu and they too are sufficiently self-explanatory . . . or do I need an ear of two of wheat lying beside them to distinguish them from oatcakes?

Finally, here’s one of those long benches from a traditional ale-house. This definitely requires the addition of a group of drinkers because otherwise it might look like a church pew.

Of the illustrations that I’ve produced so far, this comes nearest to the look that I want for my book. I’ve established my characters without letting them take over the cartoon, the balance of line and tone seems about right and should be suitable for the method of printing and I’m beginning to build up a homely and somehow familiar Victorian world, which suits my theme.

On the strength of this afternoon’s illustrations, I could reasonably expect to turn out ten illustrations a day . . . if, indeed, I ever get a day when I don’t have some other errand to run.

In the Dragon’s Den

In this week’s Dragon’s Den (BBC2 television) there were a couple of twins with a background in the fashion industry who were seeking a large investment in ‘Brat and Suzie’, a distinctive fashion label they’d recently launched. The quirky originality of their range depends mainly on the specially commissioned illustrations printed on each garment of animals engaged in various activities (for example, a raccoon riding a bicycle).

The ‘Dragons’ asked for some financial details;

“What are you paying for your illustrations?”

“Oh. It’s quite small; we pay for each illustrator a £20 flat fee. We blog about them and help them out as much as we can.”

“So they see it as a way of getting their illustrations around.”

Yes, a business that depends so much on the skill of the illustrators, with a turnover of a hundred thousand pounds and the illustrator walks away with enough money to buy him or herself a pizza and a glass of wine.

That sounds like a good business plan.