Category: Art

Coltsfoot and a Crowd

I’M GRADUALLY getting there with the drawing style for my latest book. During our weekend away I picked up a copy of Private Eye at a station bookstall as my holiday reading. It was useful to be reminded how simply drawn cartoons can make a point so successfully. Private Eye is currently celebrating 50 years of publication and during its first half century the satirical magazine has stuck to newsprint for its pages, so they should have a pretty good idea of what works best in the medium by now.

Coming back to my drawing of Coltsfoot (top left), which I’d made a start on before we went away, I decided that I needed to simplify my design. When I’m drawing a flower from nature I like to include every detail that I see. My aim is to study the plant itself so who am I to decide what is or is not relevant.

These illustrations call for a different strategy. Real life can be confusing and I need to strip down reality to a few easily grasped essentials. Hopefully I can still catch the spirit of the subject.

Coltsfoot is a spring flower, so there’s none around for me to draw at the moment but working from a photograph was tending to make my drawing too literal. Instead, I’ve referred to a Victorian copy of Culpeper’s Herbal and tried to go for the simplicity of the coltsfoot illustrated on one of the colour plates.

Drawing a Crowd

I need to show a group of people crowding around a fire but with so many bodies blocking the view I couldn’t show the hearth itself. The tapering chimney breast isn’t typical of Victorian buildings but I felt that it gave more of a clue that the group were gathering at a fireside.

 

Highland Journey

WE’RE SPENDING Friday travelling up and Monday travelling back again so the East Coast rail journey of our weekend in Inverness is one half of our short break in the Highlands. It’s too long since we’ve been here – well over 20 years. We get to Scotland once or twice a year but rarely get any further than Edinburgh or Glasgow.

We’ve always driven here, so it’s 31 years since I last travelled up by rail. The names of the stations conjure up memories of my journeys to summer and Easter stints as a volunteer osprey warden in my student days; Gleneagles, Pitlochary, Blairgowrie and Kingussie on the countdown to Aviemore. After a year in Leeds or London at art college, going through the rugged pass north of Blair Atholl, with its screes and cascading streams felt like crossing the border into another world of primeval landscapes and spectacular wildlife.

Food and drink on the train are included as part of our bargain break, as we’ve upgraded to first class for the eight hour journey so I indulge in a miniature of Famous Grouse blended whisky as we drink in the landscape as the train pulls out of Gleneagles.

“I don’t normally drink whisky,” I explain to the stewardess, “but I felt I should as we’re entering the Highlands.”

“These aren’t the Highlands!” she retorted.

“Yes, but Gleneagles sounds like the Highlands.”

This reminds me of my three day Highland Tour with Dr Stephen Cribb whose book Whisky on the Rocks I illustrated. Famous Grouse is a blended whisky but the book investigated the geological story behind the process water – usually spring water – used in distilling single malt whiskies.

The taste and bouquet of the blended whisky brings back our visits to some of the famous single malt distilleries on our research trip. Places such Speyside and, north of Inverness, Tain where they make Glenmorangie. We didn’t have time to visit any island distilleries unfortunately.

Muddy Boots #2

I’M TRYING not to agonise about my artwork for my current project – it’s supposed to be fun, remember! – but there are still decisions to be made in getting over a concept with clarity, and perhaps a touch of humour.

I’ve got an illustration of muddy boots to do – what could be simpler? Well, I think my first pen drawing (above, middle) looks too much like crumbly material while my second looks more like porridge than mud!

And then the boots; it’s a Victorian setting so should those be riding boots . . . or would hob-nail working boots look more down to earth? Decisions, decisions!

Perhaps I should refer to the photograph that I took of my own boots in a muddy field in the Rhubarb Triangle, back in my diary for January.

Once again, in this illustration of an unsteady horse, I find myself preferring my pencil sketch (above, left) to my finished pen and ink drawing.

I’ve got at least 100, probably more like 200 of these illustrations to draw, so I’m not going to dwell on any particular illustration. After a while I should develop a ‘house style’ and then, reviewing the whole book, if there are any illustrations that stand out as looking particularly awkward, I can soon redraw them.

 

The Parker and the Padfoot

I’M INTENDING to illustrate my next book (not the Sherlock Holmes, that’s going to have to wait, but a new, less involved idea that came to me this week) in black and white line, so this morning I got some of my fountain pens in working order again, including three of these Parker Reflex pens. I’ve got used to using my ArtPens with waterproof Noodler’s ink as this suits my everyday pen and watercolour wash drawing but I’d like to experiment with something that’s just a bit more fluid and inky to create a rather different visual identity for my new book.

I drew this vinegar bottle in the fish and chip restaurant yesterday using my extra fine-nibbed ArtPen with Noodler’s black ink and you can see the difference compared with the dunnock (right), drawn with a fine-nibbed ArtPen loaded with a black ArtPen ink cartridge. The ArtPen ink isn’t waterproof, so I can’t use it as I would the Noodler’s in conjunction with a watercolour wash.

Padfoot

I decided to try out the pens on a randomly chosen cartoon illustration for my new book, which includes, as one of its themes, creatures from local folklore. All we know of Padfoot is that it was a four-footed supernatural animal with saucer-shaped eyes which waylaid people on dark nights in lonely places.

I prefer my sketchy rough (above, right) in the fine-nibbed ArtPen to this more stylised version in ArtPen with solid black added with a Pentel Brush Pen. I want to have fun with this project so I think that I should be going for the rougher line version, which seems to come more naturally to me but then part of having fun with drawing is in trying out new approaches, so I’ve still got an open mind.

I’ll just have one more try and then move onto a fresh subject. The vagueness of the apparition of Padfoot was one of its main characteristics. It padded along softly behind you and if you looked back at it you’d see a shadowy, half-real creature in the hedgerow.

My final attempt has gone too far towards Dracula gothic and by putting trees on either side of the path I’ve implied that Padfoot’s natural habitat was woodland. You’d be more likely to meet it on a lonely byway.

The Jester of Kirklees

On a lighter note, I need an illustration of the Jester of Kirklees. I think this kind of cartoon style is going to be more successful for the book. My drawings are intended to illustrate specific points, not to be stand-alone drawings in their own right. I don’t, for instance, like to go over lines in an observational drawing but to give this cartoon a graphic look – something along the lines of a woodcut – I’ve gone over the outlines with the ArtPen.

Next, I have to illustrate a rough and ready form of clearing weeds using a spade; this book is nothing if not varied and that’s the appeal of illustrating it.

The Man in the Straw Hat

Then there’s a particular sort of straw hat. It’s associated with a local character who I’ve tried to depict here but the trouble is his character then dominates the drawing; it’s actually the straw hat that counts here.

So here’s my second version in which the straw hat takes centre stage.

 

The Little Flash Rabbit

IT’S THE WEEKEND, so as a break from my normal work I decided to have a go, once again, at creating a Flash Animation. This rabbit, which would have failed the audition for Watership Down, is from a tutorial on ‘Simple Animation’ in Ivan Hissey and Curtis Tappenden’s The Professional Step-by-Step Guide to Cartooning.

A year ago, I read right through the Teach Yourself Visually Guide to Flash MX but that has the disadvantage that when you get to Chapter 9, ‘Create Tweened Animations’, they expect you to have picked up the basics. I’m afraid that with Flash, which I use only once or twice a year, I’ve invariably forgotten the basics. The Step-by-Step Guide gives you clear simple instructions in full.

Effects like this Shape Tweening are simple to achieve once you know how. I like the way the Step-by-Step Guide casually mentions a few really useful keystrokes for Flash in the two paragraphs of instructions for shape tweening.

But I’m afraid that’s going to be the end of Flash for me for another six months! What a complex program! Everything seems designed to do what you don’t expect it to do. What finally stumped me was trying to do the simplest of processes, the selection of a sequence of frames in the animation: ‘select frames . . . by clicking and dragging the mouse across the timeline’. In my version of the program, that just drags the first frame along the timeline, leaving a sequence of blank frames. Most discouraging.

I’m not completely illiterate when it comes to computers but Flash does win the prize for the most abstruse and contrary program ever designed. Perhaps it’s too much to expect to run an old program like Flash MX on Windows 7.

Art Bag

MONDAY MORNING and I’m playing the waiting game again; my Mantaray art bag seems the most appealing subject that I have available so I draw it in ArtPen and Noodler’s black ink and have time to add a watercolour wash of Sepia, Neutral Tint, Yellow Ochre and Winsor Yellow for the press studs.

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Categorized as Drawing

Greenhouse Mural Sketch

I WAS LOOKING through my 1972 student diary recently (see Student Days) and was reminded that on 4 October that year, at the start of my first full month at college I drew:

‘ . . . a sketch from imagination of the proposed identification chart which I thought that I might do as a large painting – in emulsion of course!’

This ‘identification chart’, which grew into an 8ft x 4ft acrylic on chipboard mural, absorbed a lot of my time for the next three years and I was still adding details to it – I think the last thing that I painted was a leopard frog in the foreground – on the eve of the degree show.

To demonstrate the process that I’d gone through, I included the original sketch in my show but I was surprised when a fellow student – a young man from the jewellery department who would go on to make a name for himself as a goldsmith – asked if it was for sale.

Detail from the finished acrylic on chipboard painting

I was taken aback by this and explained that, as a working drawing, it was never intended to be for sale. It’s on the cheap smooth offset paper that they sold at the college shop, folded down the middle and on the back there are streaks where I’ve cleaned my brush, ring-marks from a coffee cup but at one end there are some delightful sketches of frogs in ballpoint pen, drawn by my tutor John Norris Wood when he was advising me to add some reptiles and amphibians to the painting.

I’ve just come across the sketch in a drawer in the plan chest and I can now see why my college friend was attracted to it. It’s rough and splodgy but there’s spontaneity about it that is inevitably missing in the laboriously crafted finished product.

Equine Delinquents

EARLIER THIS week at 6.30 in the morning we heard galloping hooves going down the lane and thought someone had got up early for a ride. At breakfast-time we saw that it was the three ponies from the field behind us that had escaped. They were escorted back up the lane with a police video van bringing up the rear.

The owners soon identified the weak point in the fence; a small gate to a service area. They sat on guard there drinking cups of coffee until repairs could be made. Later I could see from the hoof prints that the ponies got at least as far as the main road, making their way along the pavement and into the ends of driveways as they went.

Next door’s Sumac is now in flower and attracting hoverflies and bees. It’s a tree that doesn’t seem quite in step with the seasons.

Frog Trap

This morning I was upset to be unable to save a frog. It had become trapped in a drain at the edge of the road in front of Barbara’s mum’s house (which is currently up for sale). I found a pair of rubber gloves and a small bucket. Not ideal for the job, but what completely stumped me was that, without a crowbar to hand, I couldn’t use the lever point to flip open the grating. By then the frog had disappeared into the opaque black water in the sump.

Inky Feet

After drawing my slippers yesterday I thought I should try drawing my feet but I think I prefer drawing hands. The proportions are more familiar.


 

A View of the Meadow

BIOLOGIST Joe Hutto said that when he reared a brood of wild Turkeys, the main thing that he learnt from them, as he took his brood of fledglings foraging deep in the Florida Everglades, was always to be in the present moment; to give your full attention to the meadow you happen to be in, not to be thinking that a better meadow will be coming along later. You shouldn’t rush along regardless with some future goal in mind. It reminds me of Cornford’s poem;

‘O why do you walk through the fields in gloves, Missing so much and so much?’

Wherever you happen to be just now, that’s as good as it gets.

The young Turkeys did seem to be able to make all sorts of discoveries on their home patch. Hutto already knew the area well but he’d never realised, for example, that there were several rattlesnakes living nearby. Hutto admits to identifying so much with his charges that he joined them by eating the occasional grasshopper.

The Grasshopper Mind


I was listening to impressionist Rory Bremner’s investigation into Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. His ADHD, undiagnosed at the time, led to him having a total memory wipe-out when he walked on stage at the Royal Variety Performance.

Looking at my diary for 1972, I can’t help thinking that I had a tendency towards Attention Deficit. One of the symptoms of ADHD is having a grasshopper mind; always leaping on to the next thing. I was juggling so many projects at the time – thesis, exhibition, drawings, leaflets, scripts, articles. I can’t possibly have done them all to the standard that I was capable of. Would I have done better to have focussed on one aspect of my work and to have aimed at excellence at that one thing?

Experts on ADHD say that it’s a matter of degree. The off-the-wall thinking and improvisation of a grasshopper mind can lead to creative solutions. Typically, in business, someone who is good at a more creative, hands-on job – in sales for instance – will struggle when they get promoted to management, which requires organisational skills.

One strategy for ADHD sufferers is to make sure you have a partner who has those organisational skills. Thank goodness I met Barbara!

Of course observational drawing also forces me to slow down and to be in the moment for a while.

Student Days

23 June 1972: Working on my degree show at Leeds College of Art. Harpo and Chico.

MY OLD DIARIES and sketchbooks sit on a shelf in the attic and it’s only on odd occasions, such as looking up the details of my first meeting with Stan Barstow (see previous post), that I take a look at them. While I have my 1972 diary down here by the scanner, I can’t resist showing you a few more of the drawings from it. I can see the influence of Victor Ambrus in my pen and Indian ink drawing (above).

In some ways I prefer these playful attempts to catch the events of everyday life to my self-concious efforts as an art student.

Time Capsule

College work, films, television programmes, concerts, books and my dreams all appear in the diary. The Marx Brothers and Dr Who keep cropping up and this Jon Pertwee episode from a story of a 30th century World Empire, screened on Saturday 8 April 1972, seems appropriate as it involves a capsule from the Time Lords which ‘can only be opened by the one for whom it is intended’.

Before watching that episode of Dr Who, I’d been browsing the secondhand books on Wakefield Market and climbing Storrs Hill ‘the hard way’ (right).

I wish that my time capsule of a diary could be more of a two-way process as I’d have one or two pieces of advice to my younger self!

Looking at a diary is a different experience to looking back at one of my sketchbooks. Drawings in my sketchbooks bring back memories of particular places or incidents but as the diary is more about what I was thinking it makes me remember what it felt like to be me. Unlike the sketchbooks, the diaries were never intended to be seen by my tutors as part of my college work nor were they ‘secret diaries’ full of angst. Almost all the drawings were drawn from memory as I wrote up each day’s events.

Greenhouse Mural

It was the year of my 21st birthday and in the September I started at the Royal College of Art. After a few weeks, on Wednesday 4 October, I came up with an ambitious idea for a painting that would take me, on and off, the rest of my 3 years in the Illustration Department to complete:

I did some sketching of plants and birds in the Conservatory. Well it wasn’t too bad doing them in ink. But, after lunch I decided I would have a go with my designer acrylic gouache. A disaster. Perhaps it was too hot to work with paints. But the difficulties; of making the brush go where you want it to – you can’t push it; of mixing the paint and of having no black or white.

I gave up and stormed down to the room (like Van Gogh returning from a cornfield) and did a sketch from imagination of the proposed identification chart which I thought that I might do as a large painting – in emulsion of course!

 Tutorial: ‘Cheat like mad!’

I favoured emulsion because I was so used to using it for scenic painting. Fortunately painting tutor Bateson Mason persuaded me that acrylics would be more suitable. From then on the illustration tutors had to make there way up to my room at the Kensington Gore building if they wanted to keep up with my painfully slow progress on the 4ft x 8ft acrylic on chipboard painting. I remember Bryan Robb chuckling and heartily endorsing Quentin Blake’s advice to ‘cheat like mad’. That’s my natural history illustration tutor John Norris Wood on the right.

I particularly like this drawing of me busily finishing an overdue article for Yorkshire Life in my narrow room at the college hostel at Evelyn Gardens, South Kensington, only 10 minutes walk from the college. It brings back that feeling of having a room of my own for the first time and having lots of time allocated to creative work.

Mid-term, I was invited back to Yorkshire for the Morley Operatic production of Pickwick, to see the scenery for  that I’d painted during the summer vacation (how did I fit that in?!). You can see, in this entry from my diary for the following day, when I had time for a walk around the valley, that after just two months in London I was glad to be back home and that I was feeling a nostalgic pull from my home patch.