This looks like an Andy Warhol-style famous-for-fifteen-minutes portrait of John Carr but the idea is to come up with a colour harmony that will suit the Carr Tricentenary exhibit in the Redbox Gallery in Horbury.
Procreate includes a Colour Harmony Wheel so starting off with the colour of Yorkshire stone – the coal measures sandstone of St Peter’s Church – I’ve experimented with the various options available. Complementary does give me enough colours, Tetradic gives too many fighting against each other, so it’s the Split Complementary, Analogous and Triadic that are most likely to give me a workable colour scheme.
Saving half the work while drawing a butterfly; my latest Procreate drawing tutorial using symmetry in drawing assist. I’ve faded out the photograph of the peacock butterfly that I’m basing my drawing on so I’ve put in a reference image, floating in the top left hand corner, so that I can see the colours.
While I wouldn’t use symmetry drawing assist if I was out drawing with the iPad I am going to use it for a logo I’m designing which has to be strictly symmetric.
Procreate also includes ‘Animation Assist’, which turns layers into frames and gives you a timeline and onion skinning (showing a faint impression of your previous frames).
Not sure what happened to the unfortunate butterfly’s dislocated left wing, but you get the idea.
We’ve got a tricentenary coming up: John Carr, at various times through his life a stone mason, bridge surveyor, architect and Mayor of York, was born in Horbury, in a cottage that still stands at the lower end of Cluntergate, in 1723.
I’m designing an exhibit for the town’s Redbox Gallery, in the repurposed telephone box on Queen Street. Perhaps a three dimensional version of my cartoon, drawn for a birthday card a year or two ago, would be an eye-catching solution and an excuse to bake a three-tier cake for the launch party.
We want to get away from the portrait of him at the height of his success, looking like a rather stuffy Georgian gentleman.
Royal College of Art, Valentine’s Day, Wednesday 14 February 1972: Today at 11 o’clock a dreadful fire. The College shop on the Ground Floor was in flames. Painting my mural in the college greenhouse, I at first thought the alarm was a distant circular saw but I was puzzled by why so many people were hurrying through.
The smoke was funnelled up the stair well and got into the greenhouse. From the courtyard I could see it billowing out of the windows. At least 7 birds are dead. Of course small birds are very susceptible to fumes.
I sketched four of the dead birds on the following Friday.
(adapted from my student diary and sketchbook)
Photography Course
The following week, I had a break from the painting when I took the college’s three-week photography course, which I’ve written about previously in this Wild Yorkshire blog.
On the following Thursday, after a morning of photography at the Chelsea Physic Garden, I met up with my tutor John Norris Wood. Judging from my conversation with him he’d spotted the flaws in my workflow and I haven’t changed much fifty years later!
The Demise of the College Greenhouse
In 1985 this appeal for help in the college greenhouse appeared in student newsletter. My thanks to Sarah Mercer, Digitisation Officer (Special Collections), at the college library for spotting this and to Henrietta Goodden for passing it on to me.
The greenhouse would soon be repurposed as a drawing studio. The Rector, Jocelyn Stevens offered to rehouse the birds in his own greenhouse.
Tchaikovsky Concert
A visit to the bank . . . luckily I wasn’t overdrawn (just sketched in very quickly).
And just one more piece of ephemera: ‘The highlight of today,’ I recorded in my diary for 11th February, ‘was the Tchaikovsky concert; Nutcracker, Piano Concerto No. 1, Capriccio Italien, Swan Lake and, with cannons and the Coldstream Guards, the 1812 overture.’
February 1995: the only time that I played the title role in a theatrical production, but as this was a Wakefield further education evening class production improvised from a John Wain short story The Death of the Hindlegs that did mean I was playing the hind legs of a pantomime donkey.
But my niece Sarah, then aged (almost) five, spotted a shortcoming in my moving death scene: ‘Uncle Richard, I could tell that you weren’t really dead because I could see that you were still breathing.’
The action took place on stage and back stage but my elaborate set never got built. The audience had to use their imagination.
The people include my fellow thespians, my nephew James, sister Linda, mum Gladys (but preferred her second name Joan) and our goddaughter Helen with a short-eared rabbit (she still keeps rabbits!)
Disambiguation: Rob isn’t the ‘Pirate Rob’ featured in Ben Fogle’s New Lives in the Wild on Tuesday. Although we think that the dreadlocks would suit him.
Feather that I picked up by the track at St Aidan’s yesterday and I think that it’s a secondary from the right wing of a goose. A large flock of pink-footed geese went over, touching down at the Astley Lake end of the reserve.
A juvenile great-crested grebe, drawn on the iPad with shadow areas and colour added on separate layers, which are set to ‘multiply’. Latest exercise in my Introduction to Procreate course.
