I’ve returned to drawing on the iPad after a break of several months.
I rescued this grasshopper from the bird bath in mid-September.
Procreate Sketches
Category: Art
On Stage at Horbury School . . .
Great celebrities who trod the boards at Horbury School:
- David Munrow, early music historian
- R. D. Woodall, local historian and head teacher
- Jane McDonald, singer, who appeared as Snow White in a Pageant Players’ pantomime (she’s now starring in pantomimes at the London Palladium, so we taught her well!)
- Sir Christopher Chataway, runner (one of the pacemakers for Roger Bannister when he ran the first 4-minute mile), who officially opened the school in 1963 when he served as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Education in Harold Macmillan’s government
- Allan Schiller, classical concert pianist
. . . and not forgetting:
- My brother Bill who played a pirate on the Hispaniola in the Pageant Player’s performance of the Mermaid Theatre version of ‘Treasure Island’ (we used their scripts and Bill told me that one of them was dotted with odd doodles: we suspect it was the script Spike Milligan used when he played Ben Gunn)
- My sister Linda, who played Lucy Lockit in the Ossett Grammar School production of ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ (a new assembly hall was under construction at Ossett so they used Horbury’s stage for several years)
- And me. I never performed on stage but I painted scenery for the Pageants for 40 years and, as a young member of the Horbury Concert Society, I illustrated and designed posters, leaflets and programme covers, including those for David Munrow and Allan Schiller
Happy birthday to Zac, who may get tread the boards at Horbury Academy in the next few years.
Link
Jane MacDonald, singer and BAFTA award winning TV presenter
Allan Schiller, classical concert pianist
Portal
If you’re standing in the queue for the Science Museum on Exhibition Road you might spot this inscription above the large and imposing archway opposite:
SCIENCE AND ART DEPARTMENT
SCHOOLS ** MUSEUM
A.D. 1852
The date is misleading because the building – now the Henry Cole Wing of the Victoria and Albert Museum – was constructed between 1899 and 1909.
I was seven years old when I first joined the queue at the Science Museum (I can be sure of the date because I remember a poster for Kirk Douglas’s film ‘The Vikings’ – released in August 1958 – on hoardings around the Natural History Museum gardens).
The Royal College of Art
At that time there was an arts and crafts-style mosaic in the frame to the right of the archway. Several muses reclined elegantly beneath an inscription indicating that this was then the ‘Royal College of Art’.
Cultural DNA
Happy birthday to James. We’ve both done the Ancestry.com DNA test recently and, would you believe it, I’ve discovered that I have a close male relative in East Lothian.
Wakefield on Screen
The only one of these television dramas and movies that I spotted filming on location in Wakefield was Alan Plater’s ‘The Biederbecke Affair’ (1985) in a sequence where James Bolan and Barbara Flyn’s characters were driving their battered yellow Bedford van round and round County Hall.
Happy birthday last week to Sue.
Eliza Elland Bell
In this photograph, probably taken around 1901, my great aunt, Eliza Elland Bell, by now Eliza Mitchell, is in her mid-thirties.
Born at Blaco Hill Farm Cottages in 1867, by the time she was 13 Eliza had started work as a domestic servant for the Johnsons at a Elm House Farm, Lound.
Ten years later and still working as a domestic servant she’d moved to Miss Hurt’s in Sutton-cum-Lound, and it was there that she met her future husband, the butler, William Henry Mitchell.
Costume
I’m colouring these images in Affinity Photo and Adobe Photoshop. Would a light sky blue be a likely colour for her outfit? I asked my friend Hilary Stubbs, my go-to costume expert:
‘I think that this colour is perfectly possible,’ she tells me, ‘though pale green or lilac would work too. Not pink as it would be considered a”young” colour I do like this colour though and it looks right.
‘The overall look of the garment should look like a dress though in reality it was probably have been a two piece to help with fit and laundering.The skirt often hook and eyed on the waist to prevent gapping.’
This wedding photograph (see link below) was taken just a year or two earlier in 1899 to me has a more Victorian look to it. The 1901 (if that’s when it was taken) with its layers and small jacket looks more Edwardian.
Link
Swiss Chard
Swiss chard at Harlow Carr, drawn with my non-dominant left hand.
Guest Artist
A guest illustrator in my nature diary in the July ‘Dalesman’: Jenny Hawksley, who joined us for a lightning tour of the North Yorks Moors and coast last summer drew the garland of wild flowers.
Lighthouse
Experimenting with Procreate and loosely based on Coquet Island lighthouse but minus the puffins, sandwich and roseate terns this is my take on the first project in the ‘Beginner’s Guide to Digital Painting in Procreate’. My thanks to freelance director and artist Izzy Burton for her step-by-step tutorial.
Foxgloves
‘Versatile, bee-friendly, drop-dead gorgeous,’ foxgloves are the cover star of this month’s RHS ‘Garden’ magazine.
They self seed around the garden and we’ve got more than usual this year as we haven’t cleared them from the veg beds, which we’re revamping this year.