R2-D2 and C-3PO: how they are related.
Happy birthday (yesterday) to a Star Wars fan who shares her name with NASA’s plucky little (weighing in at just 200 kg at the launch) solar Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph.
R2-D2 and C-3PO
Category: Art
The Hogweed Jungle
Monday morning and I’m back drawing by the tangle of hogweed, hemlock, nettle, dock and cleavers at Newmillerdam car park.
Baggage Simulator
The launch of their first Virtual Reality baggage carousel wasn’t the success that Microsoft Flight Simulator had hoped for.
Happy birthday to Dave.
Coffee Break
Happy birthday to Andrew (in the former Charles Roberts wagon works, where he started his career the Coffee Stop has opened in the room adjacent to the old drawing office).
June Sketches
Recent sketches from my pocket-sized A6 landscape sketchbook.
Robin Hood’s Grave
Photographs from our weekend tour of Kirklees Park where all that remains of the Priory are lintels and stone recycled for use in the buildings of Home Farm and the Gatehouse where, according to tradition, Robin Hood died (see my earlier post). The barn would have been in use at the time Cistercian nuns occupied the Priory.
There’s only a fragment of the original tombstone left as over the century so many visitors have chipped off fragments – Robin Hood’s stone was reputed to cure toothache. As Dr Borlik pointed out, the plant debris (larch needles?) scattered on the surface of the stone seem to have picked out a faint impression of the shaft of the cross that early drawings show carved on the stone.
The Yorkshire Robin Hood
Dr Todd Borlik and an online Dr Alex Brown were the speakers at The Yorkshire Robin Hood talk and discussion at Huddersfield University yesterday.
Todd, a Shakespeare scholar with a special interest in Renaissance Ecocriticism put the tradition of Robin Hood’s death and burial in Kirklees into context. He mentioned that shortly before Shakespeare wrote As You Like It, set in the Forest of Arden, a Robin Hood play had been performed in the Rose Theatre, just across the road from the Globe.
In his talk Riding the Wheel of Fortune with Robin Hood, Alex looked at how the fear of downward social mobility in post pandemic medieval England is taken up in some of the earliest surviving Robin Hood ballads, particularly in the story of the poor knight Sir Richard of the Lee in A Lyttell Geste of Robyn Hode.
In the afternoon we got a chance to visit Robin Hood’s Grave and the gatehouse of Kirklees Priory, recently restored as a private home.
Summer River
Stonecrop, viper’s bugloss, marsh woundwort, bream, banded demoiselle and a family of swans on our walk alongside the canal and the Calder today. Now we’re past midsummer’s day racken and bramble have grown up shoulder high, trees are in full leaf and on the riverside path, tall grasses are going to seed
Four Lane Ends
Once known as Four Lane Ends, this is the view as it was in 1967 from Tithe Barn Street looking across Westfield Road to Jenkin Road, with Arnold Tattersfield’s newsagents on the left, Lee & Briggs ironmongers on the right. The fourth ‘lane’ on the near right is Manor Road.
I drew the little sketch that it’s based on while sitting at the Tithe Barn Street back entrance to the old Congregational Chapel (extreme left) while working as a teller when my dad was standing for Horbury Urban District Council. I had to politely ask every voter as they walked in for their number on the electoral roll. Towards the end of the day the local ‘independents’ (really Conservatives) would go around rounding up anyone who had promised to support them but hadn’t yet turned up.
The original of linocut was black on white but I like this reversed version, made by going for the wrong keyboard shortcut in Photoshop (Control+I instead of Control+Alt+I. After all these years I still get that wrong when I’m resizing an image). I’m currently re-scanning drawings of Horbury for a reprint of my local guide to the historic buildings of the town.
I was influenced by Daily Mail cartoonist Trog’s bold pen and ink drawings in the paper’s long-running cartoon strip Flook.
Earl ‘Eaton
Drawn with a Canada goose quill that I picked up at Cannon Hall last week, another colourful candidate in our Wakefield by-election: Sir Archibald Stanton, Earl ‘Eaton, Monster Raving Loony Party.
