Category: Art

Grappling the Graphite

grappling the graphite

Take a break, keep fit, Mattias Adolfsson advises us on his Art of Sketching course . . . and draw some exercises suitable for illustrators.

soft lead

It’s a while since I’ve tackled graphite and certainly I’m not ready for H pencils yet.

HB pencil

I can just about manage HB.

nib muscles

The problem is that I’ve spent too long working with pens.

pencil pusher

I was never cut out to be a pencil pusher.

pencil sharpening

I remember the rare pleasure of being appointed pencil monitor at school. With all thirty of the class’s pencils to sharpen there was a tendency for us to push the machine to its limits and turn too fast, result: broken leads. This meant you had to start over and the pencils rapidly decreased in size.

pumping ink

I’m better sticking to what I’m used to, but I’m drawing so much that I’m regularly having to top up my Lamy Vista with De Atramentis ink. Quite a workout and I have to mop up the mess with paper napkin afterwards. Perhaps I should go back to cartridges, you just pop them in and you’re ready to go.

Clifton Infant Teachers, 1955-58

Infant teachers

‘Draw your first teacher’ is the next prompt from Mattias in the ‘Memory Lane’ section of his Art of Sketching course.

I remember a surprising amount of details of the first couple of terms of my school life, in Mrs Clegg’s class at Wrenthorpe Infants, but we moved to Horbury before the end of the year and my sister Linda and I started at Clifton Infants, a newly-built school at the far end of Manorfields Estate.

Clifton Infants School

plan
  1. Go in the main entrance and turn left and you’d find yourself in Mrs (or Miss?) Birdhouse’s class.
  2. Mrs Wallis‘ class was nearest the school entrance, overlooking an oak tree and, beyond the school grounds, ‘The Reck’, Green Park recreation ground. In my sketch Mrs Wallis is holding a couple of the large, light greyish, wooden building bricks that we used. I remember building a model church with them and surrounding it with smaller wooden bricks to represent gravestones. I was into history even in my second year at infants school.
  3. The teacher holding the flash card had the classroom that faced you as you came in the main entrance. Unfortunately, I can’t remember her name. This was my penultimate class at Clifton. She’d made several of these flash cards, on sheets of sugar paper, each with a photograph from a magazine stuck at the top to give us a clue what the first word was as she held them up for the whole class to read.
    One sheet had just one word in place:
    “You like this one don’t you?!” she chuckled as she held it up.
    I believe that she was the teacher who specialised in music and, now that I’m remembering a bit more about her, I think that she had darker, longer hair than I’ve shown. She drove a car, which resembled a smaller version of the Austin Princess. The bonnet reminded me of the Rolls Royce. I remember this because she explained musical notes – minims, crotchets and semibreves – in terms of children, adults and her in her car, making their way to school.
  4. Finally Miss Marsh, our final class teacher, who became headmistress during my time there.

A Harrowing Experience

Disk harrow

The latest in my Art of Sketching course and Mattias has asked us to draw a favourite toy from childhood. This dates from when we lived at Wrenthorpe, so I guess that I would have been about 4 or 5 years old.

A disk harrow might seem an obscure object of desire but for children at that time agricultural implements were probably the equivalent of diggers today. We lived on Ruskin Avenue, a suburban road of then newish houses, but there was a field between our back garden and the railway embankment, so an assortment of agricultural machinery used to trundle down our road towards the field entrance a few doors on.

And talking of agricultural machinery, I remember being mystified by this snippet of conversation from my first year at the Infants school at Wrenthorpe:

The Bottle-top Tractor

Bottle-top tractor

I’m guessing that there must have been a foil-recycling charity appeal, to raise funds to buy tractors for some war-hit country but I remember puzzling over an image of my friend assembling a tractor using the milk bottle tops he’d collected.

Wrenthorpe
Mrs Clegg’s class, Wrenthorpe Infants, 1955

I drew these before reaching for the photograph album and I’m pleased to see that I wasn’t too far out with fashion trends. Tank tops are due for a comeback. I think that it was the confident-looking boy in braces, top left, standing right behind me, who told us about the tractor scheme. He’s evidently got so much confidence that you could believe him if he said that’s what he was doing.

Mrs Clegg’s classroom, the old school building, Wrenthorpe Infants, 1955.

From the indoor informal portraits, I can see that the photographer had guessed that I’d grow up to be the sort of guy who spends a lot of time in coffee shops. I like the way the focus is on the anxious-looking girl waiting in the Wendy house. Glad that I dressed for the occasion: a tie and a tank top.

Desert Opera

Still on the ‘just keep drawing’ prompt from Mattias Adolfsson’s The Art of Sketching course, I was beginning to run out of abstract shapes as a starting point for my drawings. The abstract curves that I started off with suggested a roof or a tent and by the time I drew in the stone steps and circular base I found myself thinking about a stage set; one with a revolving stage.

For the characters that might inhabit this desert base, I was thinking of an opera, perhaps a Philip Glass production, but inevitably in setting it in the 1930s or 40s I’ve ended up with Indiana Jones stereotypes. Although the zookeeper with the camel, if drawn in Hergé’s ligne claire style, could have a walk-on role in a Tintin adventure.

An Elephant Seal of Torquay

Limerick
An Elephant Seal of Torquay,
was desperate to swim in the sea :
But he couldn't reach,
the far end of the beach,
'cos the crowds had invaded Torquay.

Edward Lear seems to be contagious. A friend of mine composed three limericks for the parish magazine and now she finds she can’t help slipping into limerick mode.

My elephant seal offering was inspired by a page of Edward Lear-style punning cartoons posted by ‘have_pen_will_draw’, who like me is tackling Mattias Adolfsson’s The Art of Sketching course. His other punning creations included ‘tiger shark’, ‘bull frog’ and ‘horse fly’.

I’m lucky enough to have a copy of Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense, which helpfully has every verso page left blank, so that I could slot in my cartoon in Photoshop. I’m particularly pleased that I was able to almost match Lear’s choice of typeface by using the typeface Didot.

If only I could match the inky spontaneity of Lear’s drawings!

The Lost Hammerstone of Doggerland

cartoon

If you’d been standing on Flamborough Head 8,000 years ago, as early man began to move back into Britain, you’d be looking out over Doggerland, a landscape of woodland, marsh, rivers and lakes.

In the nature diary that I’m writing for September’s The Dalesman, I’m delving into prehistory but thought that I’d pop in one of my cartoons to lighten the mix a bit. But so as not to leave you in suspense, you’ll be pleased to hear that 8,000 years later we’ve found that missing hammerstone.

Star Books

Another ‘start with a shape’ drawing: this time it was a star. It suggests that after 100 days of lockdown I’m missing browsing, drinking lattes and visiting historic towns. Wakefield had its own Shambles and a cluster of half-timbered buildings which survived wartime bombing but which were swept away in the 1960s to provides space for new modern concrete and brick shops.

Apologies that there’s too much zooming in and out in this little iMovie clip. I thought that the best thing to do was to dive in and do something but having re-familiarised myself with the set-up, I can now try something more calm and considered.

Star Books

Al Ca-Pen’s Projection Racket

Al Ca-Pen

Another homemade birthday card, this time in honour of our nephew Andrew’s profession – no he’s not a professional gangster, but he trained as an engineer so in the distant pre-CAD days he must have experienced the perils of preparing a technical drawing.

Boris versus the Red Baron

Boris versus the Red Baron

It’s been a busy week in the homemade card factory. Here’s one for my brother-in-law and aviation enthusiast Dave’s birthday today. It’s as near as I’m ever going to get to hard-hitting satire. I’ll have to resign myself to never making it into Private Eye.