Category: Art

The Buried Cliff of Holderness

The white cliffs of Flamborough Head aren’t white all the way to the top. As I learnt on a field trip led by Richard Myerscough, they’re covered by boulder clay – the Skipsea Till – left by the last glaciation to reach Yorkshire.

My notes from the Sewerby field trip.

From Sewerby south through Holderness all the way to Hessle near Hull, the cliff is completely buried by the Ice Age deposits. Not far from Sewerby Steps you can still find the remnants of a raised beach which dates from the last interglacial. The sea level was a metre higher than its present level.

Interglacial fauna

Fragments of bone found amongst the shingle of this ancient beach include straight-tusked elephant, bison, hippopotamus and narrow-lipped rhinoceros.

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Robot

Robot

When you’re starting with a geometrical shape – in this case a hexagon – and your mind goes blank about what to make it into, the traditional robot is a useful character to turn to. My comic in my primary school days was Eagle, which featured Frank Hampson’s Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future on its cover, so I like the style of 1950s science fiction where the rockets, robots and space stations look like a plausible extension of the technology of the period. While drawing the telescreen, I thought about our 405-line black-and-white television and our record player – similar to the classic Dansette – covered in wine-red and cream leatherette.

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Eric Reichbaum

Eric

Eric Reichbaum, photographer on today’s Adobe Live ‘From the Sofa’ with Tony Harmer and Emma Lextrait.

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Geranium and grasses

geranium and grasses

These grasses and the clump of geranium by the pond reminded me of the sort of subject that Frederick Franck would draw in his book The Zen of Seeing, so I decided on a change from my usual pen and colour wash and I’ve stuck with line only. Typically Franck would add a hint of tone by dabbing parts of the drawing with a wet brush or finger tip. I can’t do that as I use waterproof ink.

I had to accept that I wasn’t going to be able to pin down this subject as the grasses were swishing around in the breeze.

Start with a Square

fantasy buildings

Fill a page with ‘drawings without any plan or image in your head, just start drawing’. Our latest assignment on Mattias Adolfsson’s The Art of Sketching course is a challenge for me as I’m usually either drawing from life in my sketchbook or getting together reference for an illustration. To be sure that I wasn’t starting with a plan in mind I started with a shape for each of these: square, circle and triangle. A theme soon emerged of buildings on rocks.

For the first I was thinking of Greek islands and while drawing the second I found myself thinking about Scarborough’s Rotunda Museum. The third would be at home deep in a German or Austrian forest.

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Categorized as cartoon

Baring-Gould Werewolf Slayer

Baring-Gould

During his time at the Mission at Horbury Bridge, from 1864 to 1867, the newly-ordained Sabine Baring-Gould wrote the hymn Onward! Christian Soldiers, met and fell in love with mill girl Grace Taylor and wrote The Book of Werewolves (1865), which Bram Stoker considered the definitive account of lycanthropy (Bram Stoker had heard rumours that there was to be a sequel on vampires, but sadly that didn’t happen).

There is no evidence that Sabine had to fight any werewolves during his time as a curate, working alongside Canon Sharp, but how could I resist him as a subject for the latest challenge from Swedish cartoonist Mattias Adolfsson in my Art of Sketching online course. We were asked to show aspects of a character’s biography through tattoos.

Alex Jenkins

Illustrator Alex Jenkins on today’s Adobe Live ‘From the Sofa’ session. I attempted to match his style in Fresco, using the Blake pen and the Natural inker but my line work is never as calm as his.

Alex said that his early influences included Robert Crumb. I was reminded of Glen Baxter and Gary Larson.

Alex

My initial sketch in Conte had a bit more life to it than the coloured version that I drew on the layer above it.

Link

Alex Gamsu Jenkins

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When Cats do Online Quizzes

cat quiz cartoon

Another homemade birthday card, this time for Barbara’s nephew Simon, who we’ve been playing against in an online family quiz.

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Garstang & Flock

comic
Tweets
The Twitter feed: I stuck with the text of the original tweets.

My thanks to Suzy Scavenger and to her hen Garstang, the chicken with the twisted beak. This is the latest assignment in my Mattias Adolfsson online course, The Art of Sketching. We were asked to draw a comic featuring the self-portrait comic character we’d created.

The dialogue is taken from directly from an exchange of tweets between Suzy and I about the removal of slave trader Edward Colston’s statue from his plinth overlooking the harbour in Bristol. What could have been a serious discussion of whether it’s acceptable to destroy works of art has been somewhat undermined by Garstang, who has overacted in every frame she appears in.

Roughs
Roughs: ‘Pencil’ blocking out (drawn on the iPad); colour rough (iPad); final rough (pen on paper, real paper)
Garstang

“Marvellous!” said Suzy, when I explained what I had in mind for the comic strip, “Garstang deserves some recognition.”

As you can see for my Clip Studio iPad cartoon (left), all this celebrity could easily go to Garstang’s head. In my cartoon, she’s standing on a copy of the popular Victorian magazine Tit-Bits (which I remember still being in print in the late 1950s). A copy dating from 1895 was discovered hidden in Colston’s plinth.

studies
Garstang drawn from a photograph Suzy sent me. Yes, hens do sometimes have long wattles.
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Gavin Campbell

gavin

Gavin Campbell, illustrator, on today’s Adobe Live ‘From the Sofa’ session, started his career with a series of portraits and photo-realistic pencil illustrations, ‘drawing’ with the rubber to create the highlights. Watching him working through a composition featuring multiple layers in Photoshop, I could see his pencil-drawing background coming through, for instance in the way he built up the tones. In places where some illustrators might have used a 3D mesh to create a contoured effect across the subject, he preferred a ‘liquify’ option which enabled him to create the same effect through drawing.

I’ve drawn this in Fresco on my iPad Pro, making a lot of use of the cross hatch brush which I was reminded of during one of the ‘Sofa’ live streams last week.

Link

Gavin Campbell on Behance

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