As well as the fantasy pens, I’ve been adding to this A3 sheet of pen studies over the last week. The red fountain pen, the Osmiroid B2, is one that I probably haven’t used for decades but I found that I still had a cartridge that fitted it, so I cleaned it out and drew the Osmiroid ‘tipped medium soft’ with it to finish off the sheet.
And here’s the final sketchbook spread of my fantasy pens. I had a space bottom left to fill so I finished off with a Metamorphosis Pen (apologies for my spelling) and Big-Fish-Eat-Little-Fish Food Chain Pen.
I’m looking forward to Lesson 2 of my online illustration course. Luckily there’s no time limit on completing assignments.
When travel restrictions are eased, if tourists ever get to travel the 7,000 light years to IC 4703, The Eagle Nebula, they’re going to want to take home a souvenir of its bucket-list highlight The Pillars of Creation. So how about this pen, pencil and eraser set?
The Pogo Pen was inspired by a great niece and nephew’s ongoing attempt to pogo jump the height of Everest, in 9cm increments. I realise that this would be more like a rubber stamp than a pen.
But my favourite pen out of this batch is the Frankenstein Pen, modelled on Boris Karloff’s neck bolt. Like the Apple Pencil, it’s rechargeable . . . if you happen to be on the top of a mountain in Transylvania during a thunderstorm.
My pen project continues but I thought that the inks ought to make an appearance today. The ’20 ounce’ bottle of Super Quink red ink was redundant stock that my dad brought back from the office c.1970. It still works fine. The Chinese ink in the attractive blue-and-white bottle was something that I tried when I worked on my monochrome sketchbook published as High Peak Drifter. I made four dilutions at different strengths which I took on my travels to simplify adding the tone.
Daler’s FW Acrylic Artists Ink goes back to my Yorkshire Rock days. I remember buying two shades of blue when I drew an underwater spread of ‘Life on the Reef’ for the Carboniferous Limestone section of the book. This bottle was Sepia, my go-to colour for most of the line work.
The Special Red is Pelikan Drawing Ink, from the 1970s. The one with the blue cap is Winsor and Newton Calligraphy Ink, the Burnt Sienna behind it is Rotring Drawing Ink. Bringing up the rear on the right, are plastic bottles of Stephen’s and Horse stamp pad inks.
The Crime Writer’s Pen
My latest fantasy pens include a gardener’s pen, complete with dibber and garden twine, a crime writer’s pen which will keep CSI busy for days and a walking pole pen which includes compass, pedometer and even and emergency supply of Kendal Mint Cake.
Our first assignment on Mattias Adolfsson’s the online illustration course The Art of Sketching: Transform Your Doodles into Art (see link below) that I’ve just started is to get our pens together. These are a small selection . . .
Next is to produce a sheet of observational drawings of some of those pens, trying out different techniques as we go. I’m still only halfway down my A3 page but the good news is that, with all those pots of pens, I won’t run out of subject matter.
I’ve already made a start on the next stage of the assignment, which is to take things one stage further and draw a sheet of fantasy pens. It doesn’t matter how silly the idea is.
The card shops and National Trust gift shops have yet to reopen so I’m still producing homemade birthday cards, this one celebrating a birthday and a very successful bee hotel. The day our friend John Gardner finished constructing it and put it in place, several solitary bees moved in.
Meanwhile the numerous cats who wonder through our back garden provide material for cards, including these two characters. When it came to a showdown, ‘Bear’ through bluster and body language had no trouble seeing off the smaller ‘Wildcat’ tabby.
I’ve started a new sketchbook for an online illustration course (more of that later). We’re asked to sign our name on the first page and write the date . . .
The difficult ones first! I knew it was the 2nd.
I had an idea of how I’d like to draw the unfurling croziers of the male fern, growing by the pond. It didn’t work out the way I’d hoped, probably because I wasn’t close enough to take in the detail I’d intended to add.
But that’s an advantage of a sketchbook, as opposed to a commission, I can relax and move on to the next drawing. Really enjoyed drawing these.
These lino cutting tools include a Linocraft Pen-tools set which probably dates from my mum’s time at Ripon Teacher Training College, c. 1937-39. I have used these tools occasionally cto produce Christmas cards.
The Linocraft set was ‘Déposée en Suisse’, registered in Switzerland, but manufactured by Perry & Co. Ltd., London and Birmingham. Also from Birmingham are the set of Lino Cutters, presented to me by a fellow student at Leeds, who felt that I’d be more likely to use them.
Lino pen-tool, Perry & Co. Ltd.
Gladys Joan Swift at Ripon
Here’s my mum, Gladys Joan Bell, nee Swift, (1918-2015) at Ripon Teacher Training College. c.1938. She’s armed with ruler pencil and a stack of sheets of what could be card, leather or textiles, so obviously up to something crafty.
She won a prize for designing a Coronation Pageant in 1937, a project which fortunately I spotted in the kitchen waste bin at my mum’s one Sunday morning when we made our regular call on her for a coffee. She was able to choose her prize so she went for a serious Oxford University Press history book, The Evolution of England by J. A. Williamson.
‘I don’t know why I chose that,’ she said to me, ‘I expect it was because I thought it was the sort of thing that I should choose.’
Appropriate choice, but it does look like tough going. My mum loved history but, as her designs for the Oakleaves Pageant suggest, she preferred a more colourful subject, such as Richard III or mysteries of the Holbein portrait of Thomas More and his family.
A quote from The Pace Quickens, the final section of Williamson’s book, written in 1931:
“There are more violent deaths on the road in a week-end than on the railways in a year, and they are generally set down to accident, as if it was impossible to prevent them. . . Public hospitals are filled with the victims, and it is even worth while for a private speculator to open a nursing-establishment near a busy road under the sign: ‘Motor casualties taken in.'”
These wood engraving tools date from my time in Norman Webster’s etching department at Leeds Polytechnic Department of Communication Design, 1970-1972.
In wood engraving, you use the end grain of a the wood, often box or pear. The leather cushion is for keeping the block steady as you cut away the areas that you don’t want to print with the graving tools. I bought myself a little sharpening wedge, but I have to admit that, fifty years later, I’ve yet to use it.
Skokholm, 1970
Wood engraving and sketchbook (which I slung around my neck using the rope as I explored the island).
ALL FOOLS DAY
In the morning it snowed. I stayed indoors doing postcards in the early part of the morning. I went out along the North Coast watching the breakers. It started to hail and I came across the Goats. These are descendants of goats that were kept by the lighthouse men for fresh milk but now they are wild roaming round the island fending for themselves. They have long shaggy coats that blow around in the wind and long horns. They look rather like Maddox-Browns Scapegoat.
With apologies to Alfred Hitchcock, this comic strip was inspired by the variety of fly masks that our local ponies are now wearing and a rather striking turnout rug that one pony was wearing a week or two ago, before the weather warmed up.
Ponies, sheep and a couple of donkeys graze in the pastures around our local camping store, Go Outdoors, which is currently in lockdown. They stock selection of pony blankets, stable rugs and rain sheets, so I might have to draw a cartoon of my two pony characters going in there and using the fitting rooms and full-length mirrors.
In the final frame in the original version of this comic strip, I had the McGuffin-clad pony extolling the virtues of his outfit with wide-eyed enthusiasm, but this made it look as if he was delivering the punch-line to a joke. I made some minor adjustments to the eyes and the corner of the mouth in an attempt to make him look as if he really thinks that his outfit gives him suave sophistication of a Roger Moore character.
Link
Go Outdoors: pony blankets available online only, so at the moment you can’t go in with your pony to try before you buy.
