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.
I wanted to go inky for this 4 inch by 3 inch sketch of my Jack Wolfskin bag but then couldn’t resist adding colour because of the yellow Lamy Safari Pen and blue Buff that it contains.
It’s drawn with a Lamy Vista EF nib filled with De Atramentis Document Ink and for the Winsor & Newton watercolour I used a Daler Rowney Aquafine Sable Round 6. And I should add that it’s a Pink Pig sketchbook containing their 270 gsm Ameleie acid free paper.
A female smooth newt appears briefly at the sunny, shallow edge of the pond. A bear-like cat saunters across our veg garden but makes a speedy return when Poppy, next door’s little dog spots him.
From our hawthorn hedge, the jingling song of a dunnock. There’s a sprinkling of pale petals of crab apple blossom across the pond, closely followed by the paper napkin that I’ve been using to blot my water-brush on. Luckily the cord of my sun hat gets caught in the zip of my fleece as it blows off my head, otherwise that would have ended up in the pond too.
No wonder the female smooth newt disappeared into the pondweeds: soon after I return indoors, I see that the female blackbird from the nest in the corner of the hedge has caught a male newt. She shakes it repeatedly and I get glimpses of the male newts bright orange belly, speckled with dark spots like a butterfly’s wing.
Two hours later, I saw her back again at the end of the pond. She went down to the water’s edge and with a quick stab caught another male newt.
The second cartoon strip inspired by the ponies we pass on our regular morning walk. In the final frame, I’m getting pretty much the look that I had in mind. I decided not to go for shadows this time. I like the simplicity of flat colours.
Talking of flat colours, in one tutorial (see link below) I discovered that you could not only save swatches in a ‘Colour Set’, you can also name them.
What we must expect now that the card shops have gone into lockdown: my lightning-sketch birthday cards are quicker and cheaper than going into town for the bought version . . . just not as slick and sparkly, but it’s the thought that counts.
This is Boris (thought he was called Basil, but, sorry Boris, I’d got that wrong), the cat that thinks that he owns our back garden.
