There’s a rhythm to his brisk walk but it’s not a sassy swagger. His outfit is understated: blue jacket, grey trousers, so just a regular guy? But then there’s the flat cap: once a cliche of the down-to-earth Yorkshireman – along with whippets and racing pigeons – today it’s as likely to be an ironic touch.
Retro eyeglasses and a messenger bag complete the ensemble. He steadies the bag with his left hand as he walks amongst the shoppers on the precinct.
His innate rhythm and understated style make me think of jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk. Rather like Eric Morecambe, Monk insisted, “The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.”
But after an improvisation session that didn’t turn out well, he came to the conclusion: “I’ve been making the wrong mistakes.”
My character, like Monk, seems like someone who’ll take things in his stride, accepting that occasionally we all need to make the right mistakes.
I’ve just started an Open University FutureLearn course, Start Writing Fiction, and our assignment for the first week has been to describe a character from our writer’s notebook (or, in my case, sketchbook), so I’ve chosen a man who I glimpsed crossing the precinct as I waited for an appointment last week.
‘A long time ago in a galaxy very, very close to us . . .’
Well, I’m not aiming for Stars Wars visuals here, in my illustration of the formation of Planet Earth, 4,600 million years ago. I’m trying out the airbrush in Procreate on my iPad Pro, but I don’t want it to look too smooth, so I’m using the pen tool to make it look hand drawn.
I’ve set up the illustration in three layers: sky, molten planet and surface crust. I painted in the crust as a featureless brown-black ball hanging in space, yellow highlights on one side, blue reflected light in the shadows on the other. I then used the eraser tool with a 6B pencil setting to scratch through to reveal the glowing lava beneath. Finally, I added spatters and pen lines.
As I drew the planet, I realised that I’d drawn something similar years before. This was part of the ‘Cosmic Zoom-in’ that I used to introduce my home patch in A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield (Lion & Unicorn Press of the Royal College of Art, 1979).
I still have the bigger picture in my mind when I get close to local wildlife. During my time at college in London, I’d often call in during my lunch break to spend half an hour in the new Story of the Earth exhibition in the Geological Museum in South Kensington. I can see that exhibition’s influence here.
Link
Procreate: I’m looking forward to the new version Procreate 5, which will be launched soon.
‘The Sea and its Wonders’ by Mary and Elizabeth Kirby, T. Nelson and Sons, Edinburgh and New York, 1871 and the frontispiece to an 1890 edition of Charles Darwin’s account of ‘The Voyage of the Beagle’.
“For the Victorians the voyage of the Challenger between December 1872 and May 1876 was akin to the Apollo astronauts’ trips to the Moon – it was a journey into the unknown.”
Exploring our Ocean, FutureLearn course, University of Southampton 2019
In the Exploring our Ocean FutureLearn course that I’ve just started, Emeritus Professor Howard Roe describes the significance of the HMS Challenger expedition. I wondered if the Challenger would feature in The Sea and its Wonders but the book dates from 1871, the year before it set out on its four-year voyage.
Dr Kane was an American explorer who launched two expeditions in the Arctic in an attempt to rescue Sir John Franklin.
The book captures the excitement of the latest discoveries.
“Wonders abound in the Ocean. It is a world in itself, and is subject to its own laws.
“The fantastic forms and shining creatures that people the recesses of the Deep are here placed before [the reader].”
Mary and Elizabeth Kirby, Preface to ‘The Sea and its Wonders’, 1871.
The Last Great Auk
With its lively engravings, The Sea and its Wonders reads like a combination of the National Geographic and, in places, The Pirates of the Caribbean but the scenes of turtle hunting, harpooning whales and driving albatrosses from their nests are hard to take, given what we know today about the effect this was going to have on wild populations.
The authors, sisters Mary and Elizabeth Kirby had crowd-funded a Flora of Leicestershire in 1848. It’s interesting to learn in Mary’s autobiography that for The Sea and its Wonders, the pictures came first:
” . . . our engagements with the publishers were increasing, and we were obliged to devote two hours or more every morning, and a couple of hours in the evening, to pens and paper. We had a number of plates from Mr. Nelson, suitable for a volume he wanted to bring out and to call The World at Home.
“This was a very pleasant book to do, for it required us to hunt up all the information that was applicable to the subjects, and there was so much latitude allowed us, that we were at liberty to range from the North to the South Pole.
“As soon as this task was finished, more plates arrived for Beautiful Birds in far off lands, and also for the Sea and its wonders.”
Mary Kirby, ‘Leaflets from my Life’, 1888
The last great auk had been seen just nineteen years earlier on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, but two of them appear in an illustration in the chapter on penguins. To confuse things still further, in the chapter on St Kilda, the great auk is described as if it is still resident on the remote Scottish island but the illustration shows a king penguin. As the pictures came first, we’ll blame Thomas Nelson Jr. rather than the Kirby sisters for the mix-up.
As you can see from the end papers, I bought this book so long ago that it was priced in pre-decimal currency, ten shillings, reduced to seven shillings and sixpence.
I’ve looked up John Taylor in the 1871 census for Leeds but unfortunately this was a common name, so, apart from us knowing that he was doing well in the French class at the YMCA, I can’t tell you anything more about him. He didn’t leave any annotations in the book.
I drew my brother-in-law John’s newsagents in the 1980s, stage directing his wife and one of his boys, along with Barbara (on the phone in the background) so that I could take a Polaroid for reference.
At the time, I had plenty of natural history and landscapes in my portfolio so I was making efforts to include more figures. I worked in A4 in pen and ink because photocopies were a useful way of posting out samples to publishers or advertising agencies.
No one commissioned me to draw a corner shop but I was kept busy illustrating a children’s book set in a Dales village, a couple of wildlife stories and a Dickens adaptation, so the effort I put in to my sample illustration paid off.
Like so many corner shops, this one closed and it’s now a private house, so I’m glad that I recorded the details of its interior.
It’s too hot to do much work in the back garden but, as it’s in the shade until lunchtime, the front stays cool. I finish weeding the narrow bed below the lounge window. Welsh poppies would happily take over here but, much as I like them, we’ve got other plans.
Inevitably, as I go, I keep digging up spring bulbs. I replant all the smaller ones. The tête-à-têtes are doing well but I pick out the larger daffodil bulbs because, in this shady bed, they grow too leggy and keel over. I’ll replant them at the end of the back garden. I’ll need more than a hand fork and trowel to get to grips with the chicory and bindweed down there.
The drawing process
I drew these on my iPad using Procreate. I wanted the entire process to be visible in the finished drawing: the false starts, the construction lines and the multiple attempts to get a shape in proportion. I limited my use of the eraser. There was a detail on the trowel that I’d painted too dark, which I took back a bit with a soft, semi-transparent eraser.
As with yesterday’s view of the back garden, I used only one layer. Because of this I had to paint over my line work, so I needed to go over it again with the ‘Gesinski ink’ pen.
My homework for the final week of my web comics course. This little animation was produced in Adobe After Effects. I did try to add a falling snow effect too, but at least I managed to add a bit of movement.
Boris Karloff, drawn in Procreate on my iPad Pro. I’m trying to echo the style of the original 1964 ‘Thriller’ comic.
From my homemade comic from January 1965
Boris Karloff makes an appearance in my homework for my latest free online FutureLearn course, Infinite Canvas: Making and Understanding Web Comics from the Comics Studies department at the University of Dundee.
We spent the first couple of weeks defining web comics and discussing how they might be used. There were also practical tutorials, including a run-through of my favourite comic-making program, Clip Studio Paint, plus suggestions for getting started with free programs, notably Madefire, where you can compile and publish your web comic, complete with animations.
Now, in the final week, we’re given the opportunity to develop our own web comic.
The Broken Leg
We’ve been looking at a few medical public information comics, which got me thinking about the first time that I landed myself in hospital. On Boxing Day 1964, when I was aged thirteen, I was hurrying home to watch Fred Hoyle’s Universe when I slipped on the icy pavement and broke my leg.
My spell in Ward G gave me a fresh insight into the world of comics. As a child, I’d always read a weekly comic, starting with Playhour during my infant school days and moving on to the Eagle at junior school. Shortly before starting at the grammar school, I’d been wowed by the use of colour photography and illustration in the new educational magazine Look & Learn, so I’d moved on to that.
The newspaper trolley, which made a daily round of the wards, gave me the chance to dip into American comics for the first time. The black and white Weird Tales was a favourite, because of the variety of stories packed into one issue but it had a rival in Boris Karloff’s Thriller, illustrated in colour.
I’d love to draw a web comic which combined my experience in hospital, as illustrated here in my ballpoint pen and crayon drawings from 1965, and combine that with the escape that I was able to make into the world of comics and science-fiction short stories (I borrowed books from the hospital library trolley). I can still remember a dozen of these stories: performing ants, hypnotic pebbles, post-apocalyptic New York (yes, even back then New York was the go-to city for apocalypses), a dimensionally unstable house, a time-travelling mystery hound, space age weather manipulation, assorted aliens . . .
Our G ward art class
I’ll draw a few sample frames but I won’t have time to illustrate the whole comic because a week from today I start my next FutureLearn course, Invisible Worlds: Understanding the Natural Environment, based on the Eden Project’s Invisible Worlds exhibition.
Link
My father in his office at the National Coal Board,Newton Hill, Wakefield
Looking back at this rough for the cover of my Walks in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire, I think that I prefer the drama of the arrowhead design to the oak tree dotted with characters that I finally went for. The king, Edward II really at the centre of things, trying and failing to keep the peace between two of his barons, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster and John, Earl of Warenne. One of them was destined to lose his head to the executioner Hugh de Muston, a villain of London, on a hill to the north of Pontefract Castle.
Adam Hood, forester.
In my booklet, eight walks follow in the footsteps of Robert Hode of Wakefield, who we guess was the son of Adam Hood, a forester, charged with protecting the lord of the manor’s deer. As a forester, like Robin’s outlaws, Adam wore a livery of green in summer, grey in winter.
From Wakefield’s Manor Court Rolls, we know that in 1316 Robert and his wife Matilda rented a plot, 30 x 16 feet, at Bichil, Wakefield and built a house of five rooms. This was in what we now call the Bull Ring, which in medieval times was the town market’s Butcher Row. Bichil probably means ‘beech hill’. Beech was used to make butcher’s blocks because beech acts as a natural antiseptic.
I’ve been re-reading my 2010 booklet Walks in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire, because Radio Leeds invited me to be interviewed about the Yorkshire Robin Hood. It was so difficult in two or three minutes to strike a balance between a brief summary and going into the arcane details that bring the subject to life.
Nine years later some of the walks have changed, particularly ‘The Pinder of Wakefield’ walk, as there’s been a lot of house building to the north-east of the city.
In the spring of 1978, I’d just finished a big black and white project and I was ready to burst into colour. I went back to the acrylics that I’d used at college and set about painting ever-more ambitious still lifes, flowers and landscapes. At one stage I remember setting myself the goal of one painting a week, but I think that it was after meeting up with my old tutor Bryan Robb at the Royal College of Art, that I speeded things up. He had chuckled and said he’d done a similar thing but he had set himself to paint one a day.
I painted these ex-Indian Army plimsols, which I remember had cost me just fifty pence at the Army surplus stores, on a primed postcard size piece of hardboard which was most likely recycled from a previously abandoned painting. An unfinished painting of South Kirkby colliery and another of my mum and dad’s back garden got recycled in this way.
Of course, I couldn’t afford to have the paintings framed professionally so I made my own, not just to save money but because I thought each frame should be a one-off for that particular painting. This one was dropped into a small tray-like frame of recycled materials, the inch or so around the glued-in board painted in a matching or harmonising coat of acrylic.
Once I’d got a dozen or more paintings together, I arranged to show them to the assistant curator at Wakefield Art Gallery. I packed them in the backpack that I’d used in Iceland and cycled to Wentworth Terrace. I got shot down in flames. One thing the curator rejected, rather scornfully, was that I’d framed the paintings, as if I was expecting her to offer me an exhibition there and then (I was!)
So that was the end of my fledgling career in fine art, at least for the present but some years later, in a new tasteful professionally-made frame (and I’m sorry that I haven’t still got the homemade version) from John at Art of Oak, Tammy Hall Street, Wakefield, this went into my first one-man show at the City Museum, then housed in the Mechanics Institute on Wood Street, Wakefield.
My dad insisted one buying it, and I’m so glad he did, because it’s now come back to me, and I couldn’t bear to part with it now, because it’s such a reminder of those early days.
The plimsols are on a workbench that I’d constructed in my small room in a shared flat. The plant box behind was made in my student days at the Royal College of Art for my room at the college hostel at Evelyn Gardens, South Kensington. And, no, I don’t still have those plimsols: I’m afraid that eventually, I wore them out.
The runner beans have yet to flower but we’re picking dwarf French and broad beans.
It’s got to that time of year when the veg beds are at their most productive and we can wander down the garden and gather beans, lettuce, beetroot and herbs.
We’ve done well with a selection of seeds that came bundled with the April Gardeners’ World magazine in an offer at Sainsbury’s: coriander, mixed lettuce, zinnia, cosmos mixed and black-eyed Susan. The zinnias have done well, they’ve now been planted on and are filling up the border, but we’ve yet to sow the Sarah Raven calendula, which were also included, as we already had plenty of those: in the spring as I weeded the lower veg bed I found a cluster of calendula seedlings from a few plants that had been growing there last year. I transplanted them to grow on (in the corner of the L-shaped bed in my photograph, above) and we’ve now got at least a hundred flowering and attracting hoverflies.
De Monica broad beans
The Gardeners’ World offer also included a decent pair of lightweight gardening gloves (Barbara’s size, but I can’t have everything) and a half-price garden pass, which we’ve already used at St Andrew’s Botanic Gardens, so in effect, we’ve already saved the cover price.
