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.
Here’s a preview of my July Wild Yorkshire diary for the Dalesman, that’s July 2020 because after three months of work concentrating on my articles, I’ve finally got to the stage where I’m a whole twelve months ahead of schedule.
This article will describe a visit the Wakefield Naturalists’ Society made to Staveley Yorkshire Wildlife Trust nature reserve earlier this month. Migrants included black-tailed godwits heading south for the winter and painted lady butterflies still heading north for the summer. We also had our best ever views of sedge warbler and reed warbler from one of the hides on East Lagoon, which are built on raised platforms so that you can see down into the reed bed.
We saw common spotted orchid and one of the outstanding specialities of Staveley, the marsh helleborine but we didn’t spot the less conspicuous common twayblade. Something to look out for when we’re next there.
Designed in Clip Studio Paint using my desktop iMac, plus graphics pad, drawn in Procreate on my iPad Pro.
In week two, ‘Brains’ of the University of York’s The Biology of Bugs, Brains and Beasts course, for our homework we’ve been asked to get our neurones and synapses working by trying to memorise Pi. They give us the ratio to a hundred digits but in my comic strip mnemonic I’ve gone for the first fourteen:
3.14159265358979
I have a habit of looking for dates when I’m memorising numbers, so the first four digits 1415 set the historical period for me. I did actually have a Welsh granny, Anne Jones, from a Welsh-speaking family in Connah’s Quay, so for the ‘9’ I decided to go for ‘Nain’, pronounced ‘nine’, the Welsh for granny.
To really make this work as a memory-jogger, I’d have to try and bring in all my senses when remembering this story: the buzz of angry bees, the sweet scent of the meadow flowers, the texture of the old gate as it creaks open. It’s important to get a flow going for the story because I need to remember the numbers in a particular order. It’s different to one of those memory games where you’re asked to remember a collection of random objects in any order.
I crammed four digits into the final frame. At this rate, to remember one hundred digits, I’d end up with graphic novel seven or eight pages long. In case I ever need to know the ratio of Pi to fourteen decimal places, I should be able to remember by thinking back to the comic strip but, more usefully, I’ve enjoyed getting back into drawing on my iPad, which I’ve taken a bit of break from over the last three months.
Pencil drawing of the pottery room, which was at the far, top end of a now-demolished range of buildings behind Batley School of Art. Here I’m looking out towards the far end. As far as I remember, a long work bench and the kilns were on the right. In the previous year the workshop had moved here from one of two huts across the road.
Looking for a suitable bowl to stand my ginger beer plant in yesterday afternoon, I remembered these bowls that I threw on the wheel at Batley School of Art in 1969 and I brought them down from the attic.
These were the rejects; somewhere I’ve got one bowl which was slightly more successful but my ultimate ambition had been to make a teapot. Mr MacAdam, our ceramics tutor, talked me through the process, which involved throwing a spout separately and attaching that with slip (watered-down clay) to the teapot. He was keen that the handle should appear to grow naturally from the pot.
Unfortunately I never got that far. Several, if not all of these bowls, were originally intended to be teapots but they wobbled on the wheel and, in order to salvage something from my efforts, I cut them down and repurposed them.
I had some limited success with mugs. You can drink from them, but my idea of randomly blotching them with manganese powder didn’t work: they just look as if someone with blue powder paint on their hands has picked them up.
But I do like the glaze on these bowls, I just wish that I’d used the same glaze on the mugs. Mr MacAdam keep a grey, A4 hardback, which he referred to as his ‘Dirty Book’, to keep a record of recipes for glazes that he tried. He claimed that he could always tell which students had done life drawing by the shapes of the pots they threw on the wheel.
I treasured a demonstration mug which Mac made to demonstrate the process. There were subtle features, like a sharper edge on the inside of the rim to prevent tea dribbling down the outside of the mug. I used the mug right through college but sadly it got broken decades ago.
Monument to the textile industry in the town square.
It’s now fifty years this summer since I left Batley School of Art and it must now be twenty since I attended a one-off reunion there so I couldn’t resist taking a look at the old place while Barbara made a start on the shopping at Tesco’s this morning. I was hoping that I might find it open for this year’s final show but the art school moved to Dewsbury some years ago and the building now houses the Cambridge Street Muslim boys only secondary school.
The upstairs room on the left with the huge east-facing window and the skylight running along the apex of the roof was the life room. Below that, immediately to the left of the main entrance, was the office of the principal, Mr Smethurst, and, to the right of the entrance, the admin office for essentials such as buying your ticket for dinner (plus a separate ‘SWEET’ ticket for the pudding!) in the college canteen.
