Category: Art

The Blackbird Diaries

Blackbird Diaries

You can learn a lot about someone from the pile of books that accumulates next to them. Amongst Barbara’s current reading is The Blackbird Diaries: A Year with Wildlife by Karen Lloyd, who is based in the limestone country of the Southern Lake District.

I’m trying out one of the ‘Realistic Watercolor’ brushes in the latest version of Clip Studio Paint; after quickly sketching with the pencil tool, I go for the Real G-Pen then try the new Rough Wash brush. In the real world, I’d never try for such a rugged effect in my ink or watercolour washes, but perhaps I should give it a go. After forty-odd years in the business, trying something different is one of the reasons that I keep experimenting with drawing on the iPad.

For the tall, folksy hand-lettering, I took my cue from Andrew Forteath’s striking, friendly cover design for the paperback.

The Travel Club

YHA group, Honsiter Pass, c.1961/2
Fourth-year boys from St Peter’s Juniors, Horbury, taking a break halfway down Honister Pass, Lake District, early summer, 1962. I’m the good-looking guy at the front of the group. No, NOT that one: that’s my red-headed friend Adrian: I’m the one on the left.
Back row: Ian Morley (like me, a member of the Great I-SPY Tribe), Trevor Wales, Marshall Coates
Boy on rock: unknown
Middle row: Remember him, but can’t remember his name, Peter Coates, Stephen Downing, Robert Bishop
Front: Richard Bell, Adrian Littlewood
Photograph, Derek Harker (or possibly Mr Lindley).

Horbury Carnegie Free Library, last Saturday, 11.45 a.m.

“Let’s see, is there anything I’d be interested in?”

It’s my teacher from junior school, Derek Harker, who’s interested in the books that Barbara is packing away in her bag.

“The Blackbird Diaries: A Year with Nature, by Karen Lloyd, that should be right up your street,” I suggest, reading the blurb, “and she won the Striding Edge award for the Lakeland Book of the Year.”

“Put my name down for it! Have you ever walked along Striding Edge?”

“No, that’s far too dangerous for me!”

“Striding Edge isn’t dangerous, I’ve walked it several times. Sharp Edge on Blencathra is the dangerous one.”

In my second year at St Peter’s Junior School, Horbury, 1959-1960, Derek organised a Travel Club for our class. We’d contribute sixpence a week and sometimes the walk would start from the school on a Saturday morning and cost nothing but, when enough sixpences had accumulated, we’d go further afield, for instance taking the train from Horbury Station to Hebden Bridge for an evening walk to Hardcastle Crags.

The photograph of us in Honister Pass was a couple of years later, in our final term at the school, taking things one stage further and setting off for a week’s Youth Hostelling, walking from Keswick to Buttermere, with a couple of nights at Borrowdale along the way.

St Peter's juniors at Buttermere Youth Hostel, 1962.
St Peter’s juniors, fourth year children at Buttermere Youth Hostel, 1962. Mr Lindley, then my form teacher, on the far left, Mr Douglas, our fell-walking, pipe-smoking headmaster in middle at the back. This must have been taken by Mr Harker, as he’s the only member of staff who doesn’t appear on it, but I have a feeling that it was with Mr Lindley’s camera.

Barbara started at the same school a few years later but she never got the opportunity to head for the hills. So why was St Peter’s so focussed on hill-walking in the early 1960s? A lot of it was down to the headmaster, Mr Douglas, who was a keen fell-walker but the Travel Club was Mr Harker’s initiative. I’d often wondered how it all started and on Saturday he told me that his enthusiasm for the great outdoors started during his school days.

In the final months of World War II, Derek and other boys from his school, Thornes House, Wakefield, went off on the first of several annual camps, a kind of boys’ version of the Land Girls, to help with forestry in North Wales. He was sixteen at the time, so he and his classmates were capable of helping out with tasks such as clearing debris.

One of his friends had built himself a battery-powered radio, which was about the size of a shoe-box.

“One evening he rushed from his tent shouting ‘They’ve dropped the A-bomb!’ I didn’t even know what the A-bomb was.

“My brother, who was older than me, had been serving on an aircraft carrier in the North Sea, protecting convoys, but by the end of the war they were sent to join the effort to defeat the Japanese. They’d just arrived when news came that the bomb had been dropped. The Japanese in New Guinea surrendered immediately.”

Links

Karen Lloyd,  award winning writer and environmental activist

Andrew Forteath, Glasgow-based designer

Roman Graffiti

Graffitie
Suburra poster
Suburra: Blood on Rome

Lock-up on the Via di San Giovanni in Laterano, a back street behind the Colosseum. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to photograph graffiti in Rome, but Barbara had set herself a bit of a challenge, so photo credit to her for this one (although can I just mention that I did the location-spotting?).
I love those textures and colours and the way the graffiti echoes the shapes of the wrought iron. Would make a great location for the gangsters’ hideout in Netflix’s Suburra: Blood on Rome, which was advertised on a huge billboard at the end of the street.

Link

Suburra: Blood on Rome, Netflix.

Catfight at the O.K. Veg Bed

crocus

At first glance I can’t see why the brown cat is sitting motionless at the end of the veg bed, fluffed up like a teddy bear.

brown cat

There’s tension in the air; the female pheasants have left off preening and pecking and they’re just standing there, looking startled and anxious, although that’s pretty much their normal look.

pheasants

We seem to be getting all the movie cliches you’d get in a western shootout as the tension builds: the Clint Eastwood stare from the bristling cat, the gaggle of townsfolk, we’ve even got the ineffectual sheriff, looking on from a safe vantage point as the cock pheasant watches from the top of the hedge.

Finally the greenhorn – in this case the athletic-looking tabby that’s trying to muscle in on the brown cat’s territory – emerges from under the hedge, trying to look as cool and unconcerned as it can under the circumstances.

We don’t have a saloon in the meadow area for the final shootout but the newcomer went for cover under my homemade bench. The brown cat followed him, slowly and menacingly then with a final spurt to drive home his message.

cat

Just one more movie cliche: the victor walked away in slow motion, pacing confidently along the top of the timber at the edge of the veg bed. It reminded me of the opening titles of Walk on the Wild Side. I’ve never seen the movie, but the titles, with Elmer Bernstien’s sassy score, are rightly celebrated. It features an alley cat patrolling its territory in slow motion.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Sofa, so good

ofa

I’ve drawn our Ikea Ektorp sofa using the Milli Pen fineliner in Clip Studio Paint. I’m trying to improve my watercolour technique in the program, to make it resemble my regular sketchbooks, so this time I went for the Running Watercolour Brush. To take away the airbrushed smoothness that I’m trying to avoid, I added a texture on the final top layer, to give an impression of paper.

cushions

Even with those tweaks, I can’t recreate the organic line of this little Safari Fountain Pen drawing of cushions from a couple of weeks ago. The original is three inches (8 cm) across.

handbag
Barbara’s bag

This drawing of Barbara’s bag was in my A5 landscape sketchbook, so it’s about four inches square. I don’t have the skills to recreate the unpredictable nature of ink on paper in Clip Studio Paint, but I’ll certainly continue with it, if only to keep emphasising to myself what a pleasure it is to draw with real pen and ink.

Graphics at Batley, 1967

road signs

One student at Batley, Nicholas Meagher, who was a year or two older than the rest of us, once commented that he could see why so many students liked graphics because you could take a so-so drawing and turn it into a finished graphic. That was certainly the aspect that I enjoyed in Colin Wood’s graphics class.

road signs

I liked the idea that by dint of putting in an hour or two’s work, with a bit of practice with oil pastels or a ruling pen, that I could convert my wobbly grey sketchbook drawings, in this case of road signs, into something presentable. We had access to the glossy Graphis magazine in the college library and I can see it’s influence in my oil pastel design.

trees

Colin Wood, our tutor, was fresh from the Graphic Design course at Leeds and I loved the crispness and wit of his designs, which generally made use of black and white photography – usually featuring himself in some role or other – on a cut-to-white background with a pithy slogan. A useful antidote to my habitual woolliness.

pan lids

These pan lids hanging below the shelf above my Mum’s kitchen sink, make me nostalgic not only for the simplicity of the Batley version of 1960s graphic design, but also for the everyday quirks of our comfortable home. I’ve still got that mirror, my Dad’s shaving mirror, hanging on the end of a shelf in my studio. Note the tube of adhesive: there was a lot of make-do-and-mend at that time, and it was usually my Mum who acted as handyman.

Party Time, 1968

Party people, 1968
Mr & Mrs Littlewood and my Dad

This gouache-on-paper painting dates from my time at Batley School of Art, 1967-1969, and I’m guessing that this was Christmas 1968. I remember my Dad grumbling that although people had been invited for seven, they had yet to turn up as it approached eight.

“They’ll be watching The Val Doonican Show!”

I was frustrated at my ineptitude when I painted this but, looking back at it now, I love the awkwardness of it and I wish that I’d done more paintings of the people around me. I made a sketch in pencil, which I’ve still got somewhere, and worked this up, most probably at college. The black may well be poster paint. It wasn’t until my time at Leeds that I made a start with watercolours.

The kidney-shaped coffee table and the hand-turned lamp base were designed and made by my Mum at Mr Bailey’s evening class in the secondary school woodwork workshop in School Yard, by the gates of St Peter’s Junior School.

It’s good to see Thelma Littlewood posing so elegantly, wine glass in hand. Mr Littlewood, as usual, looks a little reserved. Is that supposed to be their son Adrian with the half pint? Perhaps I’d be able to identify the figure if I looked out the original sketch.

Even from this back view, I can tell that my Dad, looking relaxed and genial in his cardigan, is launching into an animated conversation. As you might be able to tell, he trimmed his own hair with clippers.

The glow of the lamp on the pianola and the brilliant white gloss-painted door instantly bring back memories of those drinks-and-nibbles gatherings. I probably reached for those salted peanuts several times during the course of making my drawing. Very often there’d be party games, such as the Drawing Game, but I suspect this was meant to be a more sophisticated social soiree.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Carr Lodge Park, 1961

Carr Lodge Park, 1961

Carr Lodge Park, powder paint on grey sugar paper: a familiar subject to children at St Peter’s Junior School, Horbury. Probably painted when I was in Mr Lindley’s class, so about 1961, when I was ten years old. The reflections in the water are from my imagination, as I never remember there having been water in the ha-ha at Carr Lodge, although they did still fill the paddling pool, just up to the left, in the days before there was a danger that someone would leave broken bottles in it.

The view looks rather open without the avenue of trees along the path on the right but I suspect they hadn’t been planted at the time. I guess that we went along and sketched the scene in pencil, as powder paints would have been impossible on location.

You can see how fascinated I was by the texture of stone. I remember the sandstone of the wall in the school yard, which was weathered into crevices and crannies. One lad had discovered that you could put a marble in one hole and it would roll down through unseen passages and pop out from another hole lower down. He must have been a trustworthy boy, as I leant him one of my marbles for his demonstration.

I found the painting while retrieving a little sketchbook that had slipped down the back of my plan chest.

The Stress Solution

gulls

In his latest book The Stress Solution, Dr Rangan Chatterjee describes the ‘Micro Stress Dose’ that you’re likely to get when you check into your Facebook feed and see your friend enjoying the holiday of a lifetime, when you’ve recently returned from yours. There’s your friend, sitting by the pool with a pina colada in their hand, while . . .

“you’re looking out of your office window watching a pigeon drink out of a dirty puddle on the roof of a vandalized bus stop.”

That wouldn’t be a problem for me of course, because being forced to sit by a pool with a pina colada would be my idea of purgatory; I’d be much happier drawing that pigeon!

stare at a tree
The Arboretum, Newmillerdam

I’m lucky that my day job includes many of the elements that Dr Chatterjee suggests for trying to combat stress: a daily dose of nature, getting out on a walk or just staring at a tree.

Ikigai

Ikigai

Ideally, he says, you should be trying to find what the Japanese call your ikigai, which translates loosely as ‘a reason for being’, but it’s something more than that. It should be something you love – yes, drawing is definitely that for me; something that you’re good at (OK, the jury’s still out on that one in my case) and, ideally, something that you can make money from. Well, I’ve survived for forty years as an illustrator, so I can tick that last box.

It should also be something that the world needs. Does the world need illustration? I can’t speak for the world in general, but I know how much I feel the need for art and illustration in my life.

Brain-boosting

boathouse
The Boathouse, Newmillerdam

It seems that learning to paint is good for you. In an experiment on last week’s Twinstitute, on BBC 1, one group of volunteers were given a month to learn to paint, draw and throw pots on the wheel. This resulted in a reduction in their brain age of, on average, six years, with one of the participants reducing her brain age by nine years. A control group of twins who went on a diet of ‘brain-boosting’ foods for the same period saw no change in the their brain age.

A study by psychologist Myra Fernandes and colleagues at the University of Waterloo, Canada, suggests that the act of drawing something has “massive” benefit for memory compared with writing it down, so getting into a habit of drawing might help people who suffer from dementia.

One Small Step

One small step

But being an illustrator brings its own problems and Dr Chatterjee’s previous book, The 4 Pillar Plan, convinced me that it was about time that I did something about my posture. The hours that I spend hunched over my computer or my sketchbook aren’t ideal. He suggests plenty of simple solutions to bring movement into your daily routine and, in particular, his exercises for reawakening ‘lazy glutes’ convinced me that I should buy an exercise step. It’s in the corner of my studio so, once or twice a day, when I need to take a few minutes break, I can go through a short, simple work-out. No aerobics involved, thankfully, just getting those neglected muscles into action again.

But I won’t be giving up my daily dose of nature.

Links

Stress Solution

Dr Chatterjee’s website: drchatterjee.com

I like the use of graphics and photography in Dr Chatterjee’s books which (along with his clear explanations) gives them an accessible, friendly feel. I’ve tried to echo that by using Adobe Spark Post to add some suitably inspirational captions to my photographs of Newmillerdam Country Park, all but one of them taken on Monday morning. Newmillerdam is always suitably inspirational whatever the weather, but the winter sun on Monday gave it an extra sparkle.

Drawing and memory: a study by psychologist Myra Fernandes and colleagues at the University of Waterloo, Canada

Sun on the Strands

diary

Frost whitened rushes,
dark iced water,
isolated in the mist
in warm winter sun
the Strands looked at its best

Calder Valley, Addingford, 26 January 1997

Twenty-two years ago this weekend, in 1997, I was busy painting the scenery for the Pageant Players’ production of Dick Whittington at Horbury School but, instead of driving there, I put on my wellies and walked through a pristinely frosted Calder Valley, following first the canal, then the river.

In my a new page-a-day diary I’d decided a that I was going to try, every day, to make a note of the wildlife I’d seen and to add quick sketches in colour. In the following year this diary became the basis of my online Wild West Yorkshire nature diary, which was originally intended to be just one strand of a more ambitious website, which would include sections on geology, history and villages.

diary
cimet
Comet, 28 April, 1997.

I was keen to immerse myself in natural history because for the previous seven years I’d been working pretty intensively on geological projects. I was just finishing my illustrations for Steve Cribb’s Whisky on the Rocks and I’d also made a start on an educational publication, What is Coal? for the National Museum of Coal Mining but I was starting to get further afield as I set about planning and testing out the routes my first walks book, Village Walks in West Yorkshire.

First e-mail

A couple of weeks later, I sold my first computer, an Amstrad 386, to friends and upgraded to what then seemed like a suitably powerful PC but my self-publishing business, Willow Island Editions, didn’t get going until after I’d invested in my first scanner, a Umax Astra 1200-S. I remember that it cost hundreds of pounds, £350 I think, but included in the package was a full version of Adobe Photoshop 4.0, so it proved to be brilliant value.

It’s strange to look back and read a note that I received my first e-mail, from a birdwatcher friend in Plymouth, on the second of April, 1997. However did we manage before that?!

Published
Categorized as Drawing

January Sketches

Birstall
Looking towards the M62 motorway junction from the Showcase Cinema, Birstall.

Here are a few quick sketches from my A6-size pocket sketchbook. Barbara was asking me which I preferred, drawing on an iPad or drawing in pen and watercolour. For pleasure, pen and watercolour are what I feel most at home with, but I always like learning something new. I think of iPad drawing as being something akin to printmaking, it’s undeniably drawing but with technical considerations which might be considered limitations but which can also contribute to the character of the artwork.

Old scouring mill

chair

The original of this sketch of the old scouring mill at Horbury Bridge is just two inches, five centimetres across. Seen in close-up, the unpredictable effects of real ink and real watercolour on the slightly textured surface cartridge paper are, I feel, more convincingly organic than anything that I could have concocted on the iPad.

All these sketches were drawn as we paused for a coffee. When no view was available, when we sat in the corner at the Filmore & Union in the Redbrick Mill, Batley, last week, I attempted to draw a chair.

Beams at Blacker Hall
birch
Silver birch, the Red Kite, Calder Park, Wakefield.

Inspired by a video I’d been watching of a virtuoso South Korean comic artist, I attempted to increase my speed when I drew the timber framework of the barn at Blacker Hall Cafe this morning. I’d normally try to keep my trembling hands under close control but it’s good to try and let myself go occasionally.