Category: Art

A Christmas Carol

It’s 175 years since the publication of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and next month sees the anniversary of a multi-media dramatisation of the story, performed by my brother Bill, myself and a few of our friends.

A small but select audience (mainly parents) gathered on the evening of Wednesday 4th January 1967 at our Club Room (the summerhouse at the top end of our garden) for the premier.

The performance went well, or so I wrote in my diary, but the scene change from Scrooge’s office to his house didn’t go as quickly as planned and our friend Hilary, who was providing the musical intervals, got through seven Days of Christmas.

It was worth the wait. We were so pleased with our Scrooge’s room set which incorporated the old cast iron fireplace in the corner of the summerhouse and a red horsehair-stuffed armchair which had been relegated there but which was probably getting on for the right period for the play. I recognise an old dressing gown as the basis for my brother’s Scrooge costume on the poster.

I played Jacob Marley but I didn’t need much in the way of ghoulish make-up; a raking spotlight shining from below was enough to create the ghostly effect.

For scenes such as the Cratchits’ house we built animated puppet scenes, inspired by the historic tableaux I’d admired in museums in France, with a sound track recorded by our in-house vocal talents, including my sister Linda and one of her friends, Mary. I think I still have the tape . . .

We didn’t manage to stage the production for Christmas, despite my lino-cut playbill on the cover of the club news.

The Spirit of Christmas Past sported a real candle on his headgear, fashioned from an upturned brass bowl and he wore a large plastic bag sprayed with gold. I think that his headgear was part of a costume used in a previous production of Shakespeare’s Richard III (much abridged as it featured just the final scenes at the Battle of Bosworth).

A possible fire hazard? Ironically a decade or so the young actor who portrayed Christmas Past (and Bob Cratchit), our friend Richard – ‘Rag’ – worked for the Fire Service in California.

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Categorized as Drawing

Return to Watership Down

There’s a new film version of Watership Down on television this evening, which prompted me to look out this spread from my 1981 sketchbook, published as Richard Bell’s Britain by Collins in 1981. I’d walked the route taken by the rabbits from Sandleford Warren to Watership Down in 1976, so I was keen to include it in my itinerary three years later, when I started touring the country.

Remembering Thelma

St Peter's Church, Horbury

All that was missing was a flypast by the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight Lancaster but, after the funeral service on Thursday at St Peter’s Church, a rainbow to mark our old friend Thelma Littlewood’s last journey away from Horbury seemed suitably stylish. Her husband Jack flew Lancaster bombers during the Second World War, surviving a full tour of duty of thirty bombing raids. He was 22 years old at the time. Meanwhile Thelma was working, sometimes on the nightshift, at Sykes’ mill (later Slazengers) on the lathes, making butts for Lee Enfield rifles.

Thelma once told me that she knew when Jack was setting out on a mission because he’d come out of formation and fly his Lancaster low over Horbury (or did she say he’d do that on his safe return? I think she said on the outward flight). I’m told that this story is unlikely to be true as the RAF would never have allowed it, but who knows what happened unofficially. Possibly a roundabout route from one of the bases in North Yorkshire, such as Dishforth or Leeming, could have involved a flightpath down the Calder Valley.

Thelma (1924-2018), was a great friend of my mother’s during their retirement years, getting into all sorts of adventures on their travels, including being so keen not to miss their stop on a rail journey to the Lake District, that Thelma ended up swinging on the door of the carriage, leaning out of the open window, as the train came to a halt in the station.

As we lived not far from each other on Jenkin Road, I often walked to St Peter’s Junior School with her son, my contemporary, Adrian, especially in our third year when we were both in Mr Thompson’s class. Sadly, Adrian died over twenty years ago, in the early 1990s. Like his mother, Adrian had a sense of style and I remember being rather envious of his special pet, a beautifully marked garden cross spider, which he kept for a while in a makeshift vivarium in a mini-habitat of twigs and leaves in a Gales Honey jar with air holes punched in the brass-coloured lid. He called it Arthur (although I now realise that ‘it’ must have been the larger female of the species).

Victoria Band, Horbury

Victoria Band, Horbury

Members of Horbury’s Victoria Band were playing carols and Christmas songs at Di Bosco’s coffee & champagne bar on Thursday, which gave me a chance to try drawing them on my iPad Pro, using ProCreate.

Victoria Band
Victoria Band

The man on the right is playing a bass trombone but he ‘gets a lot of tenor notes out of it too’.

I like to set up pencil, wash and pen on separate layers but I found myself working on the wrong layer several times. For a drawing from life like this, I don’t think that matters, as I want the initial pencil to show through anyway, I don’t need to hide the pencil layer as I might in a more finished illustration.

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Cat on a Trampoline

Cat on a trampoline

The cat that is usually to be found lurking in the border by our bird feeders leaves its lair and sets off down our garden then makes its way through a gap in the hawthorn hedge. After all that waiting and watching, it’s ready for a work-out. It jumps onto next door’s trampoline and starts clawing around the entrance flap in the safety mesh. It evidently enjoys that, as it slinks in through the slit and indulges in another burst of claw-sharpening on the mesh from the inside.

Next it walks around the perimeter, then decides to attempt to climb up the netting on the far side. It almost gets to the top.

But that’s it for this session, it leaves by the entrance flap, jumps down and walks off down the garden path.

People on the Train

Passengers

It’s time that I got back to adding watercolour to my drawings, real watercolour that is, not the virtual watercolour of my iPad drawings, so when we set off to Leeds I take a new A5 Bockingford 300 gsm sketchbook with me. My regular sketchbooks are often cartridge paper, which works fine for the light washes that I normally use but it’s a pleasure to use something with a bit more character. You might think that watercolour paper would be more absorbent than cartridge but this variety has a surface – probably a thin coating of size – which is slightly resistant to a wash. This isn’t a problem, I just need to have enough watercolour on my brush to cover the area that I’m working on.

My thanks to Cremede Art for letting me try a hand-finished sample of their sketchbooks.

Link

Cremede Art on Facebook

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Categorized as Drawing

Four Figures

sketch

We’ve just posted off all our Christmas cards, so far ahead of schedule that we deserve a coffee and a homemade lattice mince pie at Di Bosco’s. What a difference homemade mincemeat makes; plump raisins and sultanas soaked, we guess, in brandy with lemon and lime to give it a fresh hint of citrus.

I draw a few of the customers as they walk in from the car park. I’ve brought my Lamy Safari fountain pen with the B nib, which is the pen that I used to write the cards.

I enjoyed the opportunity to write sixty or seventy addresses as a way of trying to improve my handwriting. Inevitably, I started off feeling self-conscious about it, which makes me feel tense, which in turn brings out the shakiness in my hands.

I’d find that I was attempting to brace myself, keeping arms rigid and bending over so that my shoulders and back tensed up too but with so many envelopes to get through, I soon got into the rhythm of it and sat up in a straighter, more relaxed pose, my arms less constrained.

The rounded tip of the B nib makes it a pleasure to write with. Spikes, spluttering lines have their place but a flowing line is more relaxing to draw, or write.

New Layout

I’m experimenting with the latest version of WordPress, so if you’ve noticed a change in the layout of my blog, that’s the reason. I’ve got a lot to learn but the best way is to try things out.

Me writing
Me tensing myself up as I attempt my best writing. Drawn on the iPad in Clip Studio Paint.
Barbara says this doesn’t look like me at all, that’s a relief!
figure sketch
Drawn with the B nib, Lamy Safari
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Categorized as Drawing

Crown Point

Leeds skyline

I probably wouldn’t choose to draw any of these building individually, but I enjoyed drawing the jumble of shapes of the Leeds city centre skyline as seen from Cafe Costa at the Crown Point Retail Park.

As I drew a single magpie was pecking between the slats of a ventilation grill at the side of the Mothercare building. Perhaps there were spiders or insects sheltering there.

shoppers
Shoppers at Birstall on Thursday.

We’re waiting for Hobbycraft to open, a store that I don’t think I’ve ever visited before. At one time, I couldn’t have browsed around the extensive art section without buying a particular pen or sketchbook but I’m so happy with my TWSBI EcoT fountain pen that I’m not really on the look-out for the next best thing. I’ve still got a drawer in my plan chest and a shoe box in the attic stocked with new sketchbooks but my rate of getting through them has slowed since I became fascinated by drawing on the iPad.

shoppers
Shoppers, Birstall, on Wednesday; we were there two days running, the first time to see the new Robin Hood film.

It’s good to alternate between iPad and sketchbook, to be reminded what a pleasure it is to make real inky lines on paper. There’s a feedback from the texture of cartridge paper that I’m never going to get from my Apple Pencil on the glassy surface of the iPad.

Trainers

trainers

I’ve switched from hiking boots to these Clarks GoreTex trainers recently and I’ve noticed the difference; you flex your feet more in trainers. You might think that would put more pressure on  the toes but its the calf muscles on the back of my legs that have been doing the extra work and which feel taut. On one occasion in the middle of the night I got a touch of cramp, so I’m making sure that I keep doing a bit of stretching.

stages in drawing trainers

I’ve drawn these in Procreate on the iPad and this time I’ve left the initial pencil drawing showing, which makes it more like a regular still life drawing as you get a hint of the process that went into it.

To make it less self-consciously an iPad drawing, I did consider doing the drawing all on one layer but I thought that the pen might run into the paint as I added it, which wasn’t the effect that I wanted, so it was drawn as normal, in three layers, as above, plus a background layer of white ‘paper’.

People on the Precinct

precinct people
Testing different pen tools and brush tools in Procreate for iPad.

precinct pencil sketch

People on the precinct in Ossett were hurrying by in the cold, gloomy, afternoon rain, so I was grateful to be sketching them from the shelter of Bistro 42 after sampling a selection of tapas.

Passers-by were crossing my field of view so quickly that the only way to draw them was a to focus on an individual, take a mental photograph and then try to get the impression down on paper.

It makes a change for me to draw people. With natural history subjects, I’m keen to record enough visual information to identify a species of plant or animal but we’re all so familiar with humans as a species that the emphasis can instead be on trying to suggest character.

Pencil, Pen & Paint in Procreate

precinct ipad drawing

I drew in pen with no watercolour in my sketchbook but then redrew the figures on my new iPad Pro using a program suggested my comic artist friend John Welding. Procreate is more closely adapted to the possibilities of the iPad than Clip Studio Paint, the program that I’ve been using a lot recently, but I’ll keep coming back to Clip Studio because I like the page design tools that are incorporated into it.

I don’t normally draw in pencil because with the rough handling my sketchbooks get, pencil lines soon get smudged but I like the pencil tool in Procreate as a quick way for starting a drawing. There’s a tool for smudging it too, if you really want that.

Procreate gives the option to make a thirty-second movie of your drawing.

Link

Procreate