Category: Books

Victor Ambrus

Victor Ambrus

I’ve mentioned before how much of an influence the springy pen and ink illustrations of Victor Ambrus were on me as a student and I’ve just come across a brief account that I made in a student notebook of an occasion when I was lucky enough to get to speak to him.

sketch
Doodle from my notebook/sketchbook where I’m trying out Ambrus’s technique of adding finger prints to a drawing.

At the Leeds Children’s Book Fair, on Tuesday 16 November 1971, I slipped in at the back of the audience of children for a talk given by Victor and another historical illustrator/writer Ian Ribbons. As I walked in, Victor had just fired the flintlock pistol that he’d brought along with him; a sure way to get everyone listening!

As the smoke cleared, he explained:

“I like drawing historical pictures because I am able to go to town on the costumes and more interesting things seemed to happen in those days.”

Ian Ribbons was the author and illustrator of a series of books about events around the world on one particular date in history. As part of the research for Monday, 21 October 1805, The Day of Trafalgar, he’d climbed the mast and drawn from the crow’s nest of HMS Victory:

“The point is that you never know what you might be doing next.”


fox sketch
Ambrus-inspired drawing from my diary a couple of days after the book fair. I studied his illustrations in books that I borrowed from the children’s section in Leeds City Library. This was my impression of a character in Barbara Leonie Picard’s Twice Read Tales, illustrated by Ambrus.

But coming back to Victor Ambrus, as I’ve said before, I was convinced that if I could use the exact same nib and paper that he used, I too might be draw like him, so when it came to questions from the audience, I asked him about art materials:

“I use ordinary layout paper for my drawings so that the printers can copy it but of course for colour you have to experiment a little but I use the same sort of paints that you would use at school.”

The real ‘secret’ of Victor’s work is that he can draw.

Quentin Blake, Blue Peter and Big Chief I-Spy

Quentin Blake

The previous day I’d seen, for the first time, Quentin Blake in action, drawing animals on request for a group of children. His giraffe ran to three sheets of his A2 layout pad. I sat quietly at the back, so unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to request a drawing. A year later, he would be one of my tutors in the Illustration Department at the Royal College of Art.

I was so lucky with my tutors right through college. On the morning of the day that I saw Quentin at work, I ‘talked with Derek Hyatt about composition’ and the following day before my return visit I had a music tutorial with Alan Cuckston (I was working on a project about the Yorkshire composer William Baines, 1899-1922).

After the Ambrus talk I saw another familiar face at the book fair:

Big Chief I-Spy
Peter Purves

‘As I walked away I saw someone smiling at me – it was Peter Purves of Blue Peter.’

And was there someone else?: ‘Also nearly walked into Big Chief I-Spy? I don’t think so.’

The I-Spy books were one of my early influences, with their encouragement to children to get out spotting, jotting and drawing. I won several prizes in the I-Spy summer holiday competitions. There was a daily I-Spy column in the Daily Mail and during August the Big Chief set something to find and to write about every day. I’ve still got my prize-winning books and I’ve never grown out of the habit of getting out and just looking.

Stan Barstow’s ‘Bright Day’

Filming Joby, 1973 Photograph from TV Times, summer of 1973

“I just selected this,” novelist Stan Barstow told me, as he gave me a well-worn Pan paperback of Bright Day, “as perhaps my all time favourite novel, certainly my favourite of J.B. Priestley’s, but it’s quite a suitable subject for you as it involves ‘disenchantment with the celluloid industry’, and part of it is set in pre-World War I ‘Bruddersford’, so you should be able to get some subject matter locally.

“Also, as it happens, I believe Yorkshire TV are in the process of filming a version of it at the moment, so, if you were stuck for costumes and sets, perhaps they’d oblige.

“Don’t worry about the cover illustration, which is nothing like. The story is so beautifully constructed and flows in such a fascinating way that illustrations seem irrelevant anyway.

“Apologies for biro marks.”

Stan had used the copy when he dramatised Bright Day for a BBC Radio 4 play. He’d met J.B.Priestley and more or less got him to admit the Bright Day was his favourite amongst all his novels.

He gave me this in the 1970s and his reference to me being disenchanted with the celluloid industry probably means that it was after my three or four months’ stint working as assistant background artist on Martin Rosen’s animated version of Watership Down in 1976. With the publication of my first book  looming, I was making efforts to put together a folio to show the range of my work, which for the past few months had consisted entirely of drawings of the interior of Cowslip’s Warren!

I loved Priestley’s description of the first room that the would-be writer in the novel sets up for himself, as I’d recently settled into a similar room, which had to serve as both studio and bedroom, in a shared flat and was enjoying attempting to start making a living from writing and illustration. I liked one of the minor characters in the story, Jock Bamiston, who ‘does nothing of any consequence’ but through it all:

‘remained cool and amused yet friendly, like a well-wisher sent to us from some other and nobler planet’.
I think that sums up the role of the illustrator pretty well: to be an amused observer.

Printing Booklets

Stapling
Saddle stapler, bone folder and long-nosed pliers for the occasional bent staple.

Printing booklets has been a cottage industry for me for the last twenty years. It took me all day to print a hundred copies of various walks and local guides, so it’s very labour intensive, however it’s satisfying to turn sheets of laser paper and card into A5- and A4-size booklets.

Surprisingly, there were no serious hiccups, other than the printer running out of paper and on one occasion running out of toner.

Rickaro Bookshop

Bookshop window

Book coverIf you’re trying to track down one of my books, this bookshop on Horbury High Street is a good place to start. In addition to my local booklets, walks guides and sketchbooks, bookseller Richard Knowles often has copies of my long out-of-print titles such as my first, A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield; I spotted two copies of the paperback version on his shelves recently.

This is the first time that I’ve tried the Adobe Illustrator trace option on a colour photograph. The results remind me of the British Library’s reprints of vintage detective fiction, which often have a period travel poster or similar artwork on the cover, hence my book cover design (all I’ve got to do now is write the mystery novel to go with it).

Bookshop

I could learn something from Illustrator when it comes to being bold and confident in the use of colour. In comparison with this posterised effect, my watercolour is soft and tentative. Not always a bad thing but bold and confident would be good from time to time.

Link

Rickaro Bookshop, High Street, Horbury

Publishing with Pages

I’ve been trying to get around to publishing an eBook for years but it’s taken a short break in the Lake District and the latest version of Apple’s Pages desktop publishing software to get me started.

As you can see from the cover, I’ve been drawing from cafes again; the Lakeside Cafe attached to the theatre at Keswick gave us a view across the top end of Derwentwater to Cat Bells.

I managed only half a dozen sketches as we spent most of our days walking but I made efforts in the evening to write up notes about the day. With those, the sketches and a selection of my photographs, I’ve got the basis of a short eBook; an extended blog post.

The main purpose is to get familiar with the e-publishing process. Pages is a great starting point but, to keep things really simple, I’m sticking with a ready-made template, one was designed for a novel. I’ve got two other programs, Adobe InDesign CC2018 and Apple’s iBooks Author, which give more possibilities for tweaking the design and adding interactive features but Pages brings the process closer to using a regular word-processing program.

I’ll post a link to the finished eBook.

Link

Pages by Apple

Little Book, Big History

A little book with an intriguing connection to Lawrence of Arabia; Richard Knowles tells the story. I filmed this afternoon at Rickaro Bookshop, Horbury.

I’ve added titles and, if you  watch the video, you’ll realise why we went for Caslon as the typeface.

Link

Rickaro Books

A Bookseller’s Dream of Christmas, 1777

 

 

There’s a twinkle in bookseller Thomas Gent’s eye,
As he sits by the fire with his port and mince pie:
“I shall go down in history in Old Ripon Town;
With my red Russian hat and my long college gown:

“On this fine Christmas Eve in the snow-covered square
By the Old Obelisk with my books, I’ll be there!
When the Wakeman of Ripon blows thrice on his horn
I’ll take up my sack and be busy til dawn.

“With six fine stags from Studley all yoked to my sleigh
With novels and poems, it’s up and away!
Now, Defoe! now, Dryden! now Shakespeare and Swift!
There’s nothing like books to give spirits a lift!”

St Mary’s Whitby, from Thomas Gent’s ‘History of Hull’.

Thomas Gent, Bookseller

 

When I saw Nathan Drake’s portrait of Thomas Gent (1693-1798), the Yorkshire historian and bookseller, I couldn’t help thinking that, popping up in that hearth-like alcove, sporting those luxuriant side whiskers and with his right hand extended, offering us a copy of his ‘quaint’ and ‘charming’ History of Ripon, he’d make a great Santa.

With a little Photoshopping, I was soon able to make a Fake or Fortune-style restoration of the painting and I felt that he also deserved a verse or two to hint that even an Ebenezer Scrooge lookalike might have had a hidden, softer side.

If you’d like to know more about the real Thomas Gent, you’re in luck because, just published this month, there’s The Autobiography of Thomas Gent, Printer of York, edited by his descendant, Frank Gent.

Hull from the Humber, from Thomas Gent’s ‘History of Hull’.

‘The name of Thomas Gent has obtained a wider celebrity than that of any other York typographer. Author, printer, and artist, his labours extended over more than half a century, and during that period many of the numerous productions of his pen, both in prose and verse, were printed at his own press, and embellished with engravings executed by his own hand. His works are, for the most part, below mediocrity, yet they possess a certain quaintness and eccentricity of character which are not without their charm’

Robert Davies, 1868

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The Autobiography of Thomas Gent, Printer of York is available from Rickaro Bookshop, Horbury, where you can view the portrait by Nathan Drake.

(So far there’s no evidence that Gent ever acted as Santa Claus to the townsfolk of Ripon).

Cookbooks

Drawing all those frames for my flick-book cartoons has helped me to feel at ease using Clip Studio Paint on the iPad. One advantage the iPad is that you can zoom in to work on details with a pinching movement of two fingers and you can rotate the whole drawing, simply by rotating two fingers. These two actions were useful when it came to writing in all the titles of the books.

Once the iPad knows that you’re drawing with an Apple Pencil, it rejects any finger movements it detects as drawing but still responds to any gestures, such as rotation and zooming in.

Paper, Pen & Pencil

There are four layers in my original Clip Studio file: the default paper background (plain white); pencil, for my initial drawing; colour, using the watercolour brush and pen, using the ‘real G-pen’.

To make it more like a real sketchbook drawing, I left my original pencil lines visible. If I’d been aiming for finished-looking illustration, I could have removed all the pencil work with a single click of the mouse: no meticulous rubbing out with a soft art eraser.