Category: Books

Book Shelf

bookshelfI’ve been reading so much recently that I’ve slipped a bit on drawing. Three of the books were about drawing so I ought to have all the inspiration that I need by now.

This section of my book shelf includes my current reading such as library books and Dummies Guides to various computer programs.

There are also odd things that haven’t yet found a place elsewhere such as the green and blue paperback which is a Donald Duck comic strip book in German that I thought might help me to learn the language. Next to it is purple box that contains a wildflower meadow mat which I must now roll-out over a sunny patch in the back garden.

Pen and Paper

I’ve drawn this with a Rotring Rapidoliner which I thought might work on the absorbent paper of a sketchbook that I’m trying to finish off. The paper too soft for the pens I use but it won’t take a watercolour wash without going blotchy. The worst of both worlds.

It’s a Wainwright sketchbook that I bought a year ago because I liked its hardback binding. I think that whoever designed it was so keen to make it like a ‘real book’ that they used paper that was better suited to printing.

At this rate it will last me another year.

Mini-booklet

a4 sheet booklet
When I folded and trimmed this version, I realised that my 9 should be a 6!

Here’s an idea for a pocket-sized booklet that you can make from a single sheet of A4 paper. It’s included in Christian Deakin’s Designing a Newsletter, subtitled ‘The really, really, really easy step-by-step guide for absolute beginners of all ages’.

pagination
Correct pagination, sketched from the diagram in Designing a Newsletter.

He gives it as an example of pagination but it appealed to me as a format that I could find a use for. Perhaps simply popping a series of related sketches into a sequence.

Or, if you couldn’t quite get started on your first novel, you could pop in some linked text boxes and write a really, really, really short story.

In Design

a7 bookletI’m gradually getting myself back into booklet producing mode so I’ve taken this as an opportunity to become more familiar with Adobe InDesign, adjusting margins and guides and adding a non-printing guide layer.

I noticed that when printing in duplex mode on my HP Laserjet that in the printer options I need to set ‘Layout’ to ‘Two-Sided; Short-Edge Binding’, otherwise one side of the sheet doesn’t tally with the other.

Laser printers aren’t designed for millimetre perfect registration and, although I could probably tweak my guide boxes to allow for the thickness of the folded paper, I think the best thing to do will be to allow a generous margin of error around the content of each page.

Link; christiandarkin.blogspot.co.uk

Rhubarb Festival

rhubarb 2014

We’re settling down again after a weekend promoting my walks booklets at Wakefield’s Rhubarb and Food and Drink Festival, although Barbara works in a bookshop so it’s not such a change for her! We were guests of Trinity Walk shopping centre.

As it was a food festival, in addition to selling books we couldn’t resist doing a bit of bartering and we exchanged a copy of Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle for a box of four muffins from the next stall! But we spent most of our profit on takeaway lattes from Cafe Costa to keep us warm as the breeze funnelled around the precinct!

Robin Hood’s Wakefield

Walks in Robin Hood's Wakefield

Saturday proved to be the best day, when Morris Dancers created a suitably festive background. It conjured up an impression of what it must have been like when Trinity Walk was a part of the town known as Goodybower, ‘God’s bower’, where statues of saints from the parish church, now the cathedral, were paraded, displayed and decorated with ribbons and flowers and where some performances of the town’s guilds’ cycle of mystery plays took place.

Mystery plays of course had a religious theme, although the second play in the cycle, Cane and Abel, could claim to be the world’s first murder mystery.

Cursed by God, Cain taunts his fellow men to capture and kill him;

And harshly when I am dead,
Bury me at Goodybower at the quarry head

The quarry was approximately where Trinity Walk had set up the stall for us, later the site for Wakefield’s market.

One of my booklets retraces the steps of a Yorkshire Robin Hood, a Robert Hode who lived in Wakefield but who found himself outlawed after the battle of Boroughbridge. There are several walks exploring the town’s connections with the story, at Sandal Castle and Pinderfields for example, the latter associated since medieval times with Robin’s great rival and supposedly cousin, George-a-Green, the Jolly Pindar of Wakefield. Then there’s a walk around the battlefield site itself at Boroughbridge and a tour of Brockadale, including the look-out post at Sayles, mentioned in the earliest Robin Hood’s ballads and still overlooking both the ancient Great North Road and its modern dual-carriageway equivalent.

The book ends up at Kirklees Priory, long associated with the death of Robin and supposedly the site of his grave.

Rough Patch

Rough Patch

We were pleased that we sold as many Robin and Liquorice walks books as we did the Rhubarb, which was good considering theme of the festival. It’s so encouraging for me when people have done all the walks in two of the books then they come back for the third in the series. I feel that I  must be doing something right.

Because of the local food connection we were also selling my sketchbook from the wilder side of the garden, Rough Patch.

It was good to meet up with several of our friends, including people we haven’t bumped into for several years, who had spotted that we would be there and come along to see us. I saw my junior school teacher from 1960 and an illustration student of mine from my days at Leeds college of art, then part of the polytechnic, from 1983.

Shopping malls aren’t my natural habitat but, as there’s a ‘Walk’ in the name of this particular shopping centre, perhaps I’ll get a chance to link up with them again.

After three four hour stints at our cart I have enormous respect for retailers and all the hard but unseen work that they put into to making shopping a seamless experience. They make it look so easy!

Don’t mention the rain

As the dark clouds whipped themselves up on the Friday morning, the street cleaner who regularly patrolled the precinct kept our spirits up;

‘Don’t talk about the rain and it won’t come!’ she advised us.

She was wrong, the shower came through just the same, but at least she made us smile!

Link; Trinity Walk

Publish 2013 Online

Publish 2013 Online

imspeakingatpublish2013v1

On Friday I’m looking forward to taking part in Publish 2013;

‘This online conference is for inspiring and equipping both children and adults to discover how writing works in the real world. See how your life experiences, passions, and creativity can become a springboard for becoming a published author or artist!’

My session will be on nature journalling. For more information and to book tickets or to sample the three free preview sessions please follow the link above.

Brockholes

WE TAKE the Mallard car ferry to Waterhead then walk along the lakeside path through the woods, following a trail of snack packets as there’s a school party ahead of us, some of whom have brought their own music with them. The way through the woods must be so boring for them without the music and snacks!

Columbine

For us though, it’s a break for coffee and a scone at the newly reopened National Trust property Wray Castle. The steam launch Columbine is down at the landing stage as we wait for the ferry to Brockholes.

Monkey Puzzle

While a second school party disembarks and heads for the treetop walk (now that does look fun) we decide it’s time for tea and a toasted teacake on the terrace by the house, where I draw this Monkey Puzzle. Monkey Puzzles, Araucaria, evolved at a time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and you can appreciate that only the tallest sauropod, standing on its hind legs, would be able to browse the scaly foliage on its top branches.

Deep in the Wood

The last time that we were at Brockholes was in 1987 when I launched my children’s book Deep in the Wood. Barbara and I organised the event with the Lake District National Park, informed the local press and booked ourselves into a bed and breakfast at Hawkshead. All the publishers had to do was supply the books and we’d seen them a few days before and their top rep had promised to do that.

‘Have the books arrived yet?’ I asked in eager anticipation when we called in at Brockholes the day before the event.

‘No, no sign of them, have you got copies with you?’

I had yet to even see a copy so we phoned the publishers who told us that, yes, they were going to send them but when they went to the stock room they found that the book had sold out in the first few days of publication, so they couldn’t!

They rounded up a few copies from around the office and sent them on via overnight courier. I think this was when I realised that my future lay in self-publishing!

As it happened, it rained heavily all weekend so we had sufficient books for the few visitors who braved the weather. As a consolation, the Lakeland National Park Authority invited us to take a stall at their annual national show at Chatsworth. Princess Diana opened the show and on her tour of the marquees took a brief look at our stall. But she didn’t buy a copy of the book for William and Harry. She seemed rather shy but we’d been instructed not to talk to her unless she spoke to us first. I was equally nervous; I’d been determined to be drawing when she came to the stall but I just froze as she stopped to take a look. This awkward moment ended when a child, peeking in through a gap in the canvas behind our stall, waved at her. Diana smiled and moved on.

In fact the only person who she talked to in the whole marquee was a watercolourist, who was the only exhibitor who had her back turned to the public, as she was working on a painting. Diana leaned over to take a closer look and confided to her; ‘I’m hopeless at that!’ (unlike Prince Charles who has painted watercolours for years).

Birds at the feeding station included Nuthatch and a juvenile Great Spotted Woodpecker.

Return Trip

Langdale from Brockholes landing stage

The return ferry, taking an anticlockwise route around the northern end of Windermere via Ambleside back to Bowness gave me an opportunity to draw the landscape, and add some watercolour.

Hills to the north east of Ambleside

Western shore of Windermere, Ambleside to Bowness.

 

A Kind of Loving

ONE OF THE OPENING events in the Flock to Ossett arts and crafts festival is a rehearsed reading in Holy Trinity church of John Godber’s new adaptation of Stan Barstow’s novel A Kind of Loving. It works well with just six actors – two playing Vic and Ingrid and the other four taking all the other roles; a dozen or more characters.

As with the novel, the story is told from Vic’s point of view; he’s the only character who can break into a scene and tell the audience how he feels about the way things are going. That’s something that you miss out on in John Schlesinger’s film version and in the television adaptation that Stan himself made in the 1980s. The dramatic device of talking directly to the audience doesn’t fit well with the kind of everyday realism that a director needs to create as a believable setting for the the story in a screen version but on stage you’re not in the actual locations, so the audience is already having to use its imagination to picture the characters on a bus, in a drawing office, in the park and so on, so there isn’t the same jolt that you might get if a character turned to the camera and explained how they felt in a gritty northern drama.

This limitation must have occurred to Schlesinger because his next film was about another young man working in a northern city, Billy Liar, but in that we keep drifting into the alternative reality, a minor European principality, that the hero keeps escaping to in his imagination.

Introducing the read-through, Godber explains that he took all the dialogue he needed directly from the novel, adding only a handful of words of his own, but there’s a Godber feel to this adaptation in the pace, the ensemble playing, the vividly sketched characters and the humour.

But really that’s all in the original novel too. I think that the reason that I hadn’t realised, for example, that there was so much humour in the novel, humour that comes from observation of character, was that I read it when I was Vic’s age -about 21. The main thing that I took away then was how easily Vic went from being free and independent, with all sorts of ambitions in his life, to seeing control of his life slipping away as others, particularly to his mother-in-law who is truly scary but not in a pantomime villain kind of way.

At twenty one, just starting at the Royal College of Art and with no clue as to how I’d support myself through my work, let alone a surprise instant family and mortgage, it read like a cautionary horror story.

I can see the wider picture now and smile, even while I’m sympathising with Vic and Ingrid’s dilemma.

Links; Theatre Royal, Wakefield; John Godber Company; Flock to Ossett

Books and Binoculars

STRAIGHT FORWARD pen and ink drawings appeal to me at the moment as I try to settle back into creative work after our home improvements and the practice I’ve been putting in to find my way around the new computer.

This time I’m testing an old bottle of Nan-King Indian Ink and it’s still free-flowing – perhaps a bit too free flowing as I spill a drop of it from an overloaded nib.

I like drawing with no end use in mind, well apart from scanning it for this online drawing journal, because I can be freer with technique; it doesn’t matter if things turn out looking a bit odd because it’s not a commission and it’s not needed for a book. A bit of hatching here, a bit of stippling there. If one side of the binoculars doesn’t work out quiet right I can experiment with the other side.

A flexible arm magnifier on the top shelf, a microscope on the bottom and the binoculars in between suggest my interest, obsession almost, for looking at the world in close up and at a distance and that’s confirmed by the books on this end of the shelf, on botany, birds and landforms.

See How They Grow

As I’ve been reorganising my shelves, I’ve been tempted to read some old natural history books recently. Books that I bought as a student 40 years ago, which I still hadn’t got around to reading. I’ve caught up on Rachel Carson’s Between the Tides and I’m currently on See How They Grow, an illustrated popular introduction to plants published in 1952 and based on a series of time lapse films on plant growth shown in cinemas. Television was only then becoming established in Britain, given a boost by the live broadcast of the coronation the previous year.

I hadn’t realised how far back natural history filmmaking went. One of the three authors of See How They Grow was F. Percy Smith.  He ‘started film work with Charles Urban in 1908 and in 1925 was engaged in making Secrets of Life and Secrets of Nature films. He always worked alone or with one assistant, using relic cameras and home-made apparatus, and published over 200 subjects varying from popular nature films to specialised technical ones. He died as a result of bombing towards the end of World War II but still has an international reputation as a master of cine-micrography.’

Link: Percy Smith, British Film Institute

Victorian Fair

I’VE BEEN at the Victorian Fair in Wakefield for a few hours each day on the Tourist Information stall, launching my new paperback Wakefield Words. When the morning fog has melted away it’s been sunny enough to make Wakefield look just as it does in the publications that the Tourist Information people are handing out. A pair of stilt-walkers in crinolines and a three-piece oom-pah band come strolling by today. We’ve seen dozens of people we know and met people keen to discuss the old local words that are the subject of my book. One man, an ex-councillor tells me that one of his ancestors from Barnsley had a business card describing himself as a ‘Sparable Maker’.

Sparables, he discovered, are the small nails used to fix the sole of a shoe in place. There’s a Sparable Lane in Sandal.

Out of the sun, on the stall, it isn’t all that warm when you’re just sitting there for any length of time. There’s dampness in the air after the morning mist so I’m sitting there in
Victorian costume – top hat, black coat, paisley scarf – concentrating on keeping my hands warm in my fingerless Scrooge-style mittens, when I hear a woman answering a question that her friend has just whispered to her;

“Of course he’s real!”

I decide that I better keep active so that people don’t mistake me for a mannequin and I draw the Cathedral tower and porch as seen from our stall on the precint.

Like most of my drawings, this started as pen and ink line, but it was when I added that patch of blue – French Ultramarine – that I could see between the sandstone finials of the Catherdral porch and the awning of the stall, that the drawing came to life.

A large flock of town pigeons were soaking up the sun on the roof of a shop on Upper Kirkgate and we saw a Sparrowhawk circling briefly but I didn’t hear or see a Peregrine, a falcon that has often been seen around the Cathedral and blocks of flats in the centre of the city.

Pictures on a Page

I ALWAYS like the stage where I’ve got sufficient illustrations and text together to start laying out the pages of a book. I’ve been worrying about whether this or that illustration is the best I can do and naturally I’ll continue to fret over that but it’s worth dropping them into a page layout to remind myself that they were never intended to be works of art, to be scrutinised in isolation. I need to see how they work as part of a spread.

Seeing them on-screen in my desktop publishing programme isn’t enough; I need to print out one or two sample spreads. My laser printer isn’t going to give me the look of a real paperback but it serves as a guide. I feel that books should be tactile but, with its line artwork, it occurs to me that this would a good title to try publishing as an e-book.

The pen and ink lines have a crispness about them in print that I can’t show you on a 100 dot per inch screen. My commercial printer advises me to scan line work at 1200 dots per inch, which is the maximum my desktop CanoScan 8800F is capable of.

Whatever my misgivings about each cartoon, I’m pleased with the way they do the job of illuminating the definitions of Victorian Yorkshire dialect words and expressions that are the subject of my book. I’m going a bit over the top by including so many cartoons but if the book was a text-only list of definitions it would run the risk of looking rather academic.

The variation in style in the illustrations, as I struggled to find the best approach, isn’t a disadvantage as it adds some variety but I do have my favourites: the drinkers on a bench in the first spread and the beetle and mole in the second.

A Bunch of Five

HERE ARE this afternoon’s little bunch of illustrations. The problem with drawing this schoolmaster’s breakfast (another of the odd subjects that I need for my book), is that at this scale – a scale sufficient to make a plate of bacon and eggs recognisable – the characters begin to take over. Well, the schoolboy is reasonably bland but the schoolmaster seems to be taking on a personality of his own. All that is needed here is an archetypal Victorian teacher.

‘What did he (or she) eat for breakfast?’ is one of the questions a novelist is supposed to be able to answer when creating a character. In this case the breakfast is the subject and anything else is a distraction.

I could have drawn this tangle of wool (left) just by itself but to make it appear truly knotty, I decided to include a figure trying to unravel it.

On the other hand this split-pin latch is distinctive enough not to need the help of a cartoon character to demonstrate it.

Crunchy wheat-cakes are next on the menu and they too are sufficiently self-explanatory . . . or do I need an ear of two of wheat lying beside them to distinguish them from oatcakes?

Finally, here’s one of those long benches from a traditional ale-house. This definitely requires the addition of a group of drinkers because otherwise it might look like a church pew.

Of the illustrations that I’ve produced so far, this comes nearest to the look that I want for my book. I’ve established my characters without letting them take over the cartoon, the balance of line and tone seems about right and should be suitable for the method of printing and I’m beginning to build up a homely and somehow familiar Victorian world, which suits my theme.

On the strength of this afternoon’s illustrations, I could reasonably expect to turn out ten illustrations a day . . . if, indeed, I ever get a day when I don’t have some other errand to run.

In the Dragon’s Den

In this week’s Dragon’s Den (BBC2 television) there were a couple of twins with a background in the fashion industry who were seeking a large investment in ‘Brat and Suzie’, a distinctive fashion label they’d recently launched. The quirky originality of their range depends mainly on the specially commissioned illustrations printed on each garment of animals engaged in various activities (for example, a raccoon riding a bicycle).

The ‘Dragons’ asked for some financial details;

“What are you paying for your illustrations?”

“Oh. It’s quite small; we pay for each illustrator a £20 flat fee. We blog about them and help them out as much as we can.”

“So they see it as a way of getting their illustrations around.”

Yes, a business that depends so much on the skill of the illustrators, with a turnover of a hundred thousand pounds and the illustrator walks away with enough money to buy him or herself a pizza and a glass of wine.

That sounds like a good business plan.