Category: People

The Pines of Riabhach

The Pines of Riabhach

As an exercise in the Open University’s FutureLearn ‘Start Writing Fiction’ course, we were asked to write a story based on the first subject that we heard when we turned on the radio.

There was a bit of user bias in my starting point, as I knew that it was tuned to Radio 3 and that I was about on schedule for the afternoon concert. Sibelius’s 5th Symphony was described by his old friend Granville Bantock as bringing the listener ‘face to face with the wild and savage scenery of [Sibelius’s] native land, the rolling mists . . . that hover over the rocks, lakes and fir-clad forests . . .’

Perfect!

You can download the whole story, all three pages of it, via the link below. I used the ‘Modern Novel’ template in Pages and dropped in my text and the drawing of pine and juniper from my April 1977 sketchbook.

Link

The Pines of Riabhach PDF, a short story

Little Westgate

Walkers
Original drawings in my pocket-sized A5 (landscape) sketchbook

It’s rare for me to sit and draw from life but I get the chance this morning as I wait for my appointment at Specsavers on Little Westgate, Wakefield. Perhaps because we’re still in the holiday season, there aren’t as many people in town as I’d expected. This is a good thing because instead of picking out a favourite character from a crowd I have to draw, at random, whoever happens to be walking past. Often there’s only one person in view.

After my course in web comics, I realise that every person embodies their own short story. Each person has a particular walk. The man with the striped trousers is the most determined and confident, while others are more diffident. The woman in the centre pauses at the threshold of a shop as if debating with herself whether she should enter.

Watercolour added later. I remember the colour of the carrier bag better than the colour of some of the footwear and trousers.

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Categorized as People

A Walk around the Serpentine

Kensington Gardens

As we entered this archway under by the Serpentine in Hyde Park, a man was feeding the birds on the bridge above us. Along with bird seed for the pigeons, he’d brought a can of sardines; he flipped open the lid as a heron warily sidled up to him along the parapet and it leant forwards to take one from his hand.

heron

For me, walking through this archway from Hyde Park into Kensington Gardens is like stepping back in time; for three years I was lucky enough to have this as my lunchtime walk. After a morning of close-up work as a natural history illustration student at the Royal College of Art, next door to the Royal Albert Hall, all I had to do was cross Kensington Gore by the Albert Memorial and I could walk under ancient elms (soon to succumb to Dutch Elm Disease) and sweet chestnuts, down to the lake near the Peter Pan statue.

We were back in London for the day in December for the preview of Elizabeth Butterworth’s Wings and Feathers, a collection of new paintings, at the Redfern Gallery on Cork Street. As usual when we’re in a city, we walked for miles, ten miles in total, from Kings Cross, much of that through parks: Regents Park, Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens and Green Park although Barbara insisted that we take the bus from 221B Baker Street to Marble Arch.

park shelter

This park shelter on an improbably lofty scale, near the fountains at the top end of the Serpentine, stuck in my memory from my first visit to London in 1958, when I was aged seven. What also stuck in my mind, and apologies if I’ve told this story before, was that as we queued up outside the Science Museum on Exhibition Road, my mum explained to me that the building across the road, the one with the Arts & Crafts mosaic sign and its intriguing entrance through an archway, was the Royal College of Art.

sweet chestnut
Sweet chestnut, Kensington Gardens

“If you work hard at school, you might go there,” she suggested.

The prospect of drawing every day was enormously appealing to me! On that day we also visited the Natural History Museum where a group of students were laboriously drawing the dinosaur skeletons. I remember thinking that, if I was drawing there, I’d make things a bit more exciting and I’d bring the dinosaurs to life.

A day in my life as a student in my next post . . .

Bird Rescue

bird rescue

From my diary for Monday, 9 June, 1997:

I had a reputation as a naturalist amongst the local children; once I was presented with a specimen of a dragonfly that had been trapped in a conservatory and on another occasion a neighbour’s son reported seeing a large black cat near the quarry in the wood, at a time when ‘The Black Beast of Ossett’ was roaming the nearby countryside.

Children assumed that I’d know what to do with orphaned or injured birds. In fact the only birds that I ever kept, two Bengalese finches that I bought, hoping to breed, when I worked on the illustrations for Ways of Drawing Birds, died when I allowed them to feast on too much lettuce. The best I could do was to phone a friend, a headmaster who lived in Horbury, who kept silver pheasants and owls in an aviary. I didn’t record in my diary what became of the hapless nestling.

Walking along the road in April that year, I was recognised by two skateboarding children. The girl pointed me out to her companion:
“It’s Richard Bell, he’s an artist.”
The boy must have confused me with another artist, perhaps the only one he’d so far learnt about at school . . .

children
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Categorized as Birds, People

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

Remembering Georgie Wood

G and E Wood
George and his brother Ernest in Woodseats Albion Football Club, 1935-36.

George Wood, on holiday on the Isle of Man, 1937.

George Wood joined up at the same time as my father at the start of World War II.

“They both came around to see us in their uniforms,” my cousin Margaret recalled at a family get-together in Sheffield yesterday, “George was a gunner in the RAF but just a few weeks later he was killed.”

As it’s Remembrance Day, one hundred years since the Armistice that ended World War I, I’m doing a little research into a friend of my father’s who I never got to meet.

Continue reading Remembering Georgie Wood

J Armitage, Dramatist

J Armitage
My first drawing using a vector pen in Clip Studio Paint.

Leeds Mercury, 7 June 1913, copyright Johnstone Press, image created courtesy of the British Library Board.

J Armitage was a dramatist, whose plays ‘received the compliments of many distinguished people’ according to a photo feature in the Leeds Mercury, dated Saturday, 7 June, 1913.

A Jesse Armitage appears in the 1911 census for Horbury; then aged 24, he was employed as a railway clerk. He lived in the family home, at 4 Mortimer Row, Westfield Road with his parents Sarah, aged 50, and John, aged 55, a railway platelayer. Also still at home, his younger brother Harry, aged 20, worked as a house painter and decorator.

Ten years earlier, in 1901, Jesse, then aged 14, was working as a railway telegraph boy. When Jesse started at school, aged 4, the family had lived on Queen Street, Horbury. In 1913 he married Amy Bower, aged 25 or 26, a dressmaker from nearby Tithe Barn Street.

There’s a record of the death of a Jesse Armitage, aged 40, in the Wakefield area, registered in the first quarter of 1927.

And that’s about all I’ve been able to find out about our local dramatist so far. I’d love to know whether he wrote dramas or comedies.

Leeds Mercury
Leeds Mercury, Saturday, 7 June, 1913, copyright Johnstone Press, image created courtesy of the British Library Board.

Young Dude

Richard as a cowboy, aged about 5 or 6.

If I hadn’t become an illustrator, perhaps I could have had a career as a cowboy. This photograph from the mid to late 1950s of me toting six-shooters brings back so many memories.

Richard as a cowboyThe shiny new silver six-gun in my right hand fired the kind of caps that come in a ribbon while the old gold model in my left needed to be laboriously loaded for each shot with an individual paper cap, which wouldn’t be a lot of use if you were being attacked by a whole posse of baddies.

However, I remember that it was engraved with curlicue patterns, so I reckoned that if I ever got lost in deep in canyon country, I could use it as a map.

I can still remember the smell of gunpowder and metal.

I’m pretty certain that the holster was one that my mum had made from skiver, a thin sheet of sheepskin leather. Not sure if it really was green with red trim, but I did once have a waistcoat from a cowboy outfit in those colours. The hand-knitted Aran pullover was most likely grey but probably not the kind of thing that gunslingers wore in the Old Wild West.

My drawing was made as a way of getting familiar with Adobe Illustrator Draw, a vector drawing program, using an Apple Pencil on my iPad.

Just my Cup of Tea

cupa and saucer

At the weekend, we were invited to a family birthday party and I was pleased to see a set of six well-worn blue-and-white china cups and saucers set out on one of the tables in the garden.

When Barbara’s mum, Betty, died we’d got them all ready to send off to the Hospice Charity shop when our niece Joanne spotted them and asked if she could take them. It’s great to see them still in use for family occasions.

I suspect that they might date back before Betty’s time. Her mum ran a boarding house in Blackpool between the wars, so perhaps they date back as far as that. There’s no maker’s name stamped on them, so they’re not anything special, like Crown Derby.

Alex Thompson

I had airbrushed cigarette card portraits of football stars of the 30s and 40s in mind as I traced this newspaper photograph of Lincoln City full back (1939-1947),  Alex Thompson (who would later be one of my teachers at junior school). You can see the coarse dotted screen tones of the original in the background of my drawing.

Unfortunately, by enlarging the photograph, I’ve lost clues to the shape of the face that you can pick up in the small version. They get flattened into amorphous grey areas of pixels when enlarged.

Drawn from Memory

If you allow for his face filling out since his lean, fit footballing days, I don’t think that my drawn-from-memory brush and ink of him as a teacher was too far off the mark. I drew this before I came across the photograph.

Thanks to Find my Past and its links to the British Newspaper Archive, I was soon able to piece together Thompson’s career:

Continue reading Alex Thompson