Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I’ve drawn my hands a couple of times waiting by the changing rooms in one of the stores in the White Rose shopping centre, Leeds, but just as I start sketching the shoppers – by trying to take a mental snapshot as they walk away – Barbara gets fitted up and we head off to find a likely place for lunch.
As storm Eva lashes across Britain, shoppers are hurrying along. I try to memorise costume and colours, making mental notes in the tens of seconds that they’re visible.
The man in the woolly hat is suitably dressed to face the elements, the woman with sparkling wine isn’t as she hastens to get her shopping packed in the car.
There were so many healthy choices at the buffet at Judy and Don’s silver wedding celebration yesterday. Needless to say, I was still tempted by the mini-quiches, pork pie and sausage rolls. Well it is Christmas.
Most people were sitting but it was the characters standing at the bar who I found most interesting to draw.
Each individual had a different way of standing. Some added gesticulations to a story they were telling, others stood listening, holding a drink in one hand and, in the case of some of the women, a bag in the other hand. Little touches that help sketch a character, rather than the standardised party person that I might draw from memory.
I drew in line only but it was the shapes that fascinated me as I drew, so today I added washes of neutral grey to emphasise the overall shapes rather than the outlines.
Waiting for a haircut gives a chance to settle down and draw, which isn’t something that I’ve much chance to do on the run up to Christmas, a week from today.
I’ve enjoyed the detective work involved in researching the scene in my comic strip biography in which we meet the Waterton family at home in Walton Hall. I’ve been unable to track down any portraits of Charles Waterton’s young sisters-in-law, the Miss Edmonstones, so photographs of their close relatives have been the next best thing but I’ve also found a clue from art history.
As I understand it, Eliza and Helen, were, like Waterton’s late wife Ann, half Scottish, half Arawak. Whether this is true or not, I can take Edmund, the only son of Waterton and Ann as my starting point for the Edmonstone look. In photographs, he has a broad face and tightly curled hair which I’ve also found in a photograph of a Josephine Waterton, who I assume is Edmund’s daughter.
Ann Waterton died shortly after the birth of Edmund in April 1830. Charles later acquired a painting of St Catherine by Carlo Maratta (1625-1713) which he felt bore a close resemblance to Ann. I’m unable to track down this particular painting but Maratta’s models for St Catherine and the Virgin Mary do have a similar look to the photograph of Josephine.
The hair style and the full-sleeved dress in Maratta’s etching of St Catherine aren’t so different to the fashions of the early 1830s that I’m using in my illustration.
Although I’ve yet to discover a portrait photograph of Charles Waterton himself, there are contemporary sketches, a bust and a portrait, plus a death mask which I have yet to arrange to see.
Links; An icon in York Art Gallery, Virgin with a Breast on her Neck appears to have links with Edmund. He liked to style himself ‘Lord of Walton Hall’ and he collected rings so I think that the flamboyant seal on the back of the York painting must be Edmund’s. Charles Waterton’s seal (left), was a simpler affair.
My reference for fashions from the Wonderful 1830s, from Whilhelmina’s Antique Fashion blog.
Ann Mary Edmonstone on the Overtown Miscellany website
I’ve been struggling to get this knife to break out of the frame, cutting across the border in the program that I’m using to lay out my comic strip artwork, Manga Studio EX5. Even after watching a YouTube tutorial by Manga Studio doyen Doug Hills, I’ve had to go back to Photoshop, which I’ve been using since the 1990s, to the cut around the artwork. There must be a way to do that in Manga Studio, but I’m not there yet.
Pasting up the comic on screen is a flexible way of working but the finished product will be printed on A4 paper so, as I’m now a quarter of the way through the project, I decided it was a good time to print out my pages to see how it’s all coming together.
I like the splash of colour in the opening frame and the low key colour of the soap works page but my favourite frame so far is the one where the poacher is forced to drop his knife. And it looks even better with the knife looming out of the frame and coming towards you!
Link; Doug Hills Manga Studio 5 Webinar; Drawing Digital Comics for Beginners
It’s time to move on from this first page of the Waterton comic, but here it is at last. I feel that I’ve overdone a scene that should have been given the lightest of touches but, having worked out the staging and the details, I can always come back to it later, when I’ve had more practice and I’ve developed a house style.
I don’t think that it harms to overdo artwork occasionally, you need to feel free to experiment, so I’m glad that I’m not up against a tight deadline.
I was surprised how difficult it was to get Squire Waterton to look as if he is winking at the reader. Although I’m always thinking in terms of scenes from a movie, a single drawing represents just one moment, much as I try to relate it to the next or the previous frame.
A wink depends on the recipient of the gesture seeing the start and finish of the movement. One eye kept closed indefinitely doesn’t have the same meaning, but in a single drawing, it’s difficult not to give the impression that an action is frozen in time. A freer style might suggest the the movement was in progress.
My great grandfather George Swift was born in Sheffield in 1840 so I guess that this portrait of him was painted around 1845. As far as I can tell, the painting isn’t signed.
It reminds me of those formal Victorian studio portrait photographs which often have a formal park on a painted backdrop.
My mum remembered as a toddler being prompted to look at this painting and say ‘Granddad, pull your sock up!’
The urn of flowers is a corner of the painting that appeals to me. I can imagine the portrait being produced by a team, with one artist adding the floral flourishes.
The pleasure dome in the background looks like the artist’s invention but the setting reminds me of Sheffield Botanical Gardens, a place that my great granddad George was familiar with.
When we drive past the gardens, I always find myself remembering my mum’s story that, when she was a baby, George would push her in her pram to the gardens but he complained that;
‘This baby always starts crying as soon as I get to the gates! And I have to turn around and bring her back to be fed.’
His good looks have come down through the generations and we’ve got photographs of one of his great great great grandsons standing by the portrait, hoop in hand looking very like his ancestor.
I had some difficulty photographing the painting because of the glossy varnish. Surprisingly, even though I had my camera on a tripod it came up with a ‘blink detected’ warning! I think it’s more likely that great granddad was winking at me.
The canvas has a tale to tell. Two patches of rubber glued to the back show where it was repaired when a bomb hit my granddad Swift’s house during the Sheffield Blitz.
There are two maker’s stamps on the back of the 3ft x 2ft 6 inch canvas. Geo. Rowney & Co. supplied the canvas, and perhaps the stretcher. I can’t decipher that London address.
There’s a clearer stamp from H. Hodgson of 39 West Street, Sheffield. It appears that Hodgson was a ‘Carvre & Gildre’, so presumably the carver and gilder who supplied the ornate frame.
If you’ve any ideas on that last line of Hodgson’s stamp, please let me know. Could that last word be ‘Stationer’?
My mum, Gladys Joan Swift (as she was then), looks about six in this portrait, so it must have been painted around 1924.
It was painted in Sheffield by Charles Beatson (1864 – 1949). He painted historical subjects including a Portrait of a Cavalier. In those subjects, I can see the influence by of Dutch painters and I think there are hints of that in this portrait, that’s if you can get past mum’s 1920s party dress!
The canvas is 3ft x 2ft 6 inches. There’s no makers name on the back.
I’d love to identify the book that my mum is holding. It might be there to add a splash of colour but, even so, it looks like a particular title. It’s possible that my mum had brought a book with her to the sitting but I think that it’s more likely to be a prop, something Beatson was able to put his hands on in the studio.
When I invert and stretch it in Photoshop, the illustration on the back cover looks like a woman reading from an open book to a boy.
One of my mum’s favourite books was Alice in Wonderland. In her final illness, in January this year, when she was confined to bed in a nursing home, she asked me to look out her childhood copy of Alice and to bring it in and read it to her, describing to me just where I’d find it on the bookshelf. I’m sorry that I didn’t get around to doing that before she passed away but between the two of us we managed to remember a few of the lines from the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.
We’re back to that staple of Victorian melodrama, gentlemen in top hats in rapt conversation. As a contrast to the businesslike surveyor (on the left) I’d originally had Waterton going hatless but then he looked too much like a canal worker so I’ve imagined him in threadbare coat and battered hat.
Battered hats are more fun to draw.
The script calls for Waterton to look wild-eyed so I’ve been trying different eye-shapes to get that across. I’m thinking of castaway Ben Gunn prattling on about Flint’s treasure or the Ancient Mariner stopping one of three to tell his tale. But Waterton is playing a practical joke on the surveyor, so he can look amused as well as manic.
With that in mind, I felt that his thumb and finger gesture looked as little too precise in my pencil rough. I was concentrating so much on this gesture that I gave Waterton five fingers!
After struggling with the final artwork in my last frame, I decided to work out everything carefully in my roughs. I even thought about the direction of the shading.
Even after producing the elaborate rough above, I felt that I needed to tweak the eyes, and as I’ve mentioned already, the hand.
Once again my light pad has been in use again and again throughout the day.