The Cobblestone Path

cobblestone path

I think that you can tell how much I liked discovering this cobblestone path from my drawing. You take a fork in a path deep in Middleton Woods, cross a stream and there it is, looking like the kind of place that Dorothy, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man might stride along on the look-out for ‘Lions . . . and Tigers . . . and Bears’.

Middleton Walk 1
My Middleton Woods walk from my ‘Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle’ (now out of print). Please don’t rely on the directions as I haven’t checked the route for five or six years.

You get a great sense of history walking through the Woods. The cobblestone path must go back a long way because one map shows a Borough Constituency Boundary following it.

Middleton Walk 2
As I say, please don’t rely on my directions for this walk as they’re now out of date.

Unfortunately there’s a bit of a question-mark hanging over this path as Leeds Council, the current owners intend to dispose of it so that a car park can be built (there’s more to it than that, but you get the picture. I’ve had an update from a local campaigner, below).

The constituency boundary seems to have moved, but hope that Hilary Benn, MP for Leeds Central since 2010, when the boundaries were last changed, will lend his support to calls to keep the path and preserve its character.

Update from a local campaigner

These are the details as I understand them, but it’s quite a complex picture, and it’s the implications of the scheme have appeared rather suddenly, so apologies if any these details are incorrect.

The council are meeting on Wednesday to discuss handing over the path to the school and 7.4 acres of greenbelt formerly South Leeds Golf Club land. The council had advised the public in March that the land was to be rewilded and incorporated into Middleton Park. The school want a new car park on their land and they propose to build a hard sports area on the rewilded land plus a new football pitch. Many mature trees will be destroyed. As they are an Academy Trust this is public green space being gifted by a local authority to a private organisation. The school already have a 3G pitch and plenty of space for sport if they didn’t build the new car park. John Charles Centre for Sport is also a short walk from the school through the wood.
We have all enjoyed walking on the rewilded area especially over lockdown so this has been a real shock to local residents. I’m not sure of the procedure after Wednesday’s meeting. Presumably the land will be transferred to the school and then maybe we will be fighting individual planning applications.

Great Yorkshire Creature Count

Creature Count

The Yorkshire Wildlife Trust’s Creature Count is underway this weekend, getting people to count as many species as they can in their gardens. Here are some of the usual suspects that I would now be rounding up, if I’d signed up for the survey this year, but I’m a bit pressed with work in the studio. Must try and join in if they run it next year.

Baring-Gould Werewolf Slayer

Baring-Gould

During his time at the Mission at Horbury Bridge, from 1864 to 1867, the newly-ordained Sabine Baring-Gould wrote the hymn Onward! Christian Soldiers, met and fell in love with mill girl Grace Taylor and wrote The Book of Werewolves (1865), which Bram Stoker considered the definitive account of lycanthropy (Bram Stoker had heard rumours that there was to be a sequel on vampires, but sadly that didn’t happen).

There is no evidence that Sabine had to fight any werewolves during his time as a curate, working alongside Canon Sharp, but how could I resist him as a subject for the latest challenge from Swedish cartoonist Mattias Adolfsson in my Art of Sketching online course. We were asked to show aspects of a character’s biography through tattoos.

Alex Jenkins

Illustrator Alex Jenkins on today’s Adobe Live ‘From the Sofa’ session. I attempted to match his style in Fresco, using the Blake pen and the Natural inker but my line work is never as calm as his.

Alex said that his early influences included Robert Crumb. I was reminded of Glen Baxter and Gary Larson.

Alex

My initial sketch in Conte had a bit more life to it than the coloured version that I drew on the layer above it.

Link

Alex Gamsu Jenkins

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When Cats do Online Quizzes

cat quiz cartoon

Another homemade birthday card, this time for Barbara’s nephew Simon, who we’ve been playing against in an online family quiz.

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Foxgloves

foxglove
Original drawing 6 cm, 2.4 inches across.

Our first visitor since March: Barbara’s sister Susan joins us for a socially-distanced coffee and bran loaf in our back garden. This group of foxgloves were self-sown but they’ve positioned themselves perfectly in the border. Thanks to lockdown, we’re more ahead in the garden than ever before and yesterday we made a trip to the garden centre to buy enough pollinator-friendly plants to fill the last gaps in the border.

bag and chair
wine glass

During the last three months we haven’t set foot in anyone else’s house, with the exception of Barbara’s brother John, who needed our assistance on a couple of occasions.

I’ve been putting my enforced spare time to good use by giving myself a refresher course in illustration and getting a bit more familiar with the work of illustrators, photographers and designers through the daily podcasts from Adobe, but I could soon get back into my usual sketchbook habit. I feel that what I’ve learnt over the past few months feeds into my regular observational drawing, even if that’s something as familiar as drawing a foxglove in the back garden.

Garstang & Flock

comic
Tweets
The Twitter feed: I stuck with the text of the original tweets.

My thanks to Suzy Scavenger and to her hen Garstang, the chicken with the twisted beak. This is the latest assignment in my Mattias Adolfsson online course, The Art of Sketching. We were asked to draw a comic featuring the self-portrait comic character we’d created.

The dialogue is taken from directly from an exchange of tweets between Suzy and I about the removal of slave trader Edward Colston’s statue from his plinth overlooking the harbour in Bristol. What could have been a serious discussion of whether it’s acceptable to destroy works of art has been somewhat undermined by Garstang, who has overacted in every frame she appears in.

Roughs
Roughs: ‘Pencil’ blocking out (drawn on the iPad); colour rough (iPad); final rough (pen on paper, real paper)
Garstang

“Marvellous!” said Suzy, when I explained what I had in mind for the comic strip, “Garstang deserves some recognition.”

As you can see for my Clip Studio iPad cartoon (left), all this celebrity could easily go to Garstang’s head. In my cartoon, she’s standing on a copy of the popular Victorian magazine Tit-Bits (which I remember still being in print in the late 1950s). A copy dating from 1895 was discovered hidden in Colston’s plinth.

studies
Garstang drawn from a photograph Suzy sent me. Yes, hens do sometimes have long wattles.
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Gavin Campbell

gavin

Gavin Campbell, illustrator, on today’s Adobe Live ‘From the Sofa’ session, started his career with a series of portraits and photo-realistic pencil illustrations, ‘drawing’ with the rubber to create the highlights. Watching him working through a composition featuring multiple layers in Photoshop, I could see his pencil-drawing background coming through, for instance in the way he built up the tones. In places where some illustrators might have used a 3D mesh to create a contoured effect across the subject, he preferred a ‘liquify’ option which enabled him to create the same effect through drawing.

I’ve drawn this in Fresco on my iPad Pro, making a lot of use of the cross hatch brush which I was reminded of during one of the ‘Sofa’ live streams last week.

Link

Gavin Campbell on Behance

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Martina Martian

“You might not have heard of me, but you’ve probably seen my work.” said Martina Martian, illustrator, designer and lettering artist, on today’s Adobe Live ‘From the Sofa’ session. As her animated graphic GIFs have had 9.2 billion downloads, you have probably seen her work literally popping up on social media.

I’ve drawn this in Adobe Fresco, the iPad drawing program that she often uses for her lettering and design. After starting my usual pen and wash approach, I went for Fresco’s Conte Crayon and Old Bristles brushes.

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Fresco Cat

cat cartoon

In today’s ‘From the Sofa’ live stream, Tony Harmer gave us a masterclass in how to draw cats, using Adobe Fresco and Adobe Capture. Okay, mine didn’t turn out looking quite like Tony’s . . . but I learnt about masks and generating textures and I particularly enjoyed drawing with the Fresco ‘Cross Hatching’ brush.

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