Remembering VE Day

Bill Ellis
Barbara’s dad, William Ellis in 1940.

On this day, 7th May, in 1995, we invited my mum, Gladys Joan Bell, and Barbara’s mum and dad, Bill and Betty Ellis, to reminisce about VE Day for the 50th anniversary. My mum was a primary school teacher in Sheffield who, in the early stages of the war, took evacuees to stay in rural Derbyshire to escape the bombing. In the Sheffield Blitz my grandad’s house was bombed but my mum, grandma and grandad were safe in the Anderson Shelter in the back garden. My great grandma next door wasn’t so lucky. She didn’t like the shelter, so she hunkered down in the cellar but the Luftwaffe scored a direct hit and demolished her house. Luckily great grandma and her pet bird in a cage were rescued via the coal shoot.

What the three of them reminisced about 25 years ago, I can’t tell you as we no longer have a cassette player in the house. My mum celebrated in Sheffield, Barbara’s mum was in Horbury but I’ve forgotten now whether Bill and my dad, Douglas, were on leave at the time.

When the lockdown is over, I’ll get the cassette transferred to digital.

My mum, Gladys Joan Swift, as she was before her marriage at the end of the war, somewhere in the Peak District, c.1946.

Pogo Pen

When travel restrictions are eased, if tourists ever get to travel the 7,000 light years to IC 4703, The Eagle Nebula, they’re going to want to take home a souvenir of its bucket-list highlight The Pillars of Creation. So how about this pen, pencil and eraser set?

Frankenstein Pen
pogo pen

The Pogo Pen was inspired by a great niece and nephew’s ongoing attempt to pogo jump the height of Everest, in 9cm increments. I realise that this would be more like a rubber stamp than a pen.

But my favourite pen out of this batch is the Frankenstein Pen, modelled on Boris Karloff’s neck bolt. Like the Apple Pencil, it’s rechargeable . . . if you happen to be on the top of a mountain in Transylvania during a thunderstorm.

Inks

inks
Actual drawing 2.25 x 4 inches, 6 x 10.5 cm.

My pen project continues but I thought that the inks ought to make an appearance today. The ’20 ounce’ bottle of Super Quink red ink was redundant stock that my dad brought back from the office c.1970. It still works fine. The Chinese ink in the attractive blue-and-white bottle was something that I tried when I worked on my monochrome sketchbook published as High Peak Drifter. I made four dilutions at different strengths which I took on my travels to simplify adding the tone.

Daler’s FW Acrylic Artists Ink goes back to my Yorkshire Rock days. I remember buying two shades of blue when I drew an underwater spread of ‘Life on the Reef’ for the Carboniferous Limestone section of the book. This bottle was Sepia, my go-to colour for most of the line work.

The Special Red is Pelikan Drawing Ink, from the 1970s. The one with the blue cap is Winsor and Newton Calligraphy Ink, the Burnt Sienna behind it is Rotring Drawing Ink. Bringing up the rear on the right, are plastic bottles of Stephen’s and Horse stamp pad inks.

The Crime Writer’s Pen

fantasy pens

My latest fantasy pens include a gardener’s pen, complete with dibber and garden twine, a crime writer’s pen which will keep CSI busy for days and a walking pole pen which includes compass, pedometer and even and emergency supply of Kendal Mint Cake.

Pots of Pens

pens

Our first assignment on Mattias Adolfsson’s the online illustration course The Art of Sketching: Transform Your Doodles into Art (see link below) that I’ve just started is to get our pens together. These are a small selection . . .

more pens

Next is to produce a sheet of observational drawings of some of those pens, trying out different techniques as we go. I’m still only halfway down my A3 page but the good news is that, with all those pots of pens, I won’t run out of subject matter.

satirical pens

I’ve already made a start on the next stage of the assignment, which is to take things one stage further and draw a sheet of fantasy pens. It doesn’t matter how silly the idea is.

Link

The Art of Sketching: Transform Your Doodles into Art
A course by Mattias Adolfsson, Illustrator

Published
Categorized as Drawing Tagged

Bee Hotel

bee hotel cartoon

The card shops and National Trust gift shops have yet to reopen so I’m still producing homemade birthday cards, this one celebrating a birthday and a very successful bee hotel. The day our friend John Gardner finished constructing it and put it in place, several solitary bees moved in.

cat cards

Meanwhile the numerous cats who wonder through our back garden provide material for cards, including these two characters. When it came to a showdown, ‘Bear’ through bluster and body language had no trouble seeing off the smaller ‘Wildcat’ tabby.

Cuckoo Flower

sketching flowers

I’ve started a new sketchbook for an online illustration course (more of that later). We’re asked to sign our name on the first page and write the date . . .

flowers

The difficult ones first! I knew it was the 2nd.

I had an idea of how I’d like to draw the unfurling croziers of the male fern, growing by the pond. It didn’t work out the way I’d hoped, probably because I wasn’t close enough to take in the detail I’d intended to add.

But that’s an advantage of a sketchbook, as opposed to a commission, I can relax and move on to the next drawing. Really enjoyed drawing these.

Basil

basil

We should be self-sufficient in pesto this year because our basil seedlings have got off to a good start. We discovered that the ones we’d potted on did better on the kitchen windowsill than in the greenhouse, probably because we had some cool nights.

Published
Categorized as Garden Tagged

Lino Cutting

lino cutting

These lino cutting tools include a Linocraft Pen-tools set which probably dates from my mum’s time at Ripon Teacher Training College, c. 1937-39. I have used these tools occasionally cto produce Christmas cards.

Linocraft Pen-tools
lino cutters

The Linocraft set was ‘Déposée en Suisse’, registered in Switzerland, but manufactured by Perry & Co. Ltd., London and Birmingham. Also from Birmingham are the set of Lino Cutters, presented to me by a fellow student at Leeds, who felt that I’d be more likely to use them.

lino pen-tool
Lino pen-tool, Perry & Co. Ltd.

Gladys Joan Swift at Ripon

Gladys Joan Swift at Ripon, 1938

Here’s my mum, Gladys Joan Bell, nee Swift, (1918-2015) at Ripon Teacher Training College. c.1938. She’s armed with ruler pencil and a stack of sheets of what could be card, leather or textiles, so obviously up to something crafty.

Oakleaves
Evolution of England

She won a prize for designing a Coronation Pageant in 1937, a project which fortunately I spotted in the kitchen waste bin at my mum’s one Sunday morning when we made our regular call on her for a coffee. She was able to choose her prize so she went for a serious Oxford University Press history book, The Evolution of England by J. A. Williamson.

‘I don’t know why I chose that,’ she said to me, ‘I expect it was because I thought it was the sort of thing that I should choose.’

Appropriate choice, but it does look like tough going. My mum loved history but, as her designs for the Oakleaves Pageant suggest, she preferred a more colourful subject, such as Richard III or mysteries of the Holbein portrait of Thomas More and his family.

A quote from The Pace Quickens, the final section of Williamson’s book, written in 1931:

“There are more violent deaths on the road in a week-end than on the railways in a year, and they are generally set down to accident, as if it was impossible to prevent them. . . Public hospitals are filled with the victims, and it is even worth while for a private speculator to open a nursing-establishment near a busy road under the sign: ‘Motor casualties taken in.'”

Mum's prize, 1937

Wood Engraving

wood engraving

These wood engraving tools date from my time in Norman Webster’s etching department at Leeds Polytechnic Department of Communication Design, 1970-1972.

In wood engraving, you use the end grain of a the wood, often box or pear. The leather cushion is for keeping the block steady as you cut away the areas that you don’t want to print with the graving tools. I bought myself a little sharpening wedge, but I have to admit that, fifty years later, I’ve yet to use it.

Skokholm, 1970

wood engraving
Wood engraving and sketchbook (which I slung around my neck using the rope as I explored the island).

ALL FOOLS DAY

In the morning it snowed. I stayed indoors doing postcards in the early part of the morning. I went out along the North Coast watching the breakers. It started to hail and I came across the Goats. These are descendants of goats that were kept by the lighthouse men for fresh milk but now they are wild roaming round the island fending for themselves. They have long shaggy coats that blow around in the wind and long horns. They look rather like Maddox-Browns Scapegoat.

From my Skokholm Island Sketchbook, 1970

Weed Knife

weed knife

I think that my previous small plastic weed knife might have ended up in a bucket destined for the compost heap, so I had the perfect excuse for upgrading to a Darlac Bamboo Weed Knife, which is a big improvement. I was drawing these while listening to today’s Adobe podcast and perhaps because of the distraction, I made a mistake with the proportion of the blade (it’s not quite that long).

The bent screwdriver has in the past been used for weeding crevices between paving and it’s also opened many cans of paint. I often took it to Pageant Players to open cans of emulsion that hadn’t been opened since the previous year’s production. This was my dad’s best ratchet screwdriver and I remember my horror when I bent it as he was liable to become explosively angry when tools went astray!

My favourite pair of secateurs were an unmissable bargain ten or so years ago but they cut better the others that we use. A satisfyingly crisp ‘snip’ as you cut through anything up to about half an inch thick.

Drawing this, I realised that my current favourite pen is the Lamy Vista with the Extra Fine nib, used in the lower two drawings. It’s a bit freer flowing than the TWSBI Ecot, which might be the one I’d favour if I was ever aiming for precision and detail.

Published
Categorized as Garden