Rhubarb Animation

storyboard
Storyboard for section one of my ‘Rhubarb Sketchbook’ animation

Speeding along the motorway, you can cross West Yorkshire’s Rhubarb Triangle in five or ten minutes but put on your boots and get out walking and there’s so much to discover. For a Creative Digital Challenge for next month’s Rhubarb Festival, I’m putting together a proposal for a short animation. I’m trying to pack a lot into it:

  • 8 picture maps
  • 3 comic strips
  • 60 pen and watercolour sketches

Section one is A Brief History of Rhubarb: From mammoths to Marco Polo; Chinese medicine and herbal cures; Victorian gardens and the Rhubarb Special night train from Ardsley Station, which, until 1966, carried 200 tons of rhubarb to London.

Bastion

constructing defences

As a contrast to my detailed aerial view of Sandal Castle, I want quite lively, smaller drawings to dot around the spread to illustrate aspects of its history. I’m starting in the south-east corner with the gun emplacement constructed by the Royalists during the English Civil War. By then, with the introduction of artillery, the medieval stone walls were old technology. Cannon ball-proof earthworks were needed.

Unfortunately the cannon needed to complete the defences never arrived.

My swaggering cavalier directing his team of barrow boys is drawn directly from a detail in an engraving by Henrik Rusc, The Strengthening of Strongholds, dated 1645. I’ve used the ‘Blotty Ink’ virtual pen in Fresco, which matches the style of the engraving. Examining Rusc’s drawing so closely, I’m impressed with the way he could evoke character with just a few lines. The wheelbarrows themselves look as if they’ve had a history and repeated figures of the labourers in a broken rhythm give a sense of movement and suggest the hard work that was involved.

Dumbbells

Sunrise
View from my studio at about 8 o’clock this morning.
dumbbells
Aldi’s 3 kg Crane dumbbells

It’s time for a new start and in the supermarkets there’s no shortage of encouragement for us to get fitter with a bewildering amount of gym equipment on offer. I’ve gone for dumbbells. In last year’s get-fit special offers I went for a pair of 2 kilogram dumbbells, this year I’ve upgraded to 3 kilograms, that’s that’s three bags of sugar!

I’m convinced that my few minutes a day exercise with the 2kg dumbbells has given me a bit more strength in my arms and shoulders but unfortunately I haven’t seen any improvement in my shaky hands, which the doctor tells me are the result of familial, also known as essential, tremor. I guess it could also be caused by spending too much time drawing, but I’m not going to give that up!

Published
Categorized as Sky Tagged

Final Touches

Sandal Castle
car park

The cars in the car park were the final details that I added to my Sandal Castle illustration. The car park looked too empty without them but I tried to draw them fairly sketchily so as not to distract attention from the main subject, the castle ruins. Also included a few visitors – dog walkers and a lone pushchair pusher – in the positions they were in when I took my reference photographs.

The advantage of having drawn this in Adobe Fresco is that if I change my mind about the figures and cars, I can delete them and redraw them as I like because they’re on a separate layer.

New Year

Garden
long-tailed tits

It’s hard to believe that we’re already two decades into the twenty-first century.

Six long-tailed tits visit the feeders at breakfast time. They tend to come as a group either early or late. Before Christmas we had eight of them gathering around the edges of the two half coconuts, pecking at the fat as the light faded.

Too Many Swans

Obelisk Lodge
Obelisk Lodge, Nostell
swan

It’s that time of year again: the Mute Swans are starting to establish their territories. On Nostell’s Middle Lake this morning, the resident pair with their six cygnets are up at the top, shallower end of the lake but they’ve got competition because at the other end of the lake two pairs of swans are circling each other, wings raised in a threat display.

Twelve swans on one small lake isn’t going to work. In the next two or three months, the grown-up cygnets will spread their wings and leave, or be persuaded to leave, and the three rival pairs will have to fight it out.

There are another eight swans on the Upper Lake, one standing by the sluice that connects with the Middle Lake. Another possible contender in the contest to claim the territory.

aconite

Beneath the hollies near the house, the first winter aconites are beginning to show. A nuthatch investigates the branches of a lakeside tree.

Nostell
Middle Lake, path to Menagerie, Nostell

A few gadwall have joined the regular mallards on the Lower Lake and we see a single drake wigeon there. Goosanders seem to prefer the deeper waters of the Middle Lake and we’ve noticed that they sometimes dive alongside the swan family. I wonder if they’re attracted by the chance of catching small fish that have been disturbed by the activities of the swans.

Small Tortoiseshell

small tortoiseshell
ichneumon wasp
Ichneumon wasp

On one of the colder days last month we had a small tortoiseshell butterfly fluttering around in the dining room and decided that the best place to release it would be in the cool shelter of our garage.

A few days later it had emerged and it perched motionless for a day or two on the outside of the up-and-over garage door. It must have eventually flown because I then saw it fluttering about at the back of the house, caught on a strand of spider’s silk in the top corner of my studio window. I released it and it flew off across the garden. Ideally I should have offered it sugared water, to allow it to replace some of the energy that it has lost.

There was no frost this morning and today a few insects were active. A tiny black fly drifts around in the kitchen and a small ichneumon wasp (or possibly a sawfly?), perhaps a centimetre long, climbs up the bedroom window. I catch it in a bug box and take a few macro shots as it goes through a grooming routine.

December was a warm month and I regularly noticed an orb web spider run out to despatch some tiny insect that had been trapped in its web in a corner on the outside of our living room window.

Keep & Barbican

Barbican

Working in from the edges, I’ve finally made it to the centre of my Sandal Castle aerial view, finishing off the Barbican: an impressive internal gatehouse between the castle’s bailey and the Keep.

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Categorized as Drawing

Ruins

Ruins

I’ve been working on this illustration as if it was a jigsaw, making a point of going around the edges of the Sandal Castle site, drawing the trees and hedges before turning my attention to the centre. This afternoon I’ve made a start on finishing off the centre by redrawing the ruins of the Great Hall. That’s working pretty much as I imagined it, although I think that it now needs a suggestion of a shadow, to look more three-dimensional.

Sandal Castle is rarely this lonely, so I also need to add those cars, dog walkers and visitors. And perhaps a table or two outside the cafe.

Earthworks

earthworks

I’ve been adding shading and hatching to the aerial view of Sandal Castle to create a more three-dimensional effect. I had intended to fade out the hedgerows around the perimeter but as the earthworks are looking so solid, I think that might be too much of a contrast.

I’ll probably add a few figures for scale and a few cars in the car park. I’m drawing with an Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro, using the program Adobe Fresco.

Greater Black-backed Gull

reeds

10.30 a.m.: On North Ings, RSPB St Aidan’s, a greater black-backed gull is feeding on the carcass of a brown hare. Two crows and several magpies, dwarfed by the gull, have gathered around it, like vultures at a kill on the savannah, waiting their turn in the pecking order. As the gull tears at the carcass with its large bill, we glimpse the long back legs of the hare and the black and white markings on the tips of the hare’s long ears.

At the field centre, there’s speculation about who was responsible for the kill. One possibility is a peregrine. For a peregrine, St Aidan’s isn’t far from the nest site on the tower of Wakefield Cathedral.

Peregrine Pellets?

pellets and feathers
breast bone
Sternum, about 6 inches long.

A few days ago, we were looking at the remains of what looked like a duck or goose, perhaps even a cygnet. Pellets left by the scattered feathers and bones could have been those of a peregrine.

A short distance, perhaps twenty yards, along the track we saw a sternum, the breastbone of a bird, which we thought looked large enough to be a goose or swan. We can’t be sure that it was part of the same kill.

pellet
Pellet about an inch and a quarter long.

There were fox droppings nearby, so the red fox was our number one suspect, but, as far as I know, foxes, unlike birds of prey, crows and herons, don’t produce pellets of indigestible material. In my photograph you can see that the two small feathers appear to have been flattened and nipped off at the quill, rather than plucked, which to me suggests fox.

It’s unlikely that the brown hare that we saw the gull feasting on had been killed by a fox, as it was on a part of the reserve that is surrounded by what is intended to be a fox- and badger-proof fence.

When we walked back past the kill nearly an hour later, the gull had moved and three magpies were picking over the remnants.

Simplifying Sandal

bailey

If I was working from life, I’d want to indicate every bramble bush in the moat and every hawthorn growing on the motte at Sandal Castle but, as I’m more interested in the structure of the earthworks, I need to simplify.

I’ll add shadows and highlights to build up a three-dimensional effect. For the stippling to represent the vegetation I’ve used a virtual brush with the appropriate name of ‘Seurat’ in the Adobe Fresco drawing app. I’ll use a dry brush following the contours to further emphasise the form.

Grandma’s Cupboard

Robert and Jane Bell at Vine Cottage, Sutton-cum-Lound in the 1950s. Colour added at colourise.sg. In real life the bricks and pantiles were terra cotta red, the paintwork green and creamy white.

My grandma, Jane Bagshaw, met my grandad Robert Bell at a celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, on Tuesday June 15th 1897 at 3 o’clock at Serlby Park, Nottinghamshire. He was then aged 19, working as second coachman to the Galways at Serlby. Jane, a domestic servant was 14.

Vine Cottage

After living in Sheffield, the couple retired to Vine Cottage, Sutton-cum-Lound, near Retford, Nottinghamshire in the 1950s.

As you might guess from the photograph of them, standing amongst the hollyhocks in front of the cottage, they were the kind of grandparents that you might encounter in a children’s story.

The ‘Grandma’s Cupboard’ prompt in my writer’s notebook.

Taking my cue from a prompt on the Start Writing Fiction course that I took this autumn, I’ve recalled some of the features of Vine Cottage, as I remember them from my childhood, from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, when they left the cottage and moved to a bungalow at the other end of the village.

Grandma’s Cupboard

shelf edging

The prompt on the fiction course was to write about ‘Grandma’s Cupboard’, so let’s start with the shelves in the narrow scullery at the back of the cottage.

Grandma lined the shelves with newspaper, cutting a decorative zig-zag on its trailing edge. My father saved copies of The Times for her. At that time it was a broadsheet consisting almost entirely of text so it gave the shelves a more uniform effect than her own Weekly News, a popular tabloid. She always saved The Weekly News for me because I liked the cartoons in it. And they would sometimes also pass on a copy of the Salvation Army’s newsletter, which featured a comic strip of The Adventures of Black Bob, featuring a hill shepherd and his faithful border collie.