Fresco Folk

Remains of the gardrobe shafts – medieval toilets – attached to the great chamber at Sandal.
peasant

My brief, for this illustration of life in a castle, is to draw ‘someone using a well’.

Following the restoration of Pontefract Castle, there’s now a scheme to improve access and restore the ruins at Sandal. I’ll be illustrating various features including the twelve-metre deep well, excavated in the bailey, conveniently close to the privy chamber, the castle’s private apartments.

I’ve tried to imagine the kind of servant who would have been assigned the task of hauling buckets from the well. Although the shaft of the well has been preserved, we can only guess at the arrangement of pulleys or rollers that were used but I’m sure that it would have involved a bucket and rope.

Wooden Poses

I’ve drawn the character on my iPad Pro using an Apple Pencil in the Adobe Fresco drawing program but for the pose I’ve used a 3D figure in Clip Studio Paint, tweaking the pose and the proportions. I felt that he would have developed broad muscular shoulders because of all that heavy lifting.

I’m still at the rough stage but this should give the team designing the interpretation a clear idea of what I have in mind. Just fourteen more illustrations to go . . .

In the days before computers, I’d occasionally use a Polaroid camera to take a photograph of a friend in a particular pose or I’d establish the proportions by setting up an artist’s lay figure, an articulated wooden doll.

Both these methods had disadvantages: under my direction, the friend would be likely to adopt a static self-conscious pose and the lay figure inevitably looked stilted and wooden.

My favourite way to draw people is to go out with a sketchbook and to try to capture their movement and character.

Virtual Brushes

Fresco drawing

I’ve got a bewildering number of virtual brushes available to me in Fresco including instant cross hatching and screen tones (left).

For the Sandal rough, after tracing the 3D figure with a virtual pencil, I’m going for a quick pen drawing – the one I used here is ‘vintage inks’.

The flat colour goes on a layer below the pen and ink. I outline each area of solid colour with a vector brush – such as ‘basic round’ – then fill using the paint bucket tool.

Reflections, Milby Cut

Reflections, Milby Cut on the River Ure at Boroughbridge, North Yorkshire.

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Howgate Wonder

apple leaves

Last year was our best ever for the two small cordon apples by the patio but this year out of the few small apples that grew, all were blemished by insects or pecked by birds.

We grow a double cordon of Howgate Wonder and a single stem of Golden Spire. They’re in a tiny bed close to the wall of next door’s conservatory so in September I added a thick mulch of garden compost to refresh the soil. I also planted dozens of crocus bulbs.

Time spent travelling in wild places

‘We know that time spent travelling and in wild places, with the people that matter most is precious.’

It might sound like Thoreau or John Muir, but it’s a quote from this year’s Rohan Christmas catalogue. If I wrote a mission statement, that would have to be part of it. Rohan’s soft-sell marketing must have worked on me because I’m going to try out their new Nordic Jeans, ‘with innovative infrared technology’. That would have been perfect yesterday at St Aidan’s RSPB nature reserve.

It’s the nearest you can get to wilderness and wet within ten miles of Leeds City Centre and we head there when we need wide open spaces. On a clear day you can see the moors of the Peak District moors twenty miles to the south but on Sunday morning mist filled the Aire Valley and the pattern of lagoons and reedbeds as seen from the visitor centre over a latte and flapjack resembled the floating world of Chinese brush paintings.

There’s just one bird, a coot, in my photograph of Fleakingly Reservoir, in the north-west corner of the reserve, but I’ve managed to position it behind the topmost seed-head of the knapweed. Coots were probably the most abundant bird with several hundred on the various lagoons. A smart drake goldeneye dived repeatedly on the main lake and a stonechat perched on a seed-head of dock alongside the track at the foot of The Hillside.

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Bridlington in November

With an onshore wind blowing, it seemed as if the high tide lasted all day. Turnstones seemed resigned to sitting it out on the promenade.

Barbara spotted the blue and orange of a kingfisher on a parapet below the Spa but it flew down before I saw it, so we walked down a slipway for a better view. In the dull afternoon light, the streak of electric blue looked incongruous amongst the duller dunlins and turnstones, like a wisp of plastic litter.

As it perched on a seaweed-covered rock, it got caught in the overspray when a wave came in, forcing the waders to move.

Fossil Raindrops

raindrop fossils

These fossil raindrops are preserved in flagstones in the courtyard of the Stable Block at Nostell Priory near Wakefield.

It looks to me as if the flow of the river that laid down the sandy sediment was flowing diagonally, depositing platy minerals such as mica as the flow of the water slackened. Masons can easily split the stone into flat slabs by splitting it along these laminations.

This second slab was laid down on top of a rain-spattered slab, filling the indentations with sediment, a similar process to taking a plaster cast of a footprint. As in the previous photograph, the light is coming from the top of the picture, so these are dimples rising above the surface.

I’ve taken these photographs for my latest FutureLearn course, the Open University’s Earth in my Pocket: an Introduction to Geology. Our assignment this week is to look at building stones.

Link

Earth in my Pocket: an Introduction to Geology

Sainsburys Shoppers

shoppers

The silhouette of the woman in headscarf and long coat made a welcome contrast to the men in jacket & jeans and anorak & cords that I’d just drawn. A woman walked briskly by, clutching a cake box, mug and a potted artificial succulent, adding a touch of drama in comparison with most of the shoppers who went for the easier options of a trolley or a basket.

I drew in pen, making brief notes about colour, which I added later when we stopped for a cup of coffee and a Debenhams’ orange and cranberry scone.

Twenty Twenty

WordPress themes ‘Twenty Nineteen’ and ‘Twenty Twenty’.

I’ve just updated my blog to the latest version of WordPress and couldn’t resist trying out their latest theme, Twenty Twenty. It’s a contrast to all the themes that I’ve tried previously as it’s got a tinted background – a neutral creamy shade – instead of the pure white that I’ve always used, but I like the way this sets off the watercolour in my drawings.

It’s easy to read too. I like the variable typeface Inter, designed by Rasmus Andersson.

The drawback of the Twenty Twenty theme for me is that by default it shows a reduced version of images, so I’ve soon gone back to the Twenty Nineteen theme.

Postcard Portraits

Richard 1976
Self portrait, pencil and watercolour, May 1979
As I was drawing my self portrait, this fly settled on the page.

If portraits were postcard size, you’d be able to fit the shortlist of the BP Portrait Award into Horbury’s telephone box art gallery. This self portrait, from forty years ago, is from one of the ‘Bushey’ 7 x 4½ inch landscape sketchbooks that I used in the late 1970s, as are all but one of the fourteen sketches in this post.

The red pullover was knitted for me by my old friend John Blackburn’s mum, Barbara. Mrs Blackburn was a thrifty knitter and, when you’d grown out of a jumper, she could unravel the wool and use it again. In this way, a batch of wool could be recycled through several generations of jumpers.

In the background, you can see my home-made bookshelves in the alcove. When I drew the portrait, I sat at my work bench on a utility Windsor kitchen chair, which is why I look as if I’m leaning on a gate.

My room
My room in a shared flat. I assembled my work bench – complete with vice – in the room so when I moved out a few years later I had to saw through my built-to-last mortice and tenon joints in order to bring it down the stairs! Now in a cut-down version, it is hinged to our garage wall.

Lawyer’s Wig

shaggy ink cap
inkcaps

‘Best in batter with garlic and parsley’, suggests Marcel Bon, but, despite a name that you might associate with Michelin stars, Bon (1925-2014) was a mycologist not a chef. In The Mushrooms and Toadstools of Britain and Europe, he tells us that Lawyer’s Wig, also known as Shaggy Ink Cap, Coprinus comatus, is best when young and white, before the cap starts to turn inky, but that it is rather watery, hence his serving suggestion.

ink cap

Bon warns that the closely related Common Ink Cap is not recommended for eating because it causes ‘flushing in the face, sweating and palpitation if eaten with alcohol’. Small wonder then that the drug Antabuse, used for treating alcoholics, is derived from it.

This single specimen was growing beneath bushes by the path near the car park at Newmillerdam Country Park but lawyer’s wig is also found in pastures, on bare ground in rubbish dumps and on lawns.

Drawing in Sidecar Mode

Sidecar

This is my first attempt to use Apple’s Sidecar mode which is a feature introduced with the latest operating system, Catalina, that enables me to use my iPad Pro as a second screen for my iMac. Here I’ve dragged just the central workspace window from the iMac version of Clip Studio Paint onto the iPad, leaving the Layers Palette, Toolbar etc on the iMac. Rather disconcerting, but it works.

I’m trying out the 3D posable figures in Clip Studio, using them to get the proportions and drawing on a layer above them.

Fresco

My first drawing in Fresco. I like the cross hatching that I can get from one of the ‘Comic’ pens. There’s also a blotty pen and a ‘Blake’ pen, which I’m afraid doesn’t suddenly enable me to draw like Quentin Blake.
The ‘Belgian Comics’ brush in Fresco has yet to succeed in enabling me to draw like Herge, but it produces a stroke very like the ‘ligne claire’, clear line, of the Tintin stories.

So far, it doesn’t feel as direct as drawing in a program such as Procreate or Adobe’s new Fresco on the iPad itself, but I’ll keep using it so that I get familiar with it, because I’m sure it’s going to be useful as a way of using an Apple Pencil on an iMac only program.

Links

Using your iPad as a second display for your Mac with Sidecar

Adobe Fresco, drawing program at the App Store