Grappling the Graphite

grappling the graphite

Take a break, keep fit, Mattias Adolfsson advises us on his Art of Sketching course . . . and draw some exercises suitable for illustrators.

soft lead

It’s a while since I’ve tackled graphite and certainly I’m not ready for H pencils yet.

HB pencil

I can just about manage HB.

nib muscles

The problem is that I’ve spent too long working with pens.

pencil pusher

I was never cut out to be a pencil pusher.

pencil sharpening

I remember the rare pleasure of being appointed pencil monitor at school. With all thirty of the class’s pencils to sharpen there was a tendency for us to push the machine to its limits and turn too fast, result: broken leads. This meant you had to start over and the pencils rapidly decreased in size.

pumping ink

I’m better sticking to what I’m used to, but I’m drawing so much that I’m regularly having to top up my Lamy Vista with De Atramentis ink. Quite a workout and I have to mop up the mess with paper napkin afterwards. Perhaps I should go back to cartridges, you just pop them in and you’re ready to go.

St Peter’s School, Horbury, 1958-1962

teachers
plan of school

My form teachers at St Peter’s, Church of England controlled, Junior School, Horbury, 1958-1962.

  1. Miss Andrassy, a relative of the Andrassy family who ran a butcher’s shop on Queen Street. I remember her being keen on art.
  2. Mr Harker had his classroom in the prefabricated block in the school yard. Organised a class walking group, The Travel Club. Walking must be good for you, because it’s only last autumn, a few weeks before he died, that he managed the two-mile walk around Newmillerdam.
  3. Mr Thompson, who I’ve written about before in this blog, had his classroom in the Ebenezer Hall, a few hundred yards away from the rest of the school in Ring O’Bells Yard. He was a great storyteller.
  4. Mr Lindley, back at the lower corner of the main school, encouraged us with drama and making little booklets. I still have my booklets on Bible stories, birds of prey and, from the last weeks of our time at junior school, a short summary of the history and myths of Ancient Rome. I was a bit over ambitious with that one!
  5. Mr Douglas, our pipe-smoking headmaster, worked from a small office in the main school which he shared with his secretary. Mr Douglas, like Mr Harker, was a keen fellwalker.

Art, walking, storytelling and writing and illustrating booklets: St Peter’s gave me all the basics I needed for my subsequent career!

Clifton Infant Teachers, 1955-58

Infant teachers

‘Draw your first teacher’ is the next prompt from Mattias in the ‘Memory Lane’ section of his Art of Sketching course.

I remember a surprising amount of details of the first couple of terms of my school life, in Mrs Clegg’s class at Wrenthorpe Infants, but we moved to Horbury before the end of the year and my sister Linda and I started at Clifton Infants, a newly-built school at the far end of Manorfields Estate.

Clifton Infants School

plan
  1. Go in the main entrance and turn left and you’d find yourself in Mrs (or Miss?) Birdhouse’s class.
  2. Mrs Wallis‘ class was nearest the school entrance, overlooking an oak tree and, beyond the school grounds, ‘The Reck’, Green Park recreation ground. In my sketch Mrs Wallis is holding a couple of the large, light greyish, wooden building bricks that we used. I remember building a model church with them and surrounding it with smaller wooden bricks to represent gravestones. I was into history even in my second year at infants school.
  3. The teacher holding the flash card had the classroom that faced you as you came in the main entrance. Unfortunately, I can’t remember her name. This was my penultimate class at Clifton. She’d made several of these flash cards, on sheets of sugar paper, each with a photograph from a magazine stuck at the top to give us a clue what the first word was as she held them up for the whole class to read.
    One sheet had just one word in place:
    “You like this one don’t you?!” she chuckled as she held it up.
    I believe that she was the teacher who specialised in music and, now that I’m remembering a bit more about her, I think that she had darker, longer hair than I’ve shown. She drove a car, which resembled a smaller version of the Austin Princess. The bonnet reminded me of the Rolls Royce. I remember this because she explained musical notes – minims, crotchets and semibreves – in terms of children, adults and her in her car, making their way to school.
  4. Finally Miss Marsh, our final class teacher, who became headmistress during my time there.

A Harrowing Experience

Disk harrow

The latest in my Art of Sketching course and Mattias has asked us to draw a favourite toy from childhood. This dates from when we lived at Wrenthorpe, so I guess that I would have been about 4 or 5 years old.

A disk harrow might seem an obscure object of desire but for children at that time agricultural implements were probably the equivalent of diggers today. We lived on Ruskin Avenue, a suburban road of then newish houses, but there was a field between our back garden and the railway embankment, so an assortment of agricultural machinery used to trundle down our road towards the field entrance a few doors on.

And talking of agricultural machinery, I remember being mystified by this snippet of conversation from my first year at the Infants school at Wrenthorpe:

The Bottle-top Tractor

Bottle-top tractor

I’m guessing that there must have been a foil-recycling charity appeal, to raise funds to buy tractors for some war-hit country but I remember puzzling over an image of my friend assembling a tractor using the milk bottle tops he’d collected.

Wrenthorpe
Mrs Clegg’s class, Wrenthorpe Infants, 1955

I drew these before reaching for the photograph album and I’m pleased to see that I wasn’t too far out with fashion trends. Tank tops are due for a comeback. I think that it was the confident-looking boy in braces, top left, standing right behind me, who told us about the tractor scheme. He’s evidently got so much confidence that you could believe him if he said that’s what he was doing.

Mrs Clegg’s classroom, the old school building, Wrenthorpe Infants, 1955.

From the indoor informal portraits, I can see that the photographer had guessed that I’d grow up to be the sort of guy who spends a lot of time in coffee shops. I like the way the focus is on the anxious-looking girl waiting in the Wendy house. Glad that I dressed for the occasion: a tie and a tank top.

The Squire & the Nondescript

Charles Waterton

I’ve been thinking about how to bring this odd couple – traveller and conservationist Charles Waterton and his apeman creation, The Nondescript – to life for a short animation. I’d like to make people smile but also to be able feel that there is something that they can do about the state of the planet, even if it’s not on the scale of exploring the upper reaches of the Essequibo and establishing a full scale nature reserve, as Waterton did.

The lockdown and the restriction of a one hour a day exercise walk, starting from home, that we were all limited to (with certain notorious exceptions!) made Barbara and I realise how much we miss on our local patch in most years by dashing off to the coast or the hills at every opportunity. There was so much to see as spring unfolded during a spell of almost uninterrupted good weather on our regular walk to the upper reaches of Smithy Brook. And the garden – including our pocket-sized nature reserve – has never received so much love and attention.

With all that’s being going on, can a Georgian Squire have any message that is relevant to us? Well, yes, loads actually:

Black Lives Matter

‘Slavery can never be defended: he whose heart is not of iron can never wish to be able to defend it . . . he wishes in his soul that the traffic had been stifled at birth’

Charles Waterton, 1825

Charles Waterton married a woman of mixed race (Anne’s maternal grandma was Arawak) and he travelled with freed slaves on his ‘wanderings’. Waterton trained a freed slave, almost certainly John Edmonstone, in the art of taxidermy. In turn Edmonstone, then based at 37, Lothian Street, Edinburgh, taught young medical student Charles Darwin and, we believe, through telling him stories of his travels with Waterton, inspired Darwin to visit the rain forests himself.

So we might not have had Darwin’s theory of evolution if it hadn’t been for Waterton’s ability to educate and inspire. I believe that he can still inspire us today.

Covid-19

Waterton was part of the first team to successfully carry out a tracheotomy under anaesthetic, not only that, but he supplied the anaesthetic, curare, which he’d collected himself in Guyana. So you could argue that he played a small part in preparing the way for a treatment that during the current epidemic has saved thousands of lives.

My animation won’t go into any of the above connections but I think that it’s important to see Waterton as more than an amiable eccentric – even though that’s the character that I’m basically sticking to in the animation!

I hope that I can suggest that there’s a backstory to my character that is worth dipping into.

North Beach, Bridlington

North Beach sketch map

This marginal illustration for one of my Dalesman diaries isn’t meant to be a trail map but you couldn’t go far wrong in finding your way to Danes Dyke Nature Reserve than starting at the harbour and keeping the sea on your right. Look forward to walking it again some time. And, when they come out of lockdown, there’s always the option of catching the Land Train at Sewerby Hall to get back to the harbour in time for fish and chips.

No Room at the Inn, 1948

No Room at the Inn

It’s one of those dimly remembered but vivid movie scenes. Sometime back around 1958, so perhaps when I was seven years old, I caught the last few minutes of a film on our black and white Bush 24-inch 405 line television. It must have made quite an impression on me but how accurate are my memories from 60 years ago.

I never knew the name of the film but scanning today’s listing for the Talking Pictures channel I’m sure that No Room at the Inn, 1948, about evacuees billeted with the ‘savagely nasty’ Mrs Voray. That’s got to be the one.

I’ve drawn my memories of the scene so that I can compare them with the actual film.

Desert Opera

Still on the ‘just keep drawing’ prompt from Mattias Adolfsson’s The Art of Sketching course, I was beginning to run out of abstract shapes as a starting point for my drawings. The abstract curves that I started off with suggested a roof or a tent and by the time I drew in the stone steps and circular base I found myself thinking about a stage set; one with a revolving stage.

For the characters that might inhabit this desert base, I was thinking of an opera, perhaps a Philip Glass production, but inevitably in setting it in the 1930s or 40s I’ve ended up with Indiana Jones stereotypes. Although the zookeeper with the camel, if drawn in Hergé’s ligne claire style, could have a walk-on role in a Tintin adventure.

An Elephant Seal of Torquay

Limerick
An Elephant Seal of Torquay,
was desperate to swim in the sea :
But he couldn't reach,
the far end of the beach,
'cos the crowds had invaded Torquay.

Edward Lear seems to be contagious. A friend of mine composed three limericks for the parish magazine and now she finds she can’t help slipping into limerick mode.

My elephant seal offering was inspired by a page of Edward Lear-style punning cartoons posted by ‘have_pen_will_draw’, who like me is tackling Mattias Adolfsson’s The Art of Sketching course. His other punning creations included ‘tiger shark’, ‘bull frog’ and ‘horse fly’.

I’m lucky enough to have a copy of Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense, which helpfully has every verso page left blank, so that I could slot in my cartoon in Photoshop. I’m particularly pleased that I was able to almost match Lear’s choice of typeface by using the typeface Didot.

If only I could match the inky spontaneity of Lear’s drawings!