Garderobe

gardrobe
gardrobe

Amongst the most substantial remains at Sandal Castle are two garderobe shafts on the moat side of the Great Chamber. The gardrobe gets its name because the smell associated with a medieval toilet was reputed to protect clothes from moths.

I’ve drawn this using the cartoon style that I used when I painted scenery for the Pageant Players’ pantomime. To create something that looked like pen and ink from the point of view of the audience, I’d draw the scene in slightly watered-down black emulsion using a half-inch filbert brush and get my team to fill in the blocks of colour.

We’d normally conclude a pantomime with a palace scene but occasionally we’d have a more rugged-looking castle to paint but the audience never got to see the garderobes.

Medicine Jars

Medicine jars

My latest drawing for my Sandal Castle spread if of some of the jars found during excavations.

To quote a caption from Wakefield Museum:

Many small jars or bottles made of pottery and glass, probably for medicines and ointments, were found in the building that used to be the kitchen of the castle. This suggests that wounded soldiers were being treated there in the Civil War.

Diggers

diggers

Presumably the Royalists didn’t employ any of The Diggers, otherwise known as The Levellers, in the construction of Sandal Castle’s English Civil War defensive earthworks because The Diggers were a radical Puritan group keen to claim common land on behalf of the people.

earthworks

Earthworks

earthworks

I’ve added a few more figures to my illustration of constructing defensive earthworks at Sandal Castle and now I’m adding flat colours, using a vector brush in Adobe Fresco and the paint-bucket tool to fill in larger areas. I can see why people find colouring relaxing.

I was going to go for red for the cavalier directing operations but I discovered that Cromwell’s New Model Army was issued with red shirts, so I’ve gone for blue instead.

Rhubarb Rambles

Rhubarb Rambles

The final section of my proposed Rhubarb Sketchbook animation is all about the pleasures of getting out and walking in the Rhubarb Triangle between Wakefield and Leeds.

Highlights include:

  • a medieval deer park at Gawthorpe
  • a rabbit warren on Lindale Hill
  • the ‘world’s first railway’ at Middleton
  • a Viking boat and a Victorian aqueduct at Stanley Ferry.

There’s a possible fourth section too: if time (and a little extra budget) allowed, I’d add a short animation featuring the three rhubarb recipes that proved such a popular feature in my booklet of Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle.

Rhubarb Folk

Rhubarb Triangle history

For the local history section of my proposed Rhubarb Sketchbook animation, I can draw on a host of colourful characters:

  • Puritan plotters at Middleton
  • bodysnatchers at East Ardsley
  • Prophet Wroe’s ‘temple’ at Kirkhamgate
  • John of Gaunt’s Manor House at Rothwell
  • Robin Hood (and his dad, Adam Hood, a forester) in the Outwood
  • plus a commercial break: from Ossett, John ‘Imperial Leather’ Cussons’ ‘Compound Rhubarb Pills’ (just don’t OD on them!).

Just dropping a few frames into my storyboard, I realise that I could easily devote a whole cartoon to the life and adventures of Prophet Wroe.

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.