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