A bit of drama for a forthcoming Dalesman article.
The Chairman’s Chain
Stan Barstow
Novelist Stan Barstow at Lumb Bank, leading an Arvon Foundation creative writing course, 1975. Drawn from a photograph, photographer not credited, in his 2001 autobiography, In My Own Good Time.
This is the first drawing I’ve made using Procreate on my iPad Pro for quite a while. I used one of the new brushes from the latest version of the program: the Bellerive brush from the Pens folder. It approximates my Lamy fountain pen drawings.
Madder, Oak, Marigold . . . and Rhubarb
In her studio in Wakefield’s Art House, down in the southern corner of Yorkshire’s Rhubarb Triangle, textile artist Kirstie Williams is checking out the possibilities of rhubarb root as a natural dye.
She creates swatches using traditional dyestuffs, such as oak bark, madder root and marigold heads, but recently she’s also experimented with avocado.
Rhubarb root gives a buff orange dye, a colour described by Scottish painter Patrick Syme in his 1821 version of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours as resembling the ‘Streak from the Eye of the King Fisher.’
Rhubarb & Iron
Kirstie found that adding an iron mordant resulted in a deeper brown, described by Syme as a Reddish Orange, resembling the ‘Lower Wings of the Tyger Moth.’
A mordant combines with the dye and helps it adhere to material.
On the Farrow & Ball colour chart, I’d go for Fowler Pink and Red Earth as nearest matches to the rhubarb root dye, without and with the iron mordant.
In the Winsor & Newton range of watercolours the nearest to Syme’s Buff Orange is Naples Yellow Deep and his Reddish Orange is equivalent to their Brown Ochre.
I wouldn’t want too many earthy colours in my watercolour box, it can get confusing. I’ve tried to mix something similar from yellow ochre and sepia, but the colour hasn’t caught the character of Kirstie’s experiments.
Soda Ash
Kirstie’s Soda Ash modified rhubarb dye is something close to Farrow & Ball’s Calamine.
I wondered what my studio might look like if I went for one of these rhubarb-themed colours:
Thanks to Farrow & Ball’s AI-generated ability to try it on a photograph of your own room, I can try out the effect without committing myself. For a studio I’ll stick to white, but I’d quite like Red Earth for an old-fashioned study or library.
Link
Kirstie Williams textile artist & printmaker
Nature’s Palette, A Colour Reference System from the Natural World, Thames & Hudson, Patrick Baty, 2021
Willow Island Logo
As I walk up Coxley Valley on a misty morning, I’m surrounded autumn leaves so, thinking about a new logo for Willow Island Editions, I decide that leaves might have more graphic impact than the tree-on-an-island logo that I currently use.
I pick up four crack willow leaves from alongside where the beck splits, creating the willow island that I used as a name for my self-publishing imprint.
A windswept version might have a lively look but the logo also needs a solid hint of authority as I want readers to feel that they can trust the instructions in my walks booklets.
“In nature you’re surrounded simple but stunning copyright-free design”
As I sat with a latte and flapjack by the The Little Acorn, the coffee cabin at the top end of the wood, I felt that their pun of a logo shows that simpler can be better.
A woodcut-style ink drawing of the willow-leaf ‘W’ would be more punchy than using the soft autumn colours of the leaves themselves. It would also hint at my hand-drawn approach.
The reason that I’m rethinking the look of Willow Island Editions is because I’m transferring my 27-year old website, www.willowisland.co.uk, from regular HTML to WordPress.
I find that a quiet walk in the woods in the perfect way to clear my mind a bit and focus on design. In nature you’re surrounded simple but stunning copyright-free design.
Osprey Daylite Plus
On a recent rainy walk along the shores of Lake Windermere, my seven year old haversack was the worse for wear, the rubberised lining disintegrating, so I chose this Osprey Daylite Plus for our latest walk on the Thames path a couple of weeks ago.
I drew in bamboo pen in Noodler’s black ink and, as the blotty bits are going to take a long time to dry, I photographed the drawing, rather than putting it on the scanner.
Affinity versus InDesign
If you’re enthusiastic bordering on obsessive about typography like me, you might feel that the way Affinity prints type isn’t quite punchy enough.
“I don’t think anyone else would notice,” says Barbara, but after all the effort I’ve put into designing the page, I’d like to see it just as I imagined it, not two shades paler.
Google AI summarises the problem:
The primary reason text printed from Affinity may appear paler than from InDesign is the way black is defined and handled in the color space settings . . .
InDesign is designed for professional print workflows and often automatically handles black text as 100% black (K100), which typically results in solid, crisp, sharp edges when printed.”
A suggested workaround of setting the text to 100% black doesn’t work for me. I’d be interested to hear if there’s a simple way of getting ‘solid, crisp, sharp’ edged text Perhaps there’s a setting that I’ve missed?
I like Affinity’s innovation in combining photo editing, vector design and layout but if it’s not going handle printing text as I’d like it, I’ll have to stick with Adobe InDesign.
Ikea Hedge
Sloe and hawthorn and a Vildpersilja cushion at Ikea, Birstall Retail Park this morning.
The car park is adjacent to one of the busiest stretches of the M62, which may be the reason for the lush lichen growth on the twigs. The yellow lichen Xanthoria polycarpa can tolerate high levels of nitrogen while the grey-green lichen, Hypogymnia physodes, tolerates acidic conditions.
Booklet Printing with Affinity
In the latest version of Affinity, the two apps that I’d normally use in producing a booklet – one for photos the other for layout – are combined into one.
I used the third included app, the one for vector drawing, to add those orange circles to my screen shots.
Affinity is now free to download and use. There’s an option to use AI but you need a paid-for subscription. AI isn’t part of my booklet printing routine, so I can manage without that.
Some of the print settings aren’t immediately obvious, so I’ve printed this booklet as a reminder to myself, and to give me a bit of practice before going ahead and printing one of my walks booklets.
To Print as a Booklet
The Print Options in steps 5 and 6 will vary depending on what type of duplex printer you’re using.
- From the File menu, select Print.
- From the dialog, set your Paper Size, (the size that you’ll be printing on rather than the size of the finished booklet size) e.g. A4.
- In the pop-up menu for print options below, select Document Layout.
- From the Model pop-up menu, select Booklet. This instructs the print process to impose pages.
- From the Print Options pop-up menu, select Xerox Features.
- From the 2-Sided Printing pop-up menu, select ‘2-Sided Print, Flip on Short Edge’.
- Click Print.
Hope it works for you!
Marine Private Billy Swift, HMS Africa
A bit of a breakthrough in tracing my great, great, great grandfather, ‘Billy’ Swift, who was present at the Battle of Trafalgar.
Thanks to a death notice in the Sheffield Telegraph, from November 1862, I now know that, as I suspected, he changed his name when he enlisted but not as I suggested in my previous post, his Christian name: he enlisted using his mother’s surname, Firth.
He served in the Royal Marines, so he was Army rather than Navy. As an infantryman, he wore a red uniform so he was a ‘Lobster’ in Navy slang.
HMS Africa was the smallest of Nelson’s ships of the line at the Battle of Trafalgar.
Separated from the rest of Nelson’s fleet, the Africa arrived late at the battle and sailed down the French and Spanish line exchanging broadsides with most of the vessels it passed.
It then joined the general melee.
With it’s masts shot off the Africa drifted onto shoals during the storm that followed the battle. Two paintings by James Wilson Carmichael show the HMS Conquerer towing the Africa away.
DIED
On the 15th inst., Mr. William Swift, aged 78. Deceased had been in the employ of Messrs. Joseph Rodgers and Sons upwards of 20 years. He was at the battle of Trafalgar, on board the ship Africa, and was wounded in the leg, which wound annoyed him through life, and was the cause of death. He was discharged July, 1807, without pension, at the age of 23. He enlisted in the Marines, in his mother’s name, Firth, being then an apprentice.
Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 22 November, 1862
This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or fewer.
By James Wilson Carmichael – Christie’s, LotFinder: entry 5794044, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=111022409
The ship’s pay book records that he was discharged 3 November 1805 to Gibraltar Hospital, twelve days after the battle.
I assume received the Trafalgar Medal but I can’t find a record of him sharing in the prize money from captured vessels. As the death notice points out, he didn’t receive a pension when he was discharged in July, 1807. He worked in the cutlery industry in Sheffield.
Trafalgar Today
‘Absolutely fascinating,’ said my niece, Karen on Facebook, ‘We visited Trafalgar cemetery in Gibraltar. There are only two graves there from the battle of Trafalgar. They both succumbed to their wounds some time after the battle and had been hospitalised in Gibraltar after the battle.’
The Lobster Red Uniform
At Deborah Lough Costumes, I learn that as a private my ancestor Billy would have worn a uniform dyed in rose madder, slightly to the orange side of red. Officers would wear a brighter red scarlet uniform.
Link
Landsman Swift, HMS Ajax
Where was my Great, Great, Great Grandfather ‘Billy’ Swift 220 years ago today? Thanks to a Battle of Trafalgar records update on Find My Past, I now believe that he was on board the HMS Ajax, picking up survivors from a storm which followed the battle.
Searching the British Library Newspaper Archive in October 2013, I came across this notice from the births, deaths and marriages column of the Sheffield & Rotherham Independent dated 18 November 1862.
If he was aged 78 when he died in 1862, that makes his birth year 1784.
Here’s what I wrote about it at the time:
Could my great great great grandfather really have been ‘present at the Battle of Trafalgar’ on 21 October 1805?
I’ve put in a request for the death certificate to check that this really is ‘our’ William Swift. We already knew that he’d worked at Joseph Rodgers from an obituary notice for his son, Samuel Burgin Swift, who followed in his footsteps there (as did his grandson).
My mum has the article, reprinted as a handbill;
‘he [Samuel] was a thoughtful, industrious workman, and inherited the skill of his father “Billy Swift”.
It seems to me unlikely that a young man from landlocked Sheffield would have served in the Battle of Trafalgar but Geoffrey Tweedale, author of A Directory of Sheffield Cutlery Manufacturers, 1742-2010, tells me; ‘Being at Trafalgar is not so strange — he lived a long life and his earlier career could have included military service. I’ve come across at least a couple of cutlers/silver platers who saw action during the Napoleonic War.’
That “Billy Swift” in quotes misled me. The only William Swift that I could find at Trafalgar was Irish, serving on the HMS Temeraire, but the new records include one more Swift serving at the Battle of Trafalgar: Samuel Swift, a Landsman, born in 1784 in Nottingham.
He would have been 21 years old at the time of Battle of Trafalgar, so just the right age for our “Billy Swift”. Samuel is a name which comes up in the Swift family tree, for instance ‘Billy’s’ son Samuel Burgin Swift.
Time to find out more about Samuel Swift (1784 – 1862) from Nottinghamshire, as I feel that he’s a likely match for my ancestor.
Update
At last I’ve tracked down my ancestor William Swift at the Battle of Trafalgar: he did change his name, but not to Samuel Swift.