‘We don’t need colour!’ says Barbara, as I hurry to complete my thumbnail sketches.
‘We need to remember which is which.’ I suggest but really it’s just the pleasure of slapping on colour that makes me go a little over the top with my scribbled notes.
We’ve got a trip coming up and we’re determined to travel light but, you know how it is, you get to the store and, out of context, in different surroundings, sizes can look different. On one occasion we spotted a rucksack that looked just the right in-between size we’d always been looking for and came back to discover that it was exactly the same size, in litres capacity, as the one we had at home.
I’ve been drawing exclusively natural history recently and putting a lot of effort into completing a page a day, so these quick sketches are a rare example of offhand note-taking.
Result; we went for two ‘cabin size’ 1.56 kg cases. Should be easier to carry, or pull along behind us (they have wheels) than one large case and they’re designed to suit the hand luggage requirements of all airlines, even the budget ones that we’re most likely to use, although these can change so you’d always have to check before travelling.
When we were travelling to France a couple of years ago, my sister-in-law Michelle inadvertently exceeded the limit when she popped in a blockbuster novel in the front pocket of her bag at the last minute! Luckily Barbara had some spare capacity.
We’re settling down again after a weekend promoting my walks booklets at Wakefield’s Rhubarb and Food and Drink Festival, although Barbara works in a bookshop so it’s not such a change for her! We were guests of Trinity Walk shopping centre.
As it was a food festival, in addition to selling books we couldn’t resist doing a bit of bartering and we exchanged a copy of Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle for a box of four muffins from the next stall! But we spent most of our profit on takeaway lattes from Cafe Costa to keep us warm as the breeze funnelled around the precinct!
Robin Hood’s Wakefield
Saturday proved to be the best day, when Morris Dancers created a suitably festive background. It conjured up an impression of what it must have been like when Trinity Walk was a part of the town known as Goodybower, ‘God’s bower’, where statues of saints from the parish church, now the cathedral, were paraded, displayed and decorated with ribbons and flowers and where some performances of the town’s guilds’ cycle of mystery plays took place.
Mystery plays of course had a religious theme, although the second play in the cycle, Cane and Abel, could claim to be the world’s first murder mystery.
Cursed by God, Cain taunts his fellow men to capture and kill him;
And harshly when I am dead,
Bury me at Goodybower at the quarry head
The quarry was approximately where Trinity Walk had set up the stall for us, later the site for Wakefield’s market.
One of my booklets retraces the steps of a Yorkshire Robin Hood, a Robert Hode who lived in Wakefield but who found himself outlawed after the battle of Boroughbridge. There are several walks exploring the town’s connections with the story, at Sandal Castle and Pinderfields for example, the latter associated since medieval times with Robin’s great rival and supposedly cousin, George-a-Green, the Jolly Pindar of Wakefield. Then there’s a walk around the battlefield site itself at Boroughbridge and a tour of Brockadale, including the look-out post at Sayles, mentioned in the earliest Robin Hood’s ballads and still overlooking both the ancient Great North Road and its modern dual-carriageway equivalent.
The book ends up at Kirklees Priory, long associated with the death of Robin and supposedly the site of his grave.
Rough Patch
We were pleased that we sold as many Robin and Liquorice walks books as we did the Rhubarb, which was good considering theme of the festival. It’s so encouraging for me when people have done all the walks in two of the books then they come back for the third in the series. I feel that I must be doing something right.
Because of the local food connection we were also selling my sketchbook from the wilder side of the garden, Rough Patch.
It was good to meet up with several of our friends, including people we haven’t bumped into for several years, who had spotted that we would be there and come along to see us. I saw my junior school teacher from 1960 and an illustration student of mine from my days at Leeds college of art, then part of the polytechnic, from 1983.
Shopping malls aren’t my natural habitat but, as there’s a ‘Walk’ in the name of this particular shopping centre, perhaps I’ll get a chance to link up with them again.
After three four hour stints at our cart I have enormous respect for retailers and all the hard but unseen work that they put into to making shopping a seamless experience. They make it look so easy!
Don’t mention the rain
As the dark clouds whipped themselves up on the Friday morning, the street cleaner who regularly patrolled the precinct kept our spirits up;
‘Don’t talk about the rain and it won’t come!’ she advised us.
She was wrong, the shower came through just the same, but at least she made us smile!
Wouldn’t it be great if I always had a team of young helpers ready to fill in the blanks when I had a big illustration to do? While the crew set up the eight flats that we use as the backdrop for our Pageant Player pantomimes I set about sketching out some ideas.
Robinson Crusoe & the Pirates starts in a village in some unspecified country in South America. We’ve never featured South America in one of our productions before and as I’ve never visited the continent I’ve got the nearest thing that I know in mind; Pollenca, Majorca. I add Rio’s Sugar Loaf mountain in the background, although Pollenca has some pretty impressive limestone crags of its own.
When they get the flats in place, I realise that I need to go for more of a letterbox, wide-screen format, cutting out the ground altogether.
I usually concoct this year’s scene from the basis of last year’s but this time I decide we ought to make a fresh start.
While my team of young helpers put a coat of white emulsion over last year’s Snow Queen village, I make a more accurate drawing to grid up onto the 11×4 ft flats, which have three cross-members – easily visible beneath the canvas – which I adopt as as my grid.
The swatches are a reference for Ken for mixing the emulsion paint.
My proportion goes awry as I get to the right hand side mapping things out and the village church ends up looking more like Barnsley town hall. No bad thing.
Cushions drawn this morning on a visit to Barbara’s brother and his wife in my Moleskine travel notebook.
It’s soon got around to Burns Night – one month since Christmas day already – and this is only my second post of the new year but I have been busy; for the last month I’ve managed a page a day in my holly green sketchbook. For that I’ve been trying something new by scanning the whole page each day.
I’ve also enjoyed sticking to just one theme, natural history, as it’s got me noticing things that I would have missed if I hadn’t set myself the task of finding something fresh, however trivial, to draw and write about each day.
New Theme
In contrast to the simplicity of that page a day approach I decided to go for a different look for this Wild Yorkshire blog, making it less of a drawing journal and more of a newsletter for my other projects, such as the somewhat neglected www.wildyorkshire.co.uk nature diary website and my even more neglected www.willowisland.co.uk, which includes my walks booklets, guide books and published sketchbooks.
WordPress 2014 theme.
I’ve decided to go for a new theme for the new year, one which makes navigation a bit more obvious, rather than relegating it to the bottom of a long page. The latest WordPress standard theme, called 2014, seemed a good one to go for.
The same page using the Aldus theme designed by Fränk Klein.
Update
25 February; As the 2014 looked a bit black and formal, I’m now trying an airier theme called Mon Cahier, which still includes a column for navigation, hopefully combining what I like about Aldus with the functionality of WordPress 2014.
A NEW SKETCHBOOK and, as I started it over Christmas, I had to go for the one with the holly green cover.
Rather than fit it into this regular blog, I’ve given it it’s own website and the new format, putting the emphasis on the sketchbook page itself, has worked well for me, encouraging me to complete a page a day.
One A5 page a day might not seem like much of a commitment but believe me with the distractions of Christmas that’s been quite a challenge.
I’ve also decided to give the sketchbook a theme – natural history – and I think this helps to give me some focus when deciding what to draw. I’m also making efforts to tell little stories rather than always to immerse myself in the drawing.
IT SEEMS such a simple thing to do a drawing, scan it same size and print it in a book but mysterious things happen in the process – such as a bright blue line suddenly turning to indigo as it goes from screen to paper.
Before conversion to CMYK . . .. . . and after.
I’m reading Louis Benjamin’s Photoshop CS5 in Simple Steps to get to know more about the process. But reading isn’t enough for me, I need to go through some of the processes to take them on board but then, if I don’t happen to need to use a particular technique for a while, it can slip from my mind.
Online Notebook
I’ve tried making notes as I go but they end up on scraps of paper or in various notebooks so today I’ve started an online notebook.
I won’t need to go rootling through a draw to refresh my memory. My experiments and notes will be beautifully organised in a mini-website. Well that’s the theory.
I’VE BEEN getting a new edition of Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle off to the printers today. I checked out all the routes and was delighted that there was hardly anything that needed changing and all those changes were for the better, for example some of the wobbly old stiles had been replaced by new metal kissing gates.
But I thought the new building – I think it’s the distribution centre – at the Coca Cola Enterprises site at Lawns village, Wakefield, should go in, so I redrew that corner of my picture map and managed to included a few facts about this ‘largest soft drinks plant by volume in Europe’.
From miles away it can look surprisingly conspicuous but strangely when you get nearer to on those leafy footpaths it often disappears altogether.
It sits pretty much in the centre of the Rhubarb Triangle, but as far as I know it doesn’t manufacture a rhubarb beverage. Dandelion & burdock perhaps but I can’t think of a rhubarb drink that they might try. Rabarbaro Zucca, an Italian aperitif, is alcoholic.
I’VE BEEN scanning some old 35mm colour slides for a friend and I’m fascinated as always by the period detail. The motorcyclist in the plus-fours at the St Gothard Pass for example.
My friend’s father, Jack, was an engineer and as a young man between the wars he’d got a secondhand sports car into reliable working order and set off and toured the continent so, after World War II he set off again with his young family.
By this time he was running a garage and he’d become a dealer for Standard Vanguard cars. This appears to be a 1956 Standard Vanguard III
St Gothard Pass
You get a sense of it still being quite an adventure to tour the continent from his Agfacolor transparencies. St Marks in Venice and the Forum in Rome look amazingly quiet.
This slide is captioned ‘On the road’ – one of the Italian lakes perhaps?
The little coach conjures up another era of travel. It wouldn’t look out of place in a Fellini film. Or The Italian Job.
This shop – a photographer’s and newsagents? – appears in the foreground of an Austrian or German painted house which Jack had photographed.
The row of potted geraniums on the windowsill, the portrait in the shop window, the bicycle, the lettering over the shop and the mystery man in grey are the kind of plain, literal details that you might meet in a Tintin story of the same vintage.
I’ve used the poster edges filter in Photoshop to flatten the colour but I’d really like to try redrawing some of these scenes in comic book format.
I’D HEARD that not much of Comet ISON had survived its close encounter with the sun but I took a quick look out of the studio window just before dawn just in case.
Even scanning with binoculars, I couldn’t see any traces but conditions weren’t ideal as there was a glow of streetlights over in the direction of Wakefield and a low bank of cloud was beginning to form in the east.
Juvenile Gull
After a couple of sessions sketching from hides I thought I’d take the opportunity to work in more detail from a photograph on my iPad as we sat in a waiting room yesterday, which probably explains why the proportion of head to body has gone awry. Colour added later.
The juvenile herring gull, photographed in September, was swimming along on Peasholm Park lake, Scarborough, looking rather worried as we passed by in our dragon-boat pedalo.
Herring gulls don’t moult into their full adult plumage until their fourth year.
HAVING GOT to the end of one sketchbook with a short burst of drawing on reserves and in the farm park, I thought now would be a good time to set about bringing my other current sketchbooks to a close so that I can make a fresh start in the new year.
In compiling my Wild Yorkshire nature diary articles for the Dalesman magazine, I’ve realised how useful it is to have a straightforward chronological run of sketchbooks if you ever want to retrieve a particular drawing for later publication.
If you’re doing what I’ve been doing for the last year, keeping five sketchbooks in assorted sizes going at once, six if you include the large format sketchbook that I keep for book illustration in the studio, it gets very difficult to search for a drawing made on a particular date.
Perhaps I’ll rationalise this a bit in the new year and concentrate on a particular size.
Square versus Landscape
The A5 landscape Pink Pig spiral bound sketchbook that I’ve just completed seems a good compromise between portability and page size, but the 8 inch square of A5 format that I used at the weekend proved good for wildlife as there’s more space on a deeper page to add quick notes.
I find that anything that I write on location – about colour, incident or atmosphere, for example – is more precise than my later memories. But I’m reluctant to write when I’m out there because I love to spend as much time as I can drawing.
Wainwright Sketchbook
All these sketches are from an A5 sketchbook that fits neatly in the little grey bag that goes with me on everyday errands. The spiral binding on a regular A5 sketchbook won’t quite squeeze in.
Great binding, shame about the paper; fountain pen ink goes straight through it, watercolour soaks in instantly but blotchily.
I might try crayons until I finish the book but it’s a shame that it’s not more sympathetic for fountain pen drawing because when I’m grabbing the odd moment to draw it flows better than any fibre tip.
All these sketches are from an A5 sketchbook that fits neatly in the little grey bag that goes with me on everyday errands. The