Sketches

Tuesday: The corn on the cob has swollen a little since I last drew this sweet corn in a veg bed in the library garden a week ago.

IT’S STARTING to spot with rain as I sit on a bench waiting for the bus and sketch Ingham’s Handyman Shop at the bottom end of Queen Street, Horbury. Using a folded scrap of laser printer paper resting on my knee isn’t going to give the best results, but it’s a drawing that I wouldn’t otherwise have done.

It’s been a scrappy week altogether for drawing. This sketch of Tilly the bookshop border collie was drawn with a Q-Connect Fineliner, a 0.4mm fibre tip pen which is designed to give you 1,800 metres of writing, ruling or stencilling.

 It isn’t 100% waterproof, so I tend to use other pens, but it works well enough for quick sketches as it flows so freely, at least it does until the tip gets worn down, which happens long before it reaches the 1,800 metre mark the way I use it.

I inadvertently scanned this lightning sketch of Tilly (below) curling around in her grooming routine at a higher resolution than I intended but I like the way you can see the variety in the lines when you see it at this scale, about four times the original size:

Like all my drawings this week, it’s a bit on the scrappy side but as Tilly was moving so continuously during her grooming session there wasn’t an option for a measured drawing.

I can see that I’ve reverted to a kind of scribbly nonsense writing to represent her curly black hair on her back. You could almost read it as ‘lattélllls’.

And we have had a lot of lattés this week. After so many pen sketches, this morning at the Waterside Kitchen at Newmillerdam as we waited for our lattés I went straight into watercolour – no initial drawing, not even in pencil – sky first then, after letting that dry, the trees.

Jones the Blacksmith

WHILE THE Sheffield side of my family tree is turning up plenty of clues, the Welsh side of my mum’s family is proving difficult to research. So far I can find only two records of my great grandfather John Jones, born about 1846 in Prestatyn; my grandma Ann Jones’ birth certificate and the 1881 census.

Until I tracked those down we thought that he was William Jones.

As you can imagine, there’s no shortage of John Joneses in the records for Wales but working out which of them might be our John Jones is tricky.

From my two definite records I know that he was a blacksmith, living near the Coach and Horses (still there over a century later) on Quay Road, Wepre, Connahs Quay, Flintshire.

My mum identifies this photograph in one of our Victorian albums as being of John and his wife Sarah (maiden name George) and I think she’s right because it was taken by ‘J. Brown, Photographic Artist, 3 Kinmel Street, Rhyl’. Rhyl is only 20 miles along the coast from Connahs Quay.

According to my mum they were Welsh speakers but their children all attended the English school so if John and Sarah wanted to keep something to themselves they would discuss it in Welsh.

It seems rather dour to modern eyes but could this be a wedding portrait? From the age of their children, I’d guess that they were married in the early 1870s, so John would be in his mid twenties and his bride Sarah George in her early twenties.

Betty and Arthur Jones. I’m guessing that this was taken c. 1900 – 1914. I can see a resemblance in the shape of Betty’s face and in her eyes to her grandma Sarah.

My mum identifies these two children (below, left) as Betty and Arthur Jones, grandchildren of John and Sarah.

Their father William Jones, born in Wepre in about 1875 worked as an engine driver . . . in the days of steam trains. Wish that I could have joined him on the footplate!

If one of these children looks like your grandparent, great grandparent or, for that matter, parent, we might be related!

I’m hurrying to finish this post because I’m going to watch the latest programme in the BBC genealogy series Who do you think you are?

If only I had a film crew and a team of researchers to help me . . .

But really the fascination is finding loose ends then following the threads.

Summer Afternoon

Horbury High Street, drawn when we took my mum to the optician’s for her weekly appointment. Lamy Safari pen.

I’VE BEEN using my Lamy Safari fountain pen a lot recently but this afternoon on our walk around Newmillerdam I’ve just got my passport-sized pouch attached to my belt (I realise that’s more comfortable than having it swinging around my neck like a camera case) so, for this chimney drawn from a table at the Lakeside Kitchen, that means that I’m back to my brown 08 Pilot Drawing Pen, which has the advantage that I can add watercolour without the ink running.

The pocket-sized Hahnemuehle travel booklet that I keep in the pouch has more absorbent ‘sketch paper’ than my other sketchbooks; fountain pen tends to bleed but the Drawing Pen works fine. As you can see, it doesn’t flow like the fountain pen in the drawing of Horbury High Street.

Lamy Safari pen drawing of sweet corn in Horbury Library’s garden last Tuesday.

It’s a change for me to apply watercolour that immediately soaks in, rather than staying on the surface just a little, as it does on the fairly smooth cartridge paper that I normally use. The off white, creamy coloured paper makes a change from white too.

Chimney Tops

AS I WAS drawing chimney pots from the waiting room the other day it started to rain so heavily that the small patio, pummeled by the deluge, frothed and bubbled like a shallow Jacuzzi and my view disappeared behind windows that soon became water-features.

I turned my attention to the chair, which someone promptly came and sat in, so he got included as well.

I was drawing this bicycle at the cafe at Newmillerdam on Monday and as it’s owner, Beverley, prepared to whisk it away (that always happens when I start drawing, doesn’t it?!) she came over to chat. She works in stained glass; usually small free-standing panels with lead tracery.

Had I seen the work of her friend Mark Powell? she asked me. He draws detailed character portrait studies in Bic ballpoint pen.

Another of her creative friends, Karron Campbell lives in what appears to be an impossibly scenic corner of New Zealand. Karron and her daughter Rickie left Wakefield four years ago and not surprisingly they don’t seem in any hurry to come back!

I guess the Coromandel Peninsula offers more scenic possibilities than Wakefield’s Rhubarb Triangle.

Links; Mark Powell Biro Pen Drawings, Karron Dawn Campbell’s and her daughter Rickie Louise Hill’s Creative Workshop on MySpace.

There were two voles . . .

BACK TO the exercises in Drawing Words, Writing Pictures and my next assignment is to draw a single panel 5 x 7 inch cartoon then come up with three different captions.

At first my mind went blank and I considered some traditional cartoon scenarios – the desert island etc – but then I decided on two voles, one I imagined with a kind of glazed but thoughtful expression, the other turning to ask it a casually dimissive question.

Hey, look, we’re still in pencil, shouldn’t we be inked by now?

But getting such subtlety of expression proved beyond me. I didn’t want a startled look (above, top) or a dumb ‘oops!’ look (above, lower left) – that vole reminds me a bit of Stan Laurel. With his pointing finger, the questioning vole (above, lower right) looks too much as if he’s giving important advice rather than being dismissive.

I’ve introduced too much drama for the gentle atmosphere of ennui that I had in mind; the vole version of Waiting for Godot.

You’re kidding! – you saw a body coming through the rye?!

In my next attempt the vole on the left looks too stunned while the one on the right should be turning in a peevish way but instead he looks as if he’s preparing to escape some horror. This is the problem with showing a sequence of actions in just one panel; has vole 2 been;

  1. facing to the right and he’s just turned his head back, or
  2. has he been facing to the left and he’s just turned his arms and torso to the right?

With all that unintended action in my rough, I’ve gone for a more dramatic caption.

And what does a vole do with it’s hands? I’ve heard animators say that they’re actors who work with pencils and the same applies to cartoons. Even the insignificant details that no one is going to notice still have to work.

Just think! Exactly which clump of meadow grass did you leave it next to?

The anxious vole and his annoyed companion in this one brought to mind the familiar lost car keys, or lost car in a huge car park situation. What ‘it’ is in the context of the everyday life of the vole, I leave for the reader to decide. A hazelnut perhaps?

But that’s quite enough vole cartoons. The great thing about doing this course is that it’s purely educational and I don’t have to come up with a working solution each time. I can now go forward to the next exercise, something fresh to have fun with.

Usually with these ‘how to’ art books I’m tempted to read through them quickly thinking ‘Oh yes, I’ll remember that advice.’ But there’s nothing like trying it for yourself to really get to grips with the principles and to understand how it all works.

Great Granddad George

I THINK that I could write a short book about this picture. It’s like a time capsule from my family’s past. We’re lucky to have dozens of Victorian photographs but this is my absolute favourite because the others, usually of people in their Sunday best standing sometimes in front of a painted background in a photographer’s studio don’t give us a glimpse of everyday life. It’s the sort of glimpse of normal life that I long for while I’m checking out the bare details of births, deaths and marriages.

He’s a real guy, relaxing at home. How often is this kind of candid shot going to turn up in a family album?

This photograph is just 5.5 x 8.5 cm (2¼ x 3¼ inches) – as you might guess from that gigantic thumb print! I’m going to do a lot of Photoshopping on this photograph to get rid of the dots and streaks.

My great granddad George Swift (1840-1918) has appeared in my Wild West Yorkshire diary before wearing a velvet dress but I should explain he was only a toddler at the time and in the 1840s that’s how they dressed. He worked as a spring knife cutler in Sheffield but as a sideline he and his wife Sarah Ann ran a little grocer’s shop which must explain the Peak Frean’s Biscuit advertisement (a sandwich board to put out when the shop was open?) in front of the kitchen range.

I’m guessing that the watering can on the range is actually a kettle. Those two black shapes behind it look like the iron lids that cover the hot plates on an Aga. Or are they plates or platters? And I think that the cupboard on the left must be the oven of a Yorkshire range, so George is sleeping by the fire.

What was in the rather nice china bowl beside him? Soup . . . porridge? Have you noticed the colanders and what I think is a potato ricer hanging on the wall on the right.

I remember my grandma (on the other side of the family) cutting newspaper for her larder shelves to resemble those lace edges.

I so wish that I could see the whole of the picture in the top left corner. I think that we’re seeing a clenched left hand and a blowsy flower like a camelia or an old-fashioned rose. Is the flower growing from a kind of tiled planter or is that a piece of card that someone has slotted in the corner of the picture for safekeeping.

I would like to think that the picture is of George’s father Samuel Burgin Swift (1813 – 1878). The style is similar to the oil on canvas portrait of George as a toddler that my mum still has. We have no picture of Samuel Burgin, so wouldn’t I love to see that picture! He was a cutler like his son, so is he holding one of the tools of his trade?

 

 

Deep in the Pond

Identifying a water beetle; this one didn’t have an English name.

I’VE HAD my Olympus Tough for a few years and it’s proved as reliable as the name suggests so on a Wakefield Naturalists’ field meeting today, when we were looking at leeches and efts (young newts) in a pond at Potteric Carr, I decided to be brave and reach down into the water to see how it would turn out.

Eft; a young newt

Hidden Depths

Leech, this one was about six inches long at full stretch!

My wildlife photographer friend John Gardner suggested using a flash. I normally prefer natural light but, in the murky depths below the pondweeds, the flash works well.

Leaning out and reaching into the water with one hand I found it difficult to avoid camera shake but at least I know that in principle the camera works underwater. Perhaps a rockpool would make a better subject.

Storrs Hill; Yorkshire Gold

OLYMPIC GOLD medallist Alistair Brownlee loves to run on the hills of West Yorkshire: “You want to be inspired by your surroundings, and you want to go out and be motivated training in nice places. I like to run anywhere around Otley Chevin.”

Horbury and Ossett have a mini-Chevin, Storrs Hill; and anyone who has struggled up to it at the end of a school cross country deserves some kind of a medal! An acre of golden gorse overlooking the Calder Valley, in Victorian times it was ‘a favourite spot for Sunday afternoon strolls’.

Storrs Hill c.1890 by Frank C.J. Cockburn, from ‘Cockburn’s Ossett Alamanac’.

Unfortunately the free access that we’ve enjoyed for over a century has been very badly abused and there’s been so much vandalism that I’m not surprised that drastic action has been taken to protect the boundary with Rock House.

The panorama path was recently restored but I was sorry to see the once grassy lumps and bumps being levelled, not only because they were part of the landscape but also because in the process I guess that the hill’s colony of Grayling butterflies has been obliterated. Graylings, which aren’t as dull as they sound, are rare and in July 2002 this was the first colony to be discovered in West Yorkshire.

In the Olympic opening ceremony a grassy mound with a stunted thorn on top was used to represent Britain. Wouldn’t it be great if Storrs Hill could remain open to public access; a place for strolls and, for those more energetic than me, for running?

Travelling in Hope

This engraving is from Coal & Iron, published in 1860, so this is the world my Welsh ancestors must have known.

I’M RESEARCHING my family tree and in my search for my great-great grandma, Francis George, I’ve just found my way, following a search on the Find My Past website, to the Welsh mining village of Hope on the county boundary of Denbighshire and Flintshire, close to the English border.

All that I’ve got so far is an 1861 census record but I think that there’s a good chance that this is my Francis George, as it’s a fairly unusual name and she was born in the right year in the right place, Hope.

I’ve tracked her down via:

  1. A marriage certificate (my mum’s parents)
  2. A birth certificate (my mum’s mum)
  3. A census record (Wepre, Connahs Quay, 1881)

In the 1881 census Francis is a widow aged 75, living with her daughter and her family (including my grandma then aged one year old) and sadly, going back twenty years to 1861, she was already a widow, then aged 55. My mum’s grandma (Sarah) isn’t listed in the household. She would then have 12 and could have been living with relatives, or equally likely, she might have gone ‘into service’ working as a maid. Or I might have the wrong family, of course.

Hope Colliery

The census lists three families with the surname George in three adjacent houses. The sons, mainly in their teens and 20s, are working as coal miners or sawyers. One 12 year old boy is a ‘colliery lad’ and a teenage girl is listed as a dressmaker. Robert George, aged 29, head of the house next door to Francis, is a wheelwright.

It isn’t just ‘my’ Francis who is a widow; her next door neighbour but one, Mary George,  aged 50, is also listed as a widow. Was there an accident at the colliery that killed both men?

My guess would be that Mary and Francis are sisters-in-law.

From the ages of her sons, John, aged 24, a sawyer and Robert, 15, a coal miner, Francis might have married about 1836. It wasn’t until 1837 that it became a requirement to register all marriages, births and deaths.

Groundwork

I HAD a little longer than usual for this drawing of a gardener’s truck parked on a roundabout. It seems a long time since I did an elaborate drawing. Perhaps the time is coming when I’ll take a day off and go somewhere to draw just for fun.

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