SINCE I moved my computer to the window end of my studio, I’ve seen the heron flying along by the wood a couple of times. This morning I was surprised to see a Kestrel hovering above the hawthorn hedge at the end of the garden. It might have been on the look-out (with its left eye) for voles in our rough patch of meadow or it might have had its (right) eye on the field beyond the hedge.
All the work involved in reorganising my studio has meant that I’ve done very little drawing during the past week, except, at the weekend, a design for this year’s Christmas card so this hand, chair and cast iron pillar in a mill are all that I’ve drawn in odd free moments.
I’M GETTING used to a new computer and I’ve scanned this quick sketch, just to check that the link from sketchbook to scanner to Photoshop and finally to WordPress post really is working.
I drew this in the dentist’s waiting room yesterday – I’ve drawn the goldfish in the tank there so many times that I thought I’d have a change . . . and drawn my hand. Again.
Now that I’ve installed my new computer I look forward to having time to get out to fresh new places to draw some new subjects but that’s not going to happen today as gales are forecast this afternoon as a low pressure area sweeps in from the Atlantic.
Two knocks on the windows and one goldfinch is lying stunned on the patio. I guess that a sparrowhawk has just raided the garden. A small flock of goldfinches is flying off with buoyant, bouncy flight over the rooftops.
At first it seems as if it has been killed instantly by the impact but I start wondering whether it is still breathing. Perhaps its just that its tail is moving in the squally wind.
I slide back the patio doors and reach out and put it upright so that its wing isn’t splayed out. It keeps its position but still with no obvious signs of life.
As a shower of sleety rain starts, I reach out again to put it in a dry spot beneath the patio table. Now it’s looking like a stunned sportsman, hunched with head down at the edge of the playing field in recovery position.
Twenty or thirty minutes later it is sitting on the spot, looking stunned and turning its head, as if looking at the patio windows and wondering what hit it. No sign of a broken neck or wing and its sitting symmetrically, suggesting that it hasn’t broken a leg either.
Forty minutes later it has gone but Barbara sees a single goldfinch on the nut feeder. It appears to have made a full recovery.
THESE 10 X 50, 5° field of view binoculars, date from the 1960s. They’ve outlasted several other pairs and while they’re too heavy to have them swinging around your neck for long periods, they’re ideal for keeping on my shelf in the studio if I spot a bird in the wood.
The brand is Cosmo, which I believe was Russian.
This week, on my mum’s regular visit to the opticians, I had time to draw the view up Horbury High Street (right), adding the colour later but last week I had time not only for a more elaborate drawing but also to add watercolour at the time;
See-Through Chair
The optician’s has recently had a revamp and, appropriately, they’ve gone for transparent chairs. I felt that the best way to depict the transparency was to show the way the background appeared as seen through the chair.
By disposing of my old oak plan chest (represented by the cardboard rectangle, bottom right) and going for a new slimline version (white card) I should end up with the studio that I'm after.
THE FAR END of the studio was too dim . . . this end is too bright . . . but I reckon the other wall at this end will be just right.
After all my efforts moving the furniture yesterday, I soon realise this morning that my desk is now in the wrong place because the winter sun is streaming across my computer screen. Yes, I can pull down the blind but what a shame to shut out the view of the garden and Coxley Valley beyond; I’d be much better facing the other wall where I’d only catch the early morning sun. I’m rarely at my desk at six in the morning.
But I don’t want to swap the bookshelves and the desk around as sunlight would soon fade the dust-jackets. No, I could really do with a slimmed down plan chest behind me as I sit at my desk.
I’ve got wonderful 3D programs like Sketchup on my computer but when it comes to re-planning my studio I feel the need to make a simple cardboard plan (above), abandoning metric for the more familiar (to me) option of one inch equals one foot. Ikea have recently introduced ‘Alex’, a six-drawer unit that fits A2 sized paper. Discussing it with Simon the joiner, we decide that putting three of those on a six-inch plinth, with a worktop running along above, will give me the storage that I need for artwork and paper, plus a working space for folding and guillotining the booklets that I still produce in-house.
Tilly proved a restless model when I called at the bookshop this afternoon. Tilly is usually a restless model and she also has a habit of disappearing altogether into her 'den' beneath the desk.
AS I TYPE this the rain is lashing against the studio window and the trees in the wood have been stripped of leaves. It’s been a good day to stay indoors and reorganise my studio. Yesterday evening it occurred to me that if I swapped around my old oak plan chest and my desk, I’d have a better view from the window and, for much of the day better light.
The plan chest is so substantial that it had never before occurred to me that it was movable. Yes, it was quite a job to remove and stack the ten drawers packed with artwork, but I’d slid them back in place by eleven.
The L-shaped arrangement of my desks together at the window end gives me more room to spread around my reference books and sketches when I’m working while around the plan chest at the darker end of the studio, I can build some much-needed shelves for my steadily overflowing books.
But these old books aren’t mine; I drew these in Rickaro’s where they’re celebrating 10 years since the bookshop opened. Local writer Ian MacMillan and cartoonist Tony Husband were the special guests. However Tilly, the bookshop Welsh border collie was not invited!
Sales Pitch
My studio revamp is in honour of a computer upgrade. Telling the salesman in a busy store that I’m keen to have a machine that can handle graphics, I show him the sketches I’ve been making while I waited in their recently introduced queuing system.
“I thought that I’d have a chance to draw the staff as they gather by a computer to talk to customers but you’re never still!”
WE HADN’T come across the Leed Gallery before; it’s down beyond the market and bus station, not far from the West Yorkshire Playhouse and the BBC.
The current show, The Illustrators, is fascinating. It includes a selection of work by – mainly – children’s book illustrators of the last one hundred years, almost all British, including Quentin Blake, E. H. Shepard, Heath Robinson, Kate Greenway, Emmett, Ronald Searle, Thelwell and a cell from Walt Disney’s Snow White.
Windows in Leeds, drawn from Clark's . . . as Barbara tried on numerous pairs of boots!
It’s a great opportunity to see the artwork at it’s original size, in the original media before it went into print. There are few obvious corrections as these illustrators are fluent in creating imagined worlds.
Of course, in a galley, you’re seeing individual illustrations out of their context on the page and away from the sequence of drawings that told the story. For all the imagination that goes into them, there can be a sweet, wistful sameness about the mostly comfortable fantasy world of childrens stories. But I’ve got to remember the purpose of these illustrations wasn’t to entertain professional illustrators like myself; they were designed with a specific readership in mind.
Shoppers passing by Cafe Rouge in the Light shopping centre.
For myself as a child, the only illustrated books that I would ever spend my pocket money and book tokens on would be those about natural history, prehistory or history. I was unaware at the time that a great deal of imagination goes into making the ‘real’ worlds of history and nature believable. I’m thinking of illustrators Charles Tunicliffe, Carrol Lane Fenton and Denys Ovenden who illustrated, respectively What to Look for in Spring, Prehistoric World and Looking at History; from Cavemen to Vikings, to give just one example from each.
I’VE BEEN at the Victorian Fair in Wakefield for a few hours each day on the Tourist Information stall, launching my new paperback Wakefield Words. When the morning fog has melted away it’s been sunny enough to make Wakefield look just as it does in the publications that the Tourist Information people are handing out. A pair of stilt-walkers in crinolines and a three-piece oom-pah band come strolling by today. We’ve seen dozens of people we know and met people keen to discuss the old local words that are the subject of my book. One man, an ex-councillor tells me that one of his ancestors from Barnsley had a business card describing himself as a ‘Sparable Maker’.
Sparables, he discovered, are the small nails used to fix the sole of a shoe in place. There’s a Sparable Lane in Sandal.
Out of the sun, on the stall, it isn’t all that warm when you’re just sitting there for any length of time. There’s dampness in the air after the morning mist so I’m sitting there in Victorian costume – top hat, black coat, paisley scarf – concentrating on keeping my hands warm in my fingerless Scrooge-style mittens, when I hear a woman answering a question that her friend has just whispered to her;
“Of course he’s real!”
I decide that I better keep active so that people don’t mistake me for a mannequin and I draw the Cathedral tower and porch as seen from our stall on the precint.
Like most of my drawings, this started as pen and ink line, but it was when I added that patch of blue – French Ultramarine – that I could see between the sandstone finials of the Catherdral porch and the awning of the stall, that the drawing came to life.
A large flock of town pigeons were soaking up the sun on the roof of a shop on Upper Kirkgate and we saw a Sparrowhawk circling briefly but I didn’t hear or see a Peregrine, a falcon that has often been seen around the Cathedral and blocks of flats in the centre of the city.
MY BIG SISTER posted a comment yesterday to say that I was beginning to sound like a computer geek (wish I was sometimes, that would be so useful) so just to prove that I haven’t totally exchanged pen and ink for mouse and graphic pad here are a few recent drawings from my sketchbook. I have to admit that when drawing this row of chairs as we waited for my mum at the doctor’s I did find myself thinking ‘how would I do this in Sketchup’.
These magazines would be fiddly to design on a 3D program. The basic shapes would be simple enough but the dog-eared corners would need adding individually.
SINCE I moved my computer to the window end of my studio, I’ve seen the heron flying along by the wood a couple of times. This morning I was surprised to see a Kestrel hovering above the hawthorn hedge at the end of the garden. 
It might have been on the look-out (with its left eye) for voles in our rough patch of meadow or it might have had its (right) eye on the field beyond the hedge.
All the work involved in reorganising my studio has meant that I’ve done very little drawing during the past week, except, at the weekend, a design for this year’s 
Christmas card so this hand, chair and cast iron pillar in a mill are all that I’ve drawn in odd free moments.
