Inspector Barnaby

DCI Barnaby

Yes, he has turned out looking rather like Ralph Vaughan Williams in my drawing but this is rumpled Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby, Neil Dudgeon’s lead character in ITV’s Midsomer Murders.

Four Lions
poster

Hopefully the good inspector won’t have any trouble from these characters, Riz Ahmed’s Omar and Kayvan Novak’s Waj, the hapless northerners in Four Lions who attempt to train crows as bombers. I love the expression on the crow’s face.

And I’m sure that no crows were harmed during location filming in the hills around Sheffield.

Sanjeev Bhaskar and Prof John Wright

These were all drawn from photographs in last week’s Radio Times, as was Sunny, played by Sajeev Bhaskar, another character from Unforgotten. Professor John Wright is a clinician and epidemiologist at the Bradford Royal Infirmary.

Easter Bunny

rabbit animation

Step 2 in my attempts at Dermot O’ Connor’s LinkedIn animation tutorial.

frames from the animation

There are 32 frames in this 24 frames per second animation. I like the way the rabbit’s expression changes with just a few changes to the lines. The blue and green shapes in frames 1 and 4 are a feature called onion-skinning. Blue represents the previous frame – as if seen through tracing paper – and green the next frame. By drawing an ‘in-between’, halfway between the two, it should be possible to get a smooth movement. The difficulty is keeping details consistent.

roughs

O’Connor suggests starting off a simple animation with a beginning and an end quick sketch of the action and one at the halfway stage.

action arc

Once you’ve drawn those key frames you get an idea of where the action is going and you plot arcs, so that things move smoothly.

I plotted an arc for the rabbits right ear but thought that I wouldn’t need one for the left. As a result it flops about aimlessly!

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Helana Attlee

Helena Attlee

I had probably held more birds than stringed instruments, and the feeling reminded me of scooping a hen from its perch, its body always lighter than I expect, and pulsing with life.

Helena Attlee, Lev’s Violin, 2021

Helena Attlee, author of An Italian Adventure and The Land Where Lemons Grow, The Story of Italy and Its Citrus Fruit, appears on the Books Page of this week’s Radio Times, on the trail of the “mongrel history” of a worn and weathered violin in her new book Lev’s Violin.

Link

Helena Attlee

Scroll Work

scroll animation

‘Is that all it does?’ asked Barbara. It takes a lot to impress some people, doesn’t it?!

I’m re-learning hand-drawn animation using the timeline in Clip Studio Paint on my iPad Pro, drawn with a second generation Apple Pencil.

I got the chance yesterday to run through a LinkedIn course created by animator Dermot O’ Connor. He kept things really simple using Photoshop – simple if you’re already familiar with Photoshop that is. My problem is that I don’t find it easy to draw using a graphics pad and so far the timeline isn’t available on the iPad version of Photoshop.

Lenora & Grigore

Lenora

In a photograph in this week’s Radio Times, Maria Schrader’s character Lenora has the detached, intense look of one of a woman in a Stanley Spencer painting. Deutschland 89, a German-American spy drama, is currently showing on More4.

Grigore and Lenora

Emil Hostina is a Securitate agent, hunkered down with her in a safe house in Timisoara, Romania, at the time of the fall of the Ceausescu regime.

I love the theatricality of the production. I wouldn’t want to stay with these two if they opened and bed & breakfast in Scarborough, but they’re wonderful characters to draw. Perhaps Deutschland will be looking for an artist in residence for their next series?

Unforgotten’s Fiona

Liz White

Fiona Grayson, Liz White’s character in Chris Lang’s crime drama Unforgotten looks very much like the bobble-hatted people we’ve been meeting right through the winter on our regular lockdown walks. In the photograph in last week’s Radio Times that I’ve drawn her from she’s on location in the Peak District. Some of the scenes were filmed at Winnat’s Pass. We’re hoping that, before too long, as restrictions slowly ease, we’ll be able to walk there again.

Fiona is described by RT’s Alison Graham a character who ‘has been trapped by her guilt for most of her life and knows time is running out.’

Linton Kwesi Johnson

Linton Quesi Johnson

Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon.

Linton Kwesi Johnson

That makes it sound as if his work could be a bit tough, but he’s just as likely to get audiences laughing and applauding as he is to get them fired up with indignation or empathic and thoughtful.

Linton Kwesi Johnson, poet and best-selling reggae artist, is only the second living poet and the only black British poet to have his work published as a Penguin Classic.

Mary Creagh

Mary Creagh

Mary Creagh was Wakefield’s first woman MP, elected in 2005, so she’s one of my local Women in History. She’s invariably more upbeat than in my drawing but this is from a still from a Channel 4 interview, live from the Palace of Westminster, in December 2019, a week after she lost her seat to Imran Nasir Ahmad Khan, our current MP, who was literally parachuted in – yes, really, landing on a school playing field – to stand for the Conservative Party.

In the interview she reflected that the then Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn had been guilty of ‘preening narcissism’, so here she reminds me of a distraught character in a Samuel Beckett play or as Cordelia, banished by the folly of her father, in King Lear.

Mary Creagh has always taken a keen interest in environmental issues and during her time at Westminster she was chair of the Environmental Audit Select Committee. She’s now chief executive of the national walking charity Living Streets.

Link

Living Streets the UK charity for everyday walking

Kate Taylor

Kate Taylor

Hard to believe that it’s now six years since I last saw Kate Taylor, Wakefield historian. On Saturday mornings, she and archivist John Goodchild used to treat themselves to breakfast at the Cottage Tearooms in Horbury then call in at the Rickaro Bookshop on the High Street. Barbara worked there at the time.

Kate Taylor

In the 1970s Kate wrote articles on history and architectural heritage for the Wakefield Express, so it was a big thing for me when she called to interview me when my first book A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield was published. It meant a lot to me that she took my work seriously.

I liked Kate’s uncompromising support for architectural conservation and always felt that she had an air of quizzical scepticism about her and a twinkle of mischief. She was force to be reckoned with and I couldn’t finish my Wakefield Women in History month without including her.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
Chiwetel Ejiofor and Maxwell Simba.

Chiwetel Ejiofor directed and starred in his 2019 film The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind and wrote the adaptation of William Kamkwamba & Bryan Mealer’s tale, which was based on a true story. For his role he learnt Chichewa, the local Bantu language of Malawi.

As with the Sherlock drawing, this is from a photograph in this week’s Radio Times.