‘Always draw with movement from the elbow or shoulder, never from the wrist’ was the advice that I read in a book on illustrating graphic novels recently. So that’s where I’ve been going wrong all these years. I’ve always had shaky hands so drawing from the wrist rather than the fingers is usually about as free as I get. For this geranium I made a point of moving my whole arm, so it helped that we were sitting in a cafe table and I could steady my arm by resting it on the table.
I didn’t find it so easy when I was kneeling, clutching my little A6 Hahnemuhle Watercolour Book, beside one of the beds in the walled garden at Sewerby Hall, drawing a red admiral on what I think was Hylotelephium telephium, a relative of the sedums. I find it impossible to sit in a crosslegged yoga pose, so kneeling is the best I can do.
Hoverflies were also attracted to the flowers and basked in the sun on the surrounding box edging.
Apostle Spoon
Reading up on comic strips and graphic novels makes me more aware of the stylisation that we’re familiar with in everyday life. Looking closely at this apostle teaspoon, part of the mismatched cutlery and crockery at Hilary’s in Cawthorne, I could see that someone had designed him with the sort of stylish simplification that you’d put into designing a character in a manga or comic strip story. He could appear as the ‘wise old man’ mentor for some hero, like Alec Guinness’s Obi-Wan Canobi in Star Wars.
‘You have much to learn, Grasshopper!’ would be a suitable aphorism for the Apostle-spoon character if he was admonishing me for my inability to adopt the lotus position, but it was actually Master Po’s line to David Carridine’s trainee monk in the 1970s television series, Kung Fu.
My mum had some teaspoons with Egyptian characters on them and I hope that I managed to keep one when we cleared her house. Now I’m thinking could they have come back with my dad from Egypt after the war. I don’t ever remember asking my mum about the story behind them.
