Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Colour version of the troublesome trio of Dewsbury lads, Henry Smith, William Crowther and Alfred Grace caught ferreting in the Boathouse Plantation at Newmillerdam in October 1870 by Chevet Estate gamekeepers, George Stephenson and William Mellor.
For the moment, I’m leaving the gamekeepers out of the final colour version. Wakefield Archives hold photographs of Chevet Estate including at least one portrait of a gamekeeper, so I would be interested to see those.
It’s those poachers again: Dewsbury lads, Henry Smith, William Crowther and Alfred Grace caught ferreting at Newmillerdam in October 1870. Gamekeepers to follow.
Thanks to various disruptions, I’m taking a while to get to the end of my battle with the poachers page but here we as the poacher runs off and Waterton warns him ‘You will NOT touch the birds in MY park!’
Needless to say, the poacher protests that this is a waste because it’s great game.
Working from my rough I tried having Squire Waterton in the foreground but it’s awkward to have him looking into the picture and to see the expression on his face. Why not, I thought, try and convey the Squire’s resolute mood in his body language?
At first I tried having him springing into action but this threw him off balance. In fact he looks like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever!
How about having him stand his ground. I thought of boxers at a weigh in, trying to look rock solid.
I’m not happy with my first attempts at shading for this night scene but we’ll have to see what it looks like when I add the watercolour. Once again, it’s the lively little sketch of the standing figure that appeals to me more than the laboured shaded version.
I might end up using watercolour only rather than inked and hatched shadows.
I’m acting as fight arranger this morning. As I pencil and then start inking the fight with poachers page I’m ironing out some of the inconsistencies in my roughs, always with clarity in telling the story as my main consideration.
For instance in my first version of the frame in which Waterton forces the poacher to drop the knife, I realised that the knife was falling the wrong way, as if the poacher had been holding it upside down.
I’ve always been sceptical of those ‘how to draw super-heroes’ books but in drawing this fight scene I can see the need for some kind of a system for getting dynamic figures convincingly onto paper. It’s more like choreography than life drawing. I’ve drawn my hand hundreds of times but always in a relaxed position.
I tried one of Keith Sparrow’s suggestions in Manga Now! and put a small mirror on the desk to check out the outspread hand for the poacher dropping the knife but I couldn’t get my hand into the correct perspective nor could I hold the pose in the twisted outstretched position (too many cups of tea at breakfast time, as usual!) and nor could I effectively sketch it single handed. Another problem is that my fingers are long so my hands don’t have the proportions that I need for my powerfully built poacher character.
I’d struggle in a similar way if I tried to take a photograph my hand so I’m concluding that building up the hand in simple block form (above), another suggestion in Keith Sparrow’s Manga Now!, is going to be the best way for me to get the dynamic hands in this story doing exactly what I want them to.
Link; Keith Sparrow author of Manga Now! How to Draw Action Figures
Sometimes I come across the perfect source of reference. In this first frame of my comic strip version of the fight between Waterton and the poachers in Walton Park I drew the astonished poacher realising that he’d been tricked by Waterton into firing at a wooden decoy pheasant. Googling for images of Yorkshire workers and countrymen in the early Victorian period, I came across George Walker’s Costume of Yorkshire, a book that I’ve used in my research on several previous occasions.
It’s hard to believe, seeing the two of them together (above), but I drew the rough before I stumbled across the Walker illustration. It’s so similar, with the exception of those lapels, that I have to wonder whether the image was lingering in my mind from when I last browsed through the book. Probably not, but this is the archetypal image that I have of an early Victorian countryman.
My scene takes place in 1835 and Walker published his book in 1814, but I think that country workers and their poacher rivals would be fairly conservative in their dress at that time.
For the other poacher, in my rough I’d gone for a powerful looking man with mutton chop whiskers and therefore too similar to the villain from the soap works scene, Edward Thornhill Simpson.
Again, George Walker comes to the rescue. His moor guide (left) will be my model for the other poacher.
Walker’s drawings were kept for many years at Walton Hall in the collection of Edward Hailstone. In the introduction to a new edition of Costume of Yorkshire, written at Walton Hall in the Easter 1885, Hailstone writes;
‘like his intimate friend Mr. Waterton of Walton Hall, [Walker]would constantly be out at early dawn in the summer months, to watch the habits of the feathered race.’
One further link; Hailstone rented Walton Hall on a long term lease from the soap manufacturing Simpson family, who had bought the property from Waterton’s son Edmund.
Link; George Walker’s Costume of Yorkshire on Calderdale Council’s From Weaver to Web online visual archive of Calderdale history.
I’D ALWAYS assumed that the stone watchtowers that Charles Waterton(1793-1865) built around Walton Park were primarily birdwatching hides where Waterton, accustomed to life in the tropics, could take shelter on walks around his nature reserve but when I read an account of a visitor to the Park in 1835, I realised that these were intended as sentry boxes. It was all very well for Waterton to enclose his sanctuary with a long high wall but in order to ensure that his pheasants and wildfowl wouldn’t be disturbed by gangs of poachers from the local towns, he had to organise night patrols.
I believe there were four towers originally of which I’ve seen three. Two of them were in ruins and have now disappeared without a trace but the third has been restored. They are positioned in strategic points such as where the stream flows out of the Park under the wall and at the diagonally opposite corner with a view down the slope to the Lake.
On an evening visit to a neighbouring wood Waterton once surprised a poacher. In the ensuing fight Waterton, who was on his own, without the support of his trusty gamekeeper, John Ogden, was wrestled to the ground. Fortunately he fought off his assailant by grabbing him by the cravat and choking him until he ceased his attack and fled.
Again for this illustration I’ve worked from reference, this time from two photographs kindly supplied by John Whitaker, curator at Wakefield Museum. I hadn’t realised that the towers originally had a conical turret roof. When the watchtower was restored a few years ago the roof was omitted, I guess for structural reasons, but what a difference it made when I reconstructed the tower with the roof in place. It changed from looking like a military installation to looking like something out of a fairy tale, the sort of enchanted little tower that a traveller would find on a walk through the woods.
No doubt one or two gangs of poachers were in for a big surprise on the night that they they went down to the woods and first came across the tower and the band of guardians that presumably hid inside it.