I’m steadily getting there with my animations for the Rhubarb Festival. For the forcing shed sequence, I’ve kept exactly to my original comic strip. I can add sound effects and lighting effects later, but for the moment, this tells the story just as I did in the booklet.
Tag: Rhubarb Festival
Forced Rhubarb
My latest, and simplest, animation for the Rhubarb Festival.
Buckets, pots or barrels are used to ‘force’ an earlier crop of rhubarb.
Rhuben
Let me introduce head gardener Rhuben Cushstead, a man so well-versed in all things rhubarb that you’d go to considerable efforts to avoid striking up a conversation on the subject with him, if you spotted him in the pub.
I’ve designed Rhuben to be a narrator in the opening Brief History of Rhubarb section of my animation for next month’s Rhubarb Festival. In the original comic strip, a Victorian gardener makes a brief appearance, followed by a couple of frames about the cultivation of forced rhubarb, so it made sense in my animation to have the gardener himself addressing the audience directly.
I can think of several gardeners I know who would be brilliant doing the voiceover for Rhuben, but to keep things simple, it’s going to have to be my voice. But that’s quite appropriate as whenever I record a voiceover it always sounds exactly like the kind of character ‘that you’d go to considerable efforts to avoid striking up a conversation with, if you spotted him in the pub.’
Chinese Rhubarb Medicine
My next cartoon illustrates the use of powdered rhubarb as a medicine in China, 2,700 years ago.
Experimenting with animation, I came up with this warped out-of-register effect, which could be an appropriate way to suggest the malady affecting the over-indulgent mandarin.
Mammoth
This mammoth looks exactly like my original frame from the Short History of Rhubarb comic strip from my Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle, except that it isn’t cropped (the tips of the tusks and the mammoth’s rear end are missing in comic) and, despite the flat colours, I’ve now reformatted it in eight separate layers, so that I can animate individual features like the trunk and the eyes.
Rhubarb Rambles
The final section of my proposed Rhubarb Sketchbook animation is all about the pleasures of getting out and walking in the Rhubarb Triangle between Wakefield and Leeds.
Highlights include:
- a medieval deer park at Gawthorpe
- a rabbit warren on Lindale Hill
- the ‘world’s first railway’ at Middleton
- a Viking boat and a Victorian aqueduct at Stanley Ferry.
There’s a possible fourth section too: if time (and a little extra budget) allowed, I’d add a short animation featuring the three rhubarb recipes that proved such a popular feature in my booklet of Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle.
Rhubarb Folk
For the local history section of my proposed Rhubarb Sketchbook animation, I can draw on a host of colourful characters:
- Puritan plotters at Middleton
- bodysnatchers at East Ardsley
- Prophet Wroe’s ‘temple’ at Kirkhamgate
- John of Gaunt’s Manor House at Rothwell
- Robin Hood (and his dad, Adam Hood, a forester) in the Outwood
- plus a commercial break: from Ossett, John ‘Imperial Leather’ Cussons’ ‘Compound Rhubarb Pills’ (just don’t OD on them!).
Just dropping a few frames into my storyboard, I realise that I could easily devote a whole cartoon to the life and adventures of Prophet Wroe.
Rhubarb Festival
We’re settling down again after a weekend promoting my walks booklets at Wakefield’s Rhubarb and Food and Drink Festival, although Barbara works in a bookshop so it’s not such a change for her! We were guests of Trinity Walk shopping centre.
As it was a food festival, in addition to selling books we couldn’t resist doing a bit of bartering and we exchanged a copy of Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle for a box of four muffins from the next stall! But we spent most of our profit on takeaway lattes from Cafe Costa to keep us warm as the breeze funnelled around the precinct!
Robin Hood’s Wakefield
Saturday proved to be the best day, when Morris Dancers created a suitably festive background. It conjured up an impression of what it must have been like when Trinity Walk was a part of the town known as Goodybower, ‘God’s bower’, where statues of saints from the parish church, now the cathedral, were paraded, displayed and decorated with ribbons and flowers and where some performances of the town’s guilds’ cycle of mystery plays took place.
Mystery plays of course had a religious theme, although the second play in the cycle, Cane and Abel, could claim to be the world’s first murder mystery.
Cursed by God, Cain taunts his fellow men to capture and kill him;
And harshly when I am dead,
Bury me at Goodybower at the quarry head
The quarry was approximately where Trinity Walk had set up the stall for us, later the site for Wakefield’s market.
One of my booklets retraces the steps of a Yorkshire Robin Hood, a Robert Hode who lived in Wakefield but who found himself outlawed after the battle of Boroughbridge. There are several walks exploring the town’s connections with the story, at Sandal Castle and Pinderfields for example, the latter associated since medieval times with Robin’s great rival and supposedly cousin, George-a-Green, the Jolly Pindar of Wakefield. Then there’s a walk around the battlefield site itself at Boroughbridge and a tour of Brockadale, including the look-out post at Sayles, mentioned in the earliest Robin Hood’s ballads and still overlooking both the ancient Great North Road and its modern dual-carriageway equivalent.
The book ends up at Kirklees Priory, long associated with the death of Robin and supposedly the site of his grave.
Rough Patch
We were pleased that we sold as many Robin and Liquorice walks books as we did the Rhubarb, which was good considering theme of the festival. It’s so encouraging for me when people have done all the walks in two of the books then they come back for the third in the series. I feel that I must be doing something right.
Because of the local food connection we were also selling my sketchbook from the wilder side of the garden, Rough Patch.
It was good to meet up with several of our friends, including people we haven’t bumped into for several years, who had spotted that we would be there and come along to see us. I saw my junior school teacher from 1960 and an illustration student of mine from my days at Leeds college of art, then part of the polytechnic, from 1983.
Shopping malls aren’t my natural habitat but, as there’s a ‘Walk’ in the name of this particular shopping centre, perhaps I’ll get a chance to link up with them again.
After three four hour stints at our cart I have enormous respect for retailers and all the hard but unseen work that they put into to making shopping a seamless experience. They make it look so easy!
Don’t mention the rain
As the dark clouds whipped themselves up on the Friday morning, the street cleaner who regularly patrolled the precinct kept our spirits up;
‘Don’t talk about the rain and it won’t come!’ she advised us.
She was wrong, the shower came through just the same, but at least she made us smile!
Link; Trinity Walk
Life After Rhubarb
THE LAUNCH of Walks around Ossett went well at the Rhubarb Festival (yesterday and Friday) but it’s wonderful to get back to normal life!
I launched Walks in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire at last year’s Festival. One of my first customers then was a woman from Nottingham who protested about any suggestion that Robin might be a Yorkshireman but I managed to talk her into buying a copy so I was delighted when – returning for this year’s festival – she said that she’d enjoyed reading it and she’d learnt a lot from it. I feel that’s quite an achievement!
It’s always a struggle to reach the deadline for this February event, following as it does the distractions of Christmas and, as often as not, some difficult weather for checking out the walks but it’s a good time of year to be starting afresh. Snowdrops, crocus and the first miniature daffodils are beginning to show and as we walked through the woods between showers this afternoon the leaves of bluebell, wild arum, golden saxifrage, dogs mercury and other woodland herbs were showing. I’ve got ambitious plans for drawing from nature and for book projects this year so hopefully I’ll be out there drawing the wild flowers as they appear throughout the season.