Tag: Sketchbook

Notes from a Nervous Student

still life

A few more sketches from 1973. I’d been hand lettering my Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield and I was worried about my shaky hands:

Fell boot

. . . `I didn’t get very much work done on the book. It’s the energy flow chart I’m doing. But my hands are so shaky when I try to do letter forms. I have to practice quite a bit to get it right, but it’s so maddening; a real curse. Depending on how this book goes I think that I shall have to give up hand lettering for good; or have the operation for Parkinson’s Disease . . . or try a different pen or pen nib.

When I’ve calmed down and don’t worry too much about each letter and curve I can produce readable lettering . . . it’s like walking – if you start thinking about each step you soon trip up

My diary for Wednesday, 15th August, 1973
haversack

Fifty years later I’m still hand lettering and still worrying about my shaky hands, although it’s nothing to do with Parkinson’s Disease, it’s just the regular Essential or Familial Tremor (which can be controlled by drinking red wine!)

It wasn’t all agonising about artwork though: I recorded ‘!! SEVEN REDSHANK !!’ on the Wyke and 3 sandpipers on the river.

More Recent Sketches

More recent sketches on the iPad and in pen and ink and watercolour plus on today’s sketch of the railway bridge seen from Books on the Lane, Walton, a dash of Gold Blend coffee to create a blotchy ink wash.

A6 Freewriter

Unfortunately our local art shop has been closed for a week due to the latest bout of flu so I’ve gone for an Eco Grey Leather A6 Freewriter with a ‘recycled’ cover made from an offcut of leather. The cover makes it difficult to scan, but the Chambers Biographical Dictionary is sufficient to flatten it on the scanner. The creamy coloured paper doesn’t take watercolour as well as my regular sketchbooks. I prefer white paper when I’m scanning watercolours.

But as a sort of pocket notebook it should be fine.

The sketchbook and pen were drawn in my A5 Seawhite travel journal and you can see it’s more sympathetic to watercolour.

‘Rather an Unsettled State’

sketchbook page

28th December 1972: ‘Why doesn’t he clear those books away instead of wasting his time drawing them?’ Well I’m in a rather an unsettled state at the moment and my other shelf unit is down in London.

If you read this picture carefully you might find hidden in it; clock from Horbury station, an unfinished model of a village built on a rock which I started before O-levels and a Victorian writing box which Grandma Bell gave us when they moved house.

Drawn in pen and ink, 28 December 1972, colour added in Clip Studio Paint, 24 December 2022

Today I date every drawing in my sketchbook, because it’s such a help when I’m trying to track down a drawing later. Apart from references to Christmas and the new year I wasn’t so consistent at that time.

diary page
Painting the backdrop to the Pageant Players production of ‘Pinocchio’, talking about ‘The White Goddess’ with my friend from school days John Blackburn.

But I did mention in my diary that I ‘did a sketch in the bedroom’ on Thursday, 28 December 1972. Probably more details than you need here! Even so, you may be wondering what I dreamt about that night?

What do you mean ‘No!’?!

Well, I recorded it, so here it is anyway . . .

My dream: receiving those cheques from the Harrogate Festival and ‘Yorkshire Life’ made me relive a busy year of organising recitals and exhibitions for the 50th anniversary of the death of Yorkshire composer William Baines.

Solstice Sketchbook, 1972

sketchbook

I started this sketchbook 50 years ago today, on Thursday 21st December 1972, title inspired by hearing Gawain and the Green Knight on the radio on the Monday. I’d stocked up on Daler 10×7 inch sketchbooks the day before in Leeds, buying a year’s supply as I suspected that size was about to be discontinued and I thought that A4 was just bit too large, A5 a bit too small. But 10×8 was just right!

But coming back to 50 years ago today . . .

at Hartley Bank wood
At Hartley Bank Wood from my A5 page-a-day diary

I recorded in my regular diary that after a morning Christmas post round which I didn’t get back from until 1.20 pm (‘longer than expected; almost missed Pogles Wood; but watched the programme on Verulamium), I ‘did a couple of sketches down Addingford’.

holly at Hartley Bank

Helpfully a passing dog walker, a school boy with a red setter, advised me that ‘You should come here in the spring, there are bluebells all over.’

Hartley Bank sketchbook page

The red setter was barking. ‘I don’t think he likes you said the boy’. Probably he realised that I was a postman. Temporarily.

Hartley Bank

Here’s Hartley Bank, an outcrop of sandstone, with its scarp edge wood of sessile oaks, as it is today, photographed this afternoon (disclaimer: barbed wire and electric fence in foreground removed in Adobe Lightroom!)

willow and cat

But 50 years ago a railway embankment follow the line of the hedge coming down the slope at the left edge of the wood. I must have paused to draw the willow on my walk home, before crossing part of the Hartley Bank Colliery spoil heap, which a few years later was opencast and landscaped and restored as farmland.

The cat curled up in the Windsor chair is Burke.

sketchbook note

My students living next door to me in the college hostel must have cursed Ray Piggott and his wife for suggesting that I learn the recorder but they should be grateful that the musical couple dissuaded me from taking up the violin!

Lightning Sketches

birch

Lightning sketches from an engagement party, Normanton Market and a lightning-struck birch tree by the car park at the Seed Room, Overton. You can see the split running the full length of the trunk of one of these trees.