I’ve mentioned before how much of an influence the springy pen and ink illustrations of Victor Ambrus were on me as a student and I’ve just come across a brief account that I made in a student notebook of an occasion when I was lucky enough to get to speak to him.
At the Leeds Children’s Book Fair, on Tuesday 16 November 1971, I slipped in at the back of the audience of children for a talk given by Victor and another historical illustrator/writer Ian Ribbons. As I walked in, Victor had just fired the flintlock pistol that he’d brought along with him; a sure way to get everyone listening!
As the smoke cleared, he explained:
“I like drawing historical pictures because I am able to go to town on the costumes and more interesting things seemed to happen in those days.”
Ian Ribbons was the author and illustrator of a series of books about events around the world on one particular date in history. As part of the research for Monday, 21 October 1805, The Day of Trafalgar, he’d climbed the mast and drawn from the crow’s nest of HMS Victory:
“The point is that you never know what you might be doing next.”
But coming back to Victor Ambrus, as I’ve said before, I was convinced that if I could use the exact same nib and paper that he used, I too might be draw like him, so when it came to questions from the audience, I asked him about art materials:
“I use ordinary layout paper for my drawings so that the printers can copy it but of course for colour you have to experiment a little but I use the same sort of paints that you would use at school.”
The real ‘secret’ of Victor’s work is that he can draw.
Quentin Blake, Blue Peter and Big Chief I-Spy
The previous day I’d seen, for the first time, Quentin Blake in action, drawing animals on request for a group of children. His giraffe ran to three sheets of his A2 layout pad. I sat quietly at the back, so unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to request a drawing. A year later, he would be one of my tutors in the Illustration Department at the Royal College of Art.
I was so lucky with my tutors right through college. On the morning of the day that I saw Quentin at work, I ‘talked with Derek Hyatt about composition’ and the following day before my return visit I had a music tutorial with Alan Cuckston (I was working on a project about the Yorkshire composer William Baines, 1899-1922).
After the Ambrus talk I saw another familiar face at the book fair:
‘As I walked away I saw someone smiling at me – it was Peter Purves of Blue Peter.’
And was there someone else?: ‘Also nearly walked into Big Chief I-Spy? I don’t think so.’
The I-Spy books were one of my early influences, with their encouragement to children to get out spotting, jotting and drawing. I won several prizes in the I-Spy summer holiday competitions. There was a daily I-Spy column in the Daily Mail and during August the Big Chief set something to find and to write about every day. I’ve still got my prize-winning books and I’ve never grown out of the habit of getting out and just looking.