This is a little sample from a counting book idea I had – I spent some time sketching flamingoes at the zoo a while ago and used the drawings for reference. It’s amazing the variety of poses these bright pink birds can do with their necks. I used a bit of texture for their bodies which I tweaked from a photo I took years ago of rain drops snaking down a window – the curvy shapes seem to suit them.
I spent a sunny Monday walking the Regent’s Canal, from King’s Cross to Kensal Green. It’s a very interesting way to see London – slow, quiet and full of surprises. The moored houseboats are all so different, with their sculptures, roof gardens and gnome yards, while the dark, dark tunnel entrances exert an ambiguous pull. I particularly enjoyed seeing the furtive (cardboard) penguins preparing to dive into the water just beside London Zoo, and the houseleek wall display.
The day ended at Kensal Green Cemetery, worth an entire outing in itself. It’s a textbook of Victorian architectural fads, each tomb more elaborate than the last. The stone hat and gloves were a nice touch. It’s also a perfect place to look for names – the best of the day: Sarah Snowball.
On the second Sunday of every month the Wandle Trust holds a river cleanup – I’ve been going along regularly for over ten years and there’s nothing I like better than standing in the river in waders, watching the damselflies flit past and feeling in the gravelly bottom with my toes for old trolleys, mattresses, car doors, kettles – there’s not much we haven’t pulled out of the river over the years and yes, there have been a number of kitchen sinks. (you can see the alphabet I made from things found in the river here)
For all the time I’ve been involved Erica has organised the cleanups – taking all the waders, wheelbarrows, crowbars, gloves and all the other things we need from the storage unit down to the various spots along the river, contacting the volunteers and liaising with each of the different councils for the rubbish pick-up. She has been the cheerful, smiling heart and soul of the operation and now she is moving to Norfolk, where I am sure some lucky river will be the beneficiary. We’re all going to miss her enormously, and for her last cleanup I made a special version of the Wandle woodcut and collage print from my recent exhibition, Skim Sky Blue. It features eels in a tyre (there are many of both in the river) and, specially for Erica, a coconut as her catch phrase is “there’s always a coconut” – and indeed there always is. I even found an old map of Earlsfield showing the river, and used that in the collage too.
Coincidentally shortly afterwards I was invited by my friend Nick to an ecumenical service at Merton Abbey Mills celebrating the 900th anniversary of Merton Priory – sadly very little remains of it, but we did get to see what’s left of the chapter house, hidden away under a road next to the giant Sainsburys. The service ended with a blessing for the river Wandle, and rose petals were cast on the water.
I’m just back from a weekend away at Holland House in the heart of Worcestershire – I was with 29 other picture book writers and illustrators on the now annual SCBWI Picture Book retreat, impeccably organised by Anne-Marie Perks and Bridget Strevens.
It was an amazing weekend in an idyllic setting – lovely gardens down to the river, sunny hidden corners to work in, fresh meals with veg from the garden and tea break cake still warm from the oven. But best of all was the people – so many new friends I can’t wait to see again, very inspiring and great fun to be with.
We were very lucky to have two very talented author illustrators leading the activities: Helen Stephens and Alexis Deacon. Helen gave a fascinating talk about how she works, showing sketchbooks, dummies and original artwork. She spoke about where she gets inspiration and we heard the story about the real-life Fleabag who prompted the book – the day Helen drew him at Battersea Dogs’ Home he was adopted to be a stunt dog! I’m definitely going to adopt some of her methods – such as drawing at a light box standing up to keep the line loose, and taking a limited number of coloured pencils out sketching to keep the palette simple.
Alexis set some really clever creative exercises designed to get us fine-tuning our observational skills to forensic levels of detail – great fun and a useful technique for the future. One of the exercises involved watching and sketching living things for an hour – I could only find invertebrates, but the exercise was so absorbing I could have gone on all day – especially when a shiny turquoise damselfly settled down on my toe.
Everyone on the weekend had the opportunity for a one-to-one crit session with a mentor – Sarah Malley from Egmont and Maria Tunney from Walker were both there giving advice on Saturday (as well as a very entertaining and useful talk). I had my crit with Helen Stephens, and she was very helpful and pointed out some ways of resolving problems in two dummies I’m working on at the moment. The atmosphere was so inspiring I almost completed a brand new picture book dummy – and it was terrific to be able to get immediate feedback from so many interesting and imaginative people.
I’m looking forward to next year already – and next time I will definitely join in the midnight croquet game – this year I got too absorbed in an informal crit group. Highly recommended – book early! Many thanks to everyone involved.
These two characters work at the riverside nightclub – a couple of ideas for a story I am developing…
Yesterday was the first ever Illustrators’ Fair, held near Kings Cross in London by the brand new House of Illustration as part of their housewarming season. I was sharing a stall with Claudia Boldt and Karin Littlewood, and there were at least 100 other illustrators on stalls, with many many more illustrators, families, local people and illustration fans visiting throughout the day.
There was a great buzz to the event, with big bunches of balloons everywhere giving it a real fairground feel. We offered free badge-making on our stall which was very popular with children and adults alike – I specially liked Sarah Edmonds‘ ‘Lettuce Dance’ and Bridget Strevens-Marzo‘s Tiz and Ott badges.
We were lucky to be opposite a long blank wall, which Karin quickly converted into a wall of drawing, which kept people busy all day – one boy spent ages drawing a beautifully elaborate northpoint, and the ketchup bottle really makes me smile. And I came home with three new signed picture books, all of which will be a perfect starting point for activities at my weekly under 5s art class.
Big thanks to Bob and Michael, and all the fantastically helpful volunteers at the House of Illustration for organising this wonderful event.
Where can these ten tapirs in a tuk-tuk be heading? Perhaps to the Illustrators’ Fair, an exciting event to be held next Sunday, 22nd June, hosted by the House of Illustration as part of its housewarming season.
I am delighted to be sharing a stall there with two very talented illustrator/authors, Claudia Boldt and Karin Littlewood. We’ll be making badges, telling stories, selling books and prints and also I hope meeting many of the other 100 illustrators who will be exhibiting at the event.
The Illustrators’ Fair is at 2 Granary Square, King’s Cross, London N1C 4BH from 11am to 6pm, on Sunday 22nd June.
Full details are here, all welcome! http://www.houseofillustration.org.uk/whats-on/housewarming-season/the-illustrators-fair
A few years ago I went to a tiny but excellent exhibition all about ink at University College London, where a video was showing about how to make ink from oak galls. It’s been in the back of my mind ever since, so when I found myself camping under a line of oaks on the Gower in south Wales last week with oak galls dotted all over the grass, it seemed as if the time had come to give it a try. (oak galls – or oak apples – are little hard balls made when a parasitic wasp larva injects certain chemicals into developing leaf buds on the oak tree).
A little bit of research on the internet showed the key ingredients of this ancient ink (first known recipe by Pliny the Younger) are oak galls and iron, with gum arabic as a binder. The dark colour is created by a chemical reaction between the tannic acid in the galls and the iron sulphate. There’s a very informative website here. There are all sorts of minor variations, so I decided to create my own hybrid method, and here’s how it went:
Firstly, I put all the oak galls in a plastic bag and used a hammer to break them up. Then I ground up some out-of-date iron tablets I found in the cupboard, and threw in some old chunks of iron I found on Chiswick Eyot last week when learning about fish for Thames 21 (but that’s another story…). I put it all in an iron pot with some rainwater, and set some heat under it on the stove. Amazingly, it was only a couple of minutes before this orange soup turned a proper inky black. I boiled it all for a few more minutes, then strained it through an old tea towel. Finally I added the gum arabic, which gave the mixture a nice viscosity. In all I made half a pint of ink, which has a good dark brown colour – and once you’ve put it on paper, it continues to darken for a few hours. (the labels on the bottles are written with the ink)
It’s been a very interesting experience – much easier than I thought it would be to get a good result, and definitely something I would do again. I don’t know how long the ink will last, but I’m certainly going to start using it for drawing right away. Big thanks to Humphrey (age 4) for collecting all the galls for me!
My exhibition of woodcuts and collage inspired by the river Thames, Skim Sky Blue, closes tomorrow, Sunday 18th May. Above is a selection of the framed prints on show – each one consists of a block-printed woodcut augmented with hand-cut and torn collage,using a variety of media ranging from watercolour to oil – and even a few washes of mud from the Thames itself. As they are too large to scan it’s difficult to capture them it’s difficult to capture the whiteness of the paper or the gloss of the oil-based inks – but here is an impression at least. It’s been very enjoyable creating an exhibition entirely to my own brief – and I feel as if it’s something I’d like to expand, as there are so many more aspects of the river still to explore through this medium. (see the previous post for all sorts of info about why I love the river so much). One day I plan to collect mud samples from the whole river and create a colour chart…
The show is on at The Art Cabin, 11 Brookwood Road, Southfields, London SW18 5BL, 10am – 6pm.
My exhibition about the river Thames, Skim Sky Blue, is now open at The Art Cabin and runs until May 18th. Details on how to visit are here (it’s all part of Wandsworth Arts Festival Fringe). I’ve been asked by a couple of people who live too far away to come and see it if I’ll post pictures, so here is selection of some of them. The works are mostly woodcuts with chine collé, and some with additional collage added after printing. I used all sorts of materials for this, from old maps to prepared sheets using both oil and watercolour paint. I had a lovely discussion with Japanese visitor who came into the gallery about the particular shade of deep, clotted blood-red that you can see in the circle on the ‘eels in a tyre’ picture – apparently this is a colour of deep significance in Japan.
Here’s my exhibition statement: read to the bottom to find out how it got its name…
“Skim Sky Blue is inspired in part by woodcut artist Robert Gibbings’ 1940 book ‘Sweet Thames Run Softly’, in which the author built his own boat then paddled down the river Thames from Lechlade in Gloucestershire all the way into central London, sketching and observing along the way. The beautiful woodcuts in the book celebrate the small details of river life, from the curl of a leaf to the dart of a dragonfly.
“Building on a lifetime’s connection with the river Thames, illustrator Jane Porter has explored every mile of the river, from walking to its source under a pile of stones in a buttercup-filled Gloucestershire meadow to the silvery sculpture of the Thames Barrier and the tidal mudflats to its east. She has swum some sections, and has rowed in a traditional Thames skiff from Lechlade 120 miles back to Teddington, as well as skiffing past central London’s landmarks in the Great River Race. She has even built her own coracle and paddled it on the Wandle and a quiet backwater of the Thames.
“The woodcuts in this exhibition tell stories about different sections of the river – the quirky Easter Island-inspired topiary patrolled by hens at Radcot Lock, the cormorants proudly occupying their tree at Stephens Eyot near Kingston, the abandoned structure out past the oystercatchers near Erith, scented by the sewage works.
As a volunteer for both Thames 21 and the Wandle Trust, Jane is involved in monitoring the health of the Thames and has been hauling tyres and other rubbish out of the river Wandle for ten years – eels are a regular sight in this Thames tributary and have an astonishingly tight grip as you pick them up to return them to the water.
The woodcut medium gives the work a very tactile quality: the gloss of the oil-based inks and the slight embossing from the force of the press – even the slight flaws where the wood has splintered – are a refreshing antidote to digitally created or printed pieces. Jane has used chine collé to give graphic highlights and splashes of colour or texture to the prints – using for collage pre-prepared watercolour washes, some even created with mud from the Thames itself.
The exhibition’s title, ‘Skim Sky Blue’ is taken from Charles Dickens – it’s how he described a glass of Thames water when offered one in 1850 on a visit to the Kew Bridge Pumping Station.”