Blocked

I seem to have a case of writer's block. Think I need the cerebral equivalent of Dyno-Rod to come and plunge my proverbial (verbal, even) pipes. Ideas for things to write about are floating about: the dead mouse, horsehair weaving, deep sea divers, recent forays into Northern Soul and a teenage pregnancy scare, with a bit of music thrown in if possible (I even had Deadmau5 lined up for the first topic, but have yet to decide what could accompany horsehair weaving).  Unfortunately that's all they're doing, though - floating. Maybe I will manage to flush them through at some point but right now I can't seem to.

So, in the meantime, please have a look at some pictures! I found these two ancient 'How To Draw' books in a charity shop. How could I resist?

Drawing Children by Victor Pérard, 1945

Drawing Animals by Victor Pérard, 1951

Here are some of the inside pages...very anachronistic:

I love this guide to facial expressions in particular:

There's even a picture of Buster Bloodvessel...

 but I can't quite bring myself to include Lip Up Fatty as a soundtrack today.

It's got legs

What a life for a Daddy Longlegs.  Once it's pupated from the brilliantly named leatherjacket, it emerges from the underground to fly weakly and drunkenly around for a short while, existing solely to mate.  This stage of its life is all about sex, sex, sex - some don't even bother to eat.   And then it dies.  During its brief time as an adult it risks life and, more specifically, limb(s), if it floats into an unwelcoming house and gets fried on a light bulb, or strays into a playground where evil children lie in wait to amputate those fragile legs.

Well, I like them, they're cute.

Here's an old pic from my sketchbook archive.  The original caption was, "Yes, she's gorgeous - legs right up to her neck!"  A slightly less tasteful alternative was, "Let's get legless!"  and others included, "You're pulling my leg" plus "I'm a leg man myself".  The list could go on, I'm sure. 

Oh you sexy thing

Idle doodles / reverse anthropomorphism II

A few more ridiculous sketches.  Last time I got carried away in a brief idle moment and a small handful of creatures were turned into strange women (or was it the other way around?); today it was the men's turn...

...like Mr Sheep.  You can't pull the wool over his eyes.

And young Mr Batt, who's a fan of The Twilight Saga.

Fancy a hairy hug from Mr Bear?

Lastly Mr Jay (who doesn't seem to know it's rude to stare).  Don't ruffle his feathers.

Aarghh.  Sorry.

Have a great weekend.

Idle doodles / reverse anthropomorphism

I had a call yesterday from a lady whose surname is Badger.  What a great name.  I'll be meeting her in due course but I'm getting this irrational fear that I'm going to be faced with this:

Mrs Badger

Of course this has set me off now and I've started to imagine her colleagues too...

...like Miss Fox

and Ms Ratt.

Then there's the elegant Miss Deer

I think it's probably unlikely I'll meet Mrs Highlandcow, at least.

Images copyright C / Sun Dried Sparrows

Spines and Someloves

I’ve been taking some virtual trips to Australia this week to research animals for a potential book job and in so doing I’ve fallen in love with the echidna.

Sixteen years ago I took a real trip down under but I never got to see one of these spiny little sweethearts in the flesh.  I wish I had.  From looking at photos of them they seem such characterful creatures, and I’m having fun trying to draw their ridiculously long snouts and their somewhat comical little faces.

What is it about Australian animals, though? – they’re just so weird.  Echidnas are mammals, but they lay eggs, with leathery shells like lizards’ eggs.  They carry these in a pouch.   The mother echidna then oozes milk from her belly – she doesn’t have teats – and the newly hatched baby sucks this from her skin.  The baby echidna is endearingly called a ‘puggle’ – which sounds  like something out of a children’s TV programme by Oliver Postgate to me (yes I know, I’m probably thinking of the Pogles…)  Or maybe there’s a band name there? Yay! - the Puggles are playing Glastonbury!  Then again, maybe not.

So… I’m now sketching echidnas and have the difficult task of trying to show one cuddling a baby kangaroo; my imagination is really being put to work.  But, I hope I get the job.

Anyway here are some echidnas.  In doing my research I also came across a youtube video featuring them, titled, ‘The World’s Most Terrifying Penises’.  I’ve yet to watch it….and decided not to post it here although I admit it was tempting.  Instead let’s have some Australian music… I bought a tape of the Someloves’ album* when I was in Sydney and they still sound like perfect Antipodean pop to me.

* Thanks to a friend who'd introduced me to them a few years beforehand...

...Rummaging through drawers and drawings

My first experience of life drawing was when I was 16, at college.  It was a little shocking to see a middle-aged woman of quite ample (if no longer very firm) proportions slip out of her dressing gown and stand there naked and unabashed while the class of teenage art students, all of whom were more embarrassed than she'd ever been, studied every fold and crease and undulating bit of her flesh.  She was very experienced, never moving a muscle, and told us later that while we were looking at her she was actually also looking at us and could see our 'auras'.  Some shone very brightly, she said, but she never told us whose.  She didn't even flinch when one of the tutors, in an attempt to focus our minds on our model as an 'object', placed an upside-down cardboard box over her head.  Maybe it helped to stop our auras from dazzling her while she posed.

I remembered that yesterday while going through a folder of life drawings that are a few years old now, and wondering if anything would inspire me again.  It's been ages since I've done any but, as anyone who's ever tried it knows, it's such good discipline to draw in a class environment with a real model.  Very few of the pieces I looked back through work as a whole; perspectives and proportions are wrong and my lines or textures are dull, but scanning and cropping them to keep the bits I like most seems to give them a slightly different feel and new lease of life.  I hope the models won't mind the amputations and decapitations I've given them here.  At least there are no cardboard boxes on heads, anyway...

 

Forties ephemera and a missing mojo

As people who know me are no doubt bored of hearing recently, I’ve mislaid my mojo (my creative one! It inspires and helps me draw…).  I last saw it when I finished the book I was working on, but now that job is complete and it’s nowhere to be found.  At others’ suggestions I’ve tried looking down the back of the sofa (where I discovered 33 pence, a furry peanut and one of those long bits out of a packet of Bombay Mix), and almost accused a friend of slipping it into their pocket when I wasn’t looking.  However, I’ve been here before, and I know it’ll turn up again some time, probably when I least expect it.  Until then I just have to find some substitutes.  These include, but are not limited to: music, wine, savoury snacks and one particular ‘how to draw’ book.

I love this little book.  It belonged to my mum when she was a teenager; this edition was published in 1944 when she was fifteen. 

The beauty of it, for me, is that essentially nothing has changed – all the ‘how to draw’ principles are completely unaltered by the passing decades.  But the fashions are so of the time; the men are moustachioed and suave, the women look pristine, the families seem wholesome.  Knowing it was first published in wartime and, who knows, perhaps my teenage mum even took it down into the air–raid shelter with her, imbues it with an even greater historical - and personal - significance.  And it’s still the best ‘how to draw’ book I’ve ever seen.  Maybe my mojo will turn up somewhere amongst its warmly yellowed pages some day soon. 

Until then, this book, some music and a glass of red will have to do. I really wish I hadn’t eaten that bit of Bombay Mix just now, though.

All images from 'How To Draw Portraits' by Charles Wood
first printed in June 1943

 

An avian observation post

I’ve only got two ‘Observer’ guide books but I treasure them.  I can’t fully explain why – maybe it’s the combination of them being pocket-sized (this always makes things which aren’t normally that small seem extra attractive for some reason) and also that they’re old.  They have an appealing vintage look, feel and scruffiness, like the Penguin paperbacks I’ve written about before on here.  So I’m holding on to my collection of two - well, it’s not as if they take up much room. 

‘Observer’ books were discontinued in the eighties, after 100 titles had been published in just over fifty years. There is even an ‘Observer’s Book of Observer’s Books’.    I’m not quite sure how they managed to fill two hundred plus pages on some topics: ‘mosses and liverworts’,  ‘sewing’ or ‘glass’,  for instance, but there are others about which I think the opposite, wondering how they managed to condense vast subjects such as ‘modern art’ and ‘wild flowers’ into relatively small volumes.  Birds and trees are just right for these little guides, though. 

‘The Observer’s Book of Birds’ was actually the very first in the series.  I’ve plenty of books about birds but I still refer to this one from time to time, it’s simple to use and it doesn’t go out of date.  It also has a notably endearing way of describing bird note/calls phonetically; for example, apparently the bearded tit makes the sound: ‘ “Cht, cht” and a twanging “ping” ’ and the tree pipit’s song is described as having ‘…a sweet rallentando at the end: “tweedle, tweedle, sweet, sweet, sweet.” ’ Well, I’ve never seen a tree pipit nor come across the term, ‘rallentando’ before, but I like the sound of them both already. 

I’m somewhat fanatical about birds. It’s just a love thing.  They make my eyes light up and my heart lift.   I’ve tried to analyse many times what exactly it is about birds which makes them special, but I can’t really nail it.  I love the fact that they are the only wild creature we share our lives with so visibly, so obviously, every day.  No matter where you are, whether it’s on a city street or in the middle of a forest, you’re bound to notice a bird at some point.  I love the way they are entirely free-willed but we can still find ways to interact with them – like the blackbird who comes to the back door for sultanas, or the robin who surveys as you do some gardening, almost seeming to urge you to notice him.  You can learn a lot about life just watching and trying to understand birds – recognizing all those behaviour patterns which are not so dissimilar to our own when you consider the basic motivations.  They get on with every aspect of their lives without fuss, clearly aware of us but relatively unperturbed.  The more time you devote to observing ordinary birds going about their business, the more you get out of it, and the more you get out of it the more you will want to share in their lives. 

Even when you can’t see them, you invariably hear them and once you’re tuned in it seems you become more aware of birdsong than any other sound.  Earlier today I could hear the jarring metallic clatter of a pneumatic drill somewhere up the road, but the sweet whistling of a territorial robin drew my attention away.  I think there may even have been a rallentando in his song somewhere.

For some reason my love of birds seems to be directly linked to my inability to represent them well on paper.  You’d think it’d make it easier as I spend so much time watching them, but it’s almost as if that’s all I can do: observe.  Observe and enjoy.  My drawings don’t do them justice; maybe I’m inhibited by the challenge of how to capture their spirit and essence, although occasionally I do I try the odd quick sketch…

 Images copyright C / Sun Dried Sparrows

But I’ll leave the proper pictures to the illustrators of my pocket guide. All I really want to do is see, hear and experience birds for real, and if I’m lucky I may get to hear the ‘ “fullock”…”chirrick” and “quark” ’ of a moorhen or the ‘ “whitz” and an explosive scream or groan’ of the water rail.

A musical tribute - Alan Ross: Blackbird (not the Beatles' song of the same name)

Not sure what species this is, but it isn't in my Observer's Book...

Image copyright C (aged about 8)

A soul thing for a Sunday morning II

It's a fine, sunny Autumn morning here, and I'm up against a tight deadline with an illustration project, which means I'm off to work in a minute.  But first:

I think this Sunday morning soul thing may become a series of occasional posts...


And here's a sneak preview of the book I'm working on at the moment, just part of an early rough of some polar bears.  A North Pole thing for a Sunday morning?

Image copyright C / Sun Dried Sparrows

Playing along with the art school boys, part one

When I left school at sixteen I had one ambition - I wanted to design record covers.  It seemed like it would be the perfect job, to create pictures to go with the music I loved.  Going to Art School would be my direct route to this nirvana.  Simple.

Of course the reality was always going to be different.  The Foundation Art course I embarked on at that tender age was perhaps not always as exciting as I’d hoped.  There were definitely some fun moments, but ironically many of these were outside the curriculum – drunken afternoons at the end of term and  adolescent pranks with studio props (a favourite being to wrap up lumps of cow-gum glue in Toffo wrappers and pass them off to a hapless friend as real sweets…)  But a lot of time was spent on  more prosaic practices such as the rules of perspective, drawing from life and understanding the colour spectrum.  I didn’t get to design any record covers at all.

Some rather embarrassing college work from 1980.  Who needs the great masters when you're making pictures like this..?!

With the benefit of hindsight  I think I might have tackled that first year differently.  I might have paid more attention to the technicalities and spent less time pondering on what I was going to wear each day (ooh - Siouxsie T-shirt or holey jumper? Leather jacket or charity shop raincoat?)  Perhaps I would also have taken more of an interest in the Art History lesson which we were obliged to attend once a week.

Sadly, I truly didn’t appreciate the relevance of learning a bit of background to a subject so vast - didn’t realise the benefits of opening up to the bigger picture (excuse the pun).  My world was small and self-obsessed.  So, I’m ashamed to say, the two hours a week watching a film about the Pre-Raphaelites, Surrealism or the Impressionists  became an excuse to do anything but learn or open up to such greatness.  I daydreamed in the soporific half light, and contemplated the latest episode of ‘Monkey’ or the thought of having a Findus crispy pancake for tea.  The most artistic thing I did during Art History was the occasional doodle in my notebook, in which only a few cursory educational notes had been jotted down : “Florence, 1400s, Botticelli.”   120 sleepy minutes would pass in which I barely even noticed his Venus.  And then it was home time (no doubt to watch ‘Monkey’ and have that Findus crispy pancake for tea.)

So I was totally unprepared when it came to sitting the Art History ‘O’ Level exam at the end of the year.  What was worse was that, somehow, I got the day of the exam wrong.  I thought it was on the Thursday, but it was on the Wednesday.  I’d presumed I had Wednesday off and the house to myself - such bliss.  So I stayed in bed for an extra hour.....only to be suddenly and unhappily awoken by a phone call. 

It was my Art History teacher. "Where are you??? The exam starts in half an hour...!” 

“Oh no…”   It felt like a large stone had been dropped inside my stomach as her words assembled themselves in my brain. “Oh NO! I’ve got to get the bus… I don’t know when the next one is… erm…” The rock in my gut felt even heavier.

“No, you’'ll be too late!  I'll come and pick you up in my car.  Now."

Oh shit.  College was eight miles from my home.  She’d be here in less than half an hour.

Not only did I have to face an exam and the wrath of my tutor, but I had to get ready.  Hair!  Oh no! Would there be time to spike it up? Oh hell, could I go to college with non-spikey hair?  Oh fuck.... could I?  And what about make-up?  And clothes? What was I going to wear?  I quickly rinsed my bed-curled mop, unsuccessfully tried to blow-dry it upright, smudged black kohl around my eyes and pulled a smelly, crumpled mohair jumper out of the linen basket where it had been awaiting a much-needed wash.  No time to even finish my bowl of Ricicles before Miss Art History pulled up outside in her Morris Minor Traveller. 

It took a long while, not to mention a lot of egg-white, to get my hair to defy gravity this way...

Anyway I got into the exam late – flustered, embarrassed and, worst of all, with floppy hair - and I was all over the place.  I hadn't a clue.  I tried to recall as much as I could - something about Florence in the 1400s and Botticelli? - but I knew it was doomed.  It was awful.  And when the exam was over all I wanted to do was go home (I had nothing to stay for) but - in the hurry to get out that morning and with not needing to catch the bus -  I only had 12 pence on me. 12 pence was enough to buy a whole packet of Polos, but only a tiny fraction of an eight-mile bus fare. So I decided to walk.

It took me nearly three hours.   I got offers of lifts from a very persistent biker (who kept turning round, coming back and asking again) and a rather pushy lorry driver who scowled nastily at me for rejecting the invitation of a ride in his cab.  I think he had a different kind of ride in mind.  I refused both, and continued on blistered feet – eventually getting home to be greeted by my mum, who was now back from work, with a cheery, “Good day at college, dear?”

I failed my Art History exam miserably.

An art history film with a difference.  The artist, Guiseppe Ragazzini, uses pieces

of masterpieces by Botticelli, Da Vinci, Giotto, etc. in this collage animation...

Dem bones...

The other day I mentioned to someone that, when we were children, my older sister had a pickled bat in her bedroom.  Now I know that sounds totally wacky out of context but, for my teenage sibling who excelled at Biology, the obvious thing to do with a dead (but otherwise perfect) pipistrelle that had been found in the garden was to preserve it in formaldehyde and keep it in a jam-jar in her room.  It then formed part of a display that would have been at home in any scientific laboratory or natural history museum. If my memory serves me well the pickled numbers included a fish eye and a chicken’s foot, which were given space alongside various dried butterflies, a sheep’s skull and a tank full of (thankfully alive) African aquatic toads.  It may sound like something out of the set of a horror B movie or even some strange herbal medicine emporium but as she was my big sis it seemed normal to me, and nurtured a keen early interest in all things natural.

Well, if only I had realised the value of drawing such things from life then rather than just drawing characters from my imagination, I could have sneaked into her room and filled a sketchbook with studies of these fascinating objects too.  But I think perhaps it did spark a rather subtle fascination for bones.  Now, I’ve no desire to see or find any human bones, although I did like looking at the repro human skeleton we had hanging up in the art-room at school, but I do rather like it when I’ve been digging in the garden and come across a tiny bone from a small rodent or perhaps a bird.  They are so fragile and yet so strong, so insubstantial looking and yet so robust.  When you look at a bird’s skull, a casing so fine that it seems more delicate even than eggshell and the connecting bones as thin as a thread of cotton, it is a wonder that the bird itself could ever have been so strong and so unbreakable to get through its life at all. 

It’s with some embarrassment that I recall using bones to make my own jewellery.  It seemed right at the time – listening to music that was part tribal, part goth (Southern Death Cult being favourite) – to accessorise with perhaps strange ancient or ethnic objects, especially anything that could be found for free.  So, my mum boiled up some chicken bones from a roast dinner, and a friend from college brought in some of his dog’s old teeth, and I strung them together with some wooden beads.  This is a drawing I did at the time of the necklace I wore daily (usually teamed up with some earrings I’d made from the smaller bones).

And here are a couple of birds’ skulls that I found in recent years.  Proof that my fascination with natural history has remained is evident in the fact that I felt compelled to keep them (although not in my bedroom).   I think the small one is from a goldfinch and the larger one from a starling.  Whilst I would always prefer to see these wonderful birds alive and well in my garden every day, I sometimes look at these skulls just to remind myself of how amazing these delicate little creatures are underneath their beautiful feathers.  And if I were ever to find a dead bat in the garden, I might just be tempted to pickle it as well.

Under slate-grey Victorian sky

In spite of recent concerns about a possible drought, this little bit of East Anglia has been drenched by some heavy rain these last couple of days – so much so that on Friday afternoon it was cascading over the edge of our lower gutter onto the boiler flue below it which then leaked it into the kitchen.  Alone in the house and wondering what best to do I rushed outside to stand on the rickety, rotting wooden bench which threatened to give way under me and scooped some yucky brown stuff out of the guttering with a trowel whilst being thoroughly soaked in the downpour.  I had visions of my sodden body being found some hours later, impaled on a broken leg of the bench and covered in this shitty-looking matter, having been knocked out by a piece of fallen gutter (it’s cast iron…), with the garden implement by my side.  In my rural setting it would have looked like a crime scene out of ‘Midsomer Murders’.  In spite of that though, I still like summer rain!  It makes me want to run outside and, well, dance around in it naked (…I’m not alone in having that desire, am I?!)

Anyway I didn’t – dance naked or get knocked out and impaled, that is – but the rain and wind did make me think of an odd little collage I did a few years ago as a contribution to an urban folk tale about witches in modern day Camden on a wet, blustery day.  I only had a few hours spare to put it together but I had good fun just trying out something different.  The clouds are made of kitchen roll.  I got through a few sheets of that on Friday too, mopping up the leak indoors.

Artwork by C / Sun Dried Sparrows

Record shop memoirs, part one

I always liked those little independent record shops found in quiet streets, with narrow, creaky doors, windows displays of faded sleeves, and dingy alcoves containing stacks of LPs that looked as if they hadn’t been touched for decades.  Record shops whose interiors were like a club or bar, dimly lit with dark painted walls covered in tatty posters and flyers, and something obscure with a heavy bassline pounding out from speakers in every corner.  But the one where I worked in my early twenties wasn’t quite like that – it was inside a shopping centre (or a ‘mall’ if you’re in the US).  It was brightly lit, with no front door (just shutters) and no windows nor alcoves.   It was adjacent to the pedestrian entrance of a multi-storey car park and opposite the centre’s main toilets.  The car park’s sliding doors opened and shut frequently all day and acted as some kind of wind-tunnel device which, in the sub-zero temperatures of an English winter, sent icy draughts straight through to the shop, and in the tropical temperatures of an English summer, for some reason sent yet more icy draughts straight through to the shop…  You know, sometimes it was windier in there than it was outside, and the records almost used to flap in their racks. Then there was the constant smell of petrol fumes, diluted only by occasional whiffs of bleach and urine emanating from those facilities opposite.  Lovely!

Yet it was still a cool, independent and popular record shop in its own way, bearing in mind this was the 1980s  – it didn’t have the bland, generic feel of an HMV or Our Price and we were the only place for miles where one could stumble upon a Pearls Before Swine LP or order the latest release by the Fuzztones and not be greeted with a blank look.

Friendly, regular customers earned themselves a kind of honorary status; they were people you were glad to see, with whom you could have a good chat and enjoy thumbing through the weighty Music Master ‘Tracks’ catalogue to locate an elusive 7” for them. There were also some dreaded, very unfriendly faces, and as anyone who’s worked with the public would probably agree, customers can make or break your day.  The enthusiastic gratitude shown by a regular indie fan when we got him a 14 Iced Bears single on the day of its release was enough to keep you feeling sweet all day.  Conversely when you were being harrassed repeatedly by a lost (arse) soul who smelt of glue trying to convince you that the deeply scored slab of warped vinyl he wanted a refund on had never been played – well, I know it’s not like a day down the mines but let’s just say it could be a bit of a bore.

One way we found to keep ourselves halfway sane in the onslaught of such behaviour was to make a note of people’s requests - the ones that they got slightly wrong, that is.  It wasn’t that we were taking the piss out of customers in true Barry-from-High-Fidelity style, honest! But some slip-ups were just too good to forget and these quickly developed into a lengthy list.  It was impossible to resist the chance to illustrate some of these erroneous names/titles so very soon some little drawings accompanied the notes.  And, guess what, I’ve kept a copy!

So, by way of gratitude to to all those anonymous members of the public who inadvertently helped to keep me smiling (and drawing) through some of those draughty, diesel-ingesting days, here are just a few from the list…

"Have you got 'Hounds Of Hell' by Kate Bush?" ('Hounds Of Love')

"I'm after the Elvis album, 'A Lawyer In Hawaii'..." ('Aloha To Hawaii')

"Do you have any records by Pat Benidorm please?" (Pat Benatar)

"What albums do you have by Huey Lewis & The Nose?" (Huey Lewis & The News)

And let's not forget the time a customer said, "The title is something about memories, but I can't remember it..." 

http://sundriedsparrows.blogspot.com/2011/05/record-shop-memoirs-introduction.html