Ten National Parks

The UK has fifteen national parks:  two in Scotland, three in Wales and ten in England. Today I'm bringing you two thirds of the set.

My friends, clients and, later today, married couple, Jon and Hannah, asked me to come up with illustrations for their wedding reception table plan. They've had happy holidays working through the list of national parks, coming from the New Forest themselves.  Here is their selection for ten tables.

Ten of the United Kingdom's national parks.

It's an ideal project for me - making lists, sketching and then filling a circle. There's wildlife, human structures, wide views and close-ups, lots of weather and a few references to the experience of visiting the elemental edifices of the British Sublime, from lunchboxes to lost gloves.

Dartmoor, The Yorkshire Dales, the North York Moors, the Brecon Beacons and the Cairngorms are left out for now but here we have Exmoor, Snowdonia, the Pembrokeshire Coast, the Lake District, the Peak District, the South Downs, the Norfolk Broads, the New Forest, Northumberland and Loch Lomond and the Trossachs.

I've been to most of them myself, although some may have been in early childhood. I've drifted on the Broads, scrambled up Snowdon, gasped on a South Down and got wet by Loch Lomond. Of course, there are plenty of other areas of land to gasp or get wet but the designated national parks are a great focus. Completing the set sounds like a great holiday plan.

A Morris Border (not Border Morris)

Here's a hearty little project from earlier in the summer, for my morris men in Southampton.

King John's Morris Men wanted a new poster for dancing dates. I thought it would suit a dense border with plenty of details to pick out, taken from dances and songs, along with assorted rural, maritime and alcoholic titbits and ephemera.

Here, because you want to know and because I want to tell you, is a full contents list:

• At the top:
• Roses - for The Rose Tree In Full Bearing.
• Hops - the importance of beer cannot be overstated.
• The KJM badge - a portcullis, representing Southampton Bargate, above water.
• At the bottom:  hollyhocks, wheat, trout and watercress (very small), more hops, tankards and a barrel being rolled out - as in the song Roll Out The Barrel.
• At the sides:  an oak tree (on the right) and an apple tree (on the left, complete with ladder and scrumper), containing...
• Bells - Ring O' Bells usually ends the King John's running order and Haste To The Wedding is included if we feel up to the challenge.
• A shepherd's crook - Shepherds Hey features in several morris traditions.
• Rifles - there are several shooting dances... including Shooting.
• A fair - for Jockey To The Fair and the Hampshire song Taro Fair.
• A mill - for Maid Of The Mill and possibly Milley's Bequest, which I may have misunderstood.
• A ship - well, this covers various maritime references and several shanties featured in the KJM singing sessions - John Kanaka, Sugar In The Hold and many more.
• Piglet - a plaster pig's head - is the King John's mascot, who comes out from time to time to cause trouble among the audience.
• The pony, hound and cow are decorative but add to the rural idiom...
• ...and, for a spread of birdlife, a seagull, falcon, woodpecker...  and the other kind of kite.
• In the centre:  the accoutrements of the morris - a top hat, stout shoes, sticks for clashing, bells for jangling, hankies for waving, the fool's brush and bladder (for tickling and bopping respectively) and our main instrument, the mighty melodeon.

Now, there are several dances that we do but that I couldn't work out how to draw, at least at such a small scale:

Bonnets So Blue, Balance The Straw, Getting Upstairs, Bean Setting, Broad Cupid, Saturday Night, The Vandals Of Hammerwich, Cuckoo's Nest (I should have got that one in), Old Black Joe, Beaux Of London City, Sheriff's Ride, Nuts In May... and whatever Trunkles are.

They all deserve drawing, as do these, although we don't dance them at the moment:
Lads A Bunchum, The Captain And His Whiskers and The Old Woman Tossed Up In A Blanket / The Old Woman Who Carried A Broom.



Look for King John's in the Southampton area and sometimes roving farther.  There are monthly singing evenings and around Christmas there will be mumming and border dancing.  First, on 15th September, KJM is hosting FOLK DANCE SOUTHAMPTON, featuring numerous visiting dance groups in the centre of Southampton and a ceilidh in the evening.

Caper, Caper, Clash

The year since I took up morris dancing has been long enough only to encounter a fraction of its tradition and lore.  There's a deep mine of colourful customs; a wealth of very specific and subtle differences.  It has linked up titbits of folk history half-remembered from museums and children's books.  I'll be a beginner for a long time.

This week the year's complement of dancing events begins - at least for me.  I'm going to a school hall in Hampshire to see bunch of morris sides from across the south, many of whom I hadn't heard of despite the many events last year.

Twelve morris men... who will know what I got wrong!

I'd like to get the quirks and character down in ink on paper.  Sketching at an event is a laudable aim but not for me and not for a night of drink and dance.  What I like better is a good stint of research and time to think of things to pick out and fit in.

Here's my page showing the sides who I was told may be represented on the night.  I combed through pictures and group websites for the specifics of each group's kit and colours.  The result is a bunch of made-up figures, not real people from photos.

This sort of thing helps me to learn what's what in a complex oeuvre.  I feel a bit more prepared for what I'll see, even if things turn out to be wrong (such as Winchester's eight-foot jig champ).  It's no document, just a cheerful array of ribbons and bells, hats festooned with flowers and tin badges, tabards, baldricks and belchers.



Bonus list:  some of the best names of dances from Lionel Bacon's "A Handbook Of Morris Dances", known as "The Black Book":

Bare-footed QuakerBluff King HalBuffoonCaptain With His WhiskersCurly-headed PloughboyDevil Among The TailorsGallant HussarHunting The SquirrelLollipop ManLumps Of Plum PuddingOld Woman Tossed Up In A BlanketRoast BeefShave The DonkeySwaggering BoneyThree Jolly Black SheepskinsTravel By SteamWalk Of The 2d PostmanWebley Twizzle

Odds And Ends

It's the time to gather up loose fragments and offcuts for slightly mystified inspection.  Before I get stuck into my seasonal artwork campaign (by which I mean complicated Christmas cards), I've looked through a variety of pads and books from this year to collect some snippets, drawn for a variety of purposes.

A bunch of sketchbook oddments from this year.

Next up are a couple of Autumn sketches.  This week I spent a couple of days scrub-bashing with the countryside team in Queen Elizabeth Country Park, between Portsmouth and Petersfield.  We were lopping and sawing thorn bushes from the sides of a combe below Butser Hill and rolling them down to the valley, over rabbit holes in the damp grass.  I drew this in situ over lunch and coloured it at home, hoping to reflect the colours of the trees the other side of the A3.

Scrub-bashing on Butser Hill.

A few weeks earlier I wandered across London's Primrose Hill, into Camden and to the Cecil Sharp House, home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.  I have been in there once, a long time ago.  It's smart and slightly grave behind the rapidly thinning plane and birch.  It's good to get out and draw before breakfast - well, sometimes.

One of North London's mysterious gems, the Cecil Sharp House.

Here's to next year's drawing.  I think sketchbooks should be on my Christmas list.

Romsey Cards At Rum's Eg

Just a quick one to say that, as of last month, my cards are on sale at Rum's Eg in Romsey.

You can buy them and then tour the town to identify each piece of the drawing.

Nearly everything in Romsey!

You might not find the hockey stick.

A Rose For St. George

I was late beginning work on a piece for St George's Day this year.  It has been a weekend of morris dancing around the Meon Valley in Hampshire, with two sides visiting from Devon.

The jaunt was full of things to draw:  there were bells, sticks, hankies, tankards, hats, tabards, badges, drums, squeezeboxes, pies, cutlasses, hats, ribbons, flowers and a nice green vintage bus.  Saturday ended with songs being shared - oh, and some more dancing.  John wrapped the session up with a song I didn't know called Saint George.  The chorus knocked all my other ideas for six and I even got a little emotional.

For St. George's Day 2017

It became an on-the-morning piece, drawn first thing this morning between getting up and going to Oxford to watch more morris dancing at the Folk Weekend.

You will see featured figures George and Guy, respectively leaping in a jig and playing the melodeon.

Here's that process in full:

• Go over jig videos
• Sketch
• Draw
• Colour
• Drying time!
• Rub out
• Scan
• Whack it on the Twitter
• Dash to the station

Happy St. George's Day!

Drawing Alton

Did I mention the set of Hampshire towns that I've been drawing?  Here's a case study of a tricky one:  Alton.

I settled on the format of a 10cm square containing a pen drawing in black and grey.  The idea is to sum up the town or give its highlights, not to present it as a view.  The arrangements are all different - symmetrical, jumbled, in blocks, splayed out...  It depends on what elements I have to work with.

Now for the process:

Research

The page of lists and sketches.

First I need to make a list of things to include:  buildings, statues, activities, symbols, natural features...
I start by scouring a bunch of old guidebooks to England or the south:  I would say "old and new" but they're mostly old or older:

Pevsner's Buildings Of England, the AA Leisure Guide, England's Thousand Best Houses, the Blue Guide to England, the Shell Guide To Britain, the Collins Pocket Guide To English Parish Churches, Here's England (by Ruth McKenney - a real treasure); online lists of follies and hills and fairs and so on.
Then come the books about Hampshire, heritage handbooks, leaflets, photo books and gazetteers.

I am in love with local history websites and photo archives.  Of course, the amount online varies but the information available can be staggering.  I don't know all of these towns and I would hate to misrepresent them.

I'll look at aerial views, OS maps and Google Streetview.  If possible, I'll go for a visit.  The project has kept me supplied with reasons to drive to unfamiliar corners of the county and take photos of wooden signs, cricket games, landmark trees, architectural styles and so on.

The arrangement

The page of layout attempts.

Having sketched the buildings and picked their best angles, it takes AN AGE to make a satisfactory arrangement - longer each time because I want variety.

Once that's done, the dark, grey and light areas have to be balanced.  It's easy to make it all outlines and not give enough depth.

Drawing!

This is by far the quickest part.  I'll sketch loosely in pencil and then begin the ink.  Finally, the pain of making sure I wait long enough before rubbing out, in fear of the much greater pain of smudging.

Here's the result for Alton, with the following elements:

• St. Lawrence's Church, with a reference to the tempest of 1686.
• Civil War muskets that left holes in the church door in the Battle Of Alton in 1643.
• The town hall on the market square.
• The high street of Georgian buildings (it's highlights, not an actual section).
• The railway bridge and an engine of the Watercress Line / Mid Hants Railway (the left-hand arch leads to a pub called The French Horn).
• Hops, a local industry even into this century.
• The Alton Buckle, an Anglo-Saxon artifact.
• The Curtis Museum.
• The unusual war memorial cairn.
• The Assembly Rooms.
• Gliders, flown in the area.
• The pond.

Wondering what I left out?  Here goes:  the new library, the Methodist chapel (converted), the Palace Cinema, the King's Head, the 20th Century magistrates' court, the Museum Annexe and Allen Gallery, the Alton Machine (a type of coach), the river Wey and the legendary Fanny Adams.

Alton in ten centimetres.

Hampshire Trios

I spend a lot of time thinking Hampshire thoughts, compiling snippets of geography and history.  There's a lot of Hampshire that I've never seen.  I'm working on vignettes of a spread of towns and villages.  Here's an example of how things are going.

First, three from the south east:  Bishop's Waltham, with the ruins of the bishop's palace; Wickham, with the Chesapeake Mill supposedly built with timber from the defeated American ship the Chesapeake; and Hambledon, up in the downs, with its cricketing history.

 The second set is the three hursts of the New Forest.  There are more settlements of note but these three fit together well.  Lyndhurst is the forest's capital.  Ashurst, the eastern gateway to the forest, is quite small, being combined with Colbury for administrative purposes.  Brockenhurst has the grandest hotels.

It's a big county.  Wish me luck with the rest of it!

Silchester

Silchester must be Hampshire's largest Roman site.  Calleva was a Roman town on the road from Londinium to Sorviodunum (Salisbury).  An uneven octagon of low walls filled with farm fields and abandoned excavations might not be the most potent historical experience.  Still, it was a satisfying goal-post for a country walk.

Starting at little Mortimer station, the route wove along the border of Hampshire and Berkshire, skirted the edges of farm fields and passed under lines of pylons, over stiles and along deep-set drovers' paths.  The Roman road marked on the map appeared to run under a field.  Most of the trees are still bare but the oilseed rape is beginning its display and the hedgerows are coming to life.  Fairly early on a sunny Saturday morning, everything was quiet except for chattering pheasants, shouts from riding practice, the distant rushing of trains and the trilling and mewing of what might have been a buzzard.  A red kite flew up right in front of us; a snake hissed and slid gracefully into the grass; sheep's wool fluttered from where it had snagged on a fence.

My screenprint of a walk near Silchester. 

I put this print together yesterday.  I almost threw it together and I'm glad of the urgency in the drawing and the registering.

Here is Adam's lifestyle photo of tea from a thermos outside the Calleva Arms ("4 Michelin Tyres!") in Silchester village.  We went in and had their stilton chips.

Tea in the sun at Silchester.