I learn more from teaching than my students do; there’s nothing to focus the mind quite like having to explain something clearly, to show how to do it and analyse why it’s going wrong for someone else. Drawing, I tell them, is just thinking with a pencil. Don’t blame your hand for your mistakes, blame  your brain.

I enjoy teaching Jane who comes to my studio for a lesson on a Friday morning.  Jane, having spent most of her life not drawing, now has 70 years’ worth of artistic urges to catch up on and she is has a very enquiring mind. This is good for me, as I need to find answers to her questions, so it keeps me on my toes.

Last week we wrestled with perspective. Not in a mathematical way, but by waving coffee mugs around (it’s ok, we’d drunk the contents). Jane wanted to know how to get the perspective right on a cylindrical object, where the round part shows as an ellipse. Well, it all depends on your point of view – literally. If the top of the mug is exactly on your eye level, it will appear as a straight line.  Honestly, it will.  Try it. If you move the mug to just below eye level, you get a small ellipse. The lower you go, the bigger the ellipse until you’re looking down on the mug and roundness is restored.

All very logical, but the problem begins when you try to draw the ellipse. ‘No, no!’ your brain says. ‘The top of a mug is a round thing!  It’s as round as a round thing that’s round!’.  Your knowledge of the shape of a mug interferes with what your eyes are telling you and the result is an uneasy compromise that neither brain nor eyes are happy with.  ’It’s all wrong’, said Jane, of her attempted drawing, ‘but I don’t know why!’   What usually goes wrong is making the ellipse too big, because your brain won’t believe that something so round could possibly appear so narrow. Drop the mug just slightly below eye level and look, really look at the ellipse. How do you know if you’ve got it right? Trust your eyes and measure. See how many times the widest part of the ellipse goes into the body of the cylinder

That’s enough theory – if you’re not interested in drawing you are probably losing the will to live by now. But the main lesson of the lesson was that if you move an object in relation to your viewpoint, it becomes a different object.  What the object usually looks like is irrelevant; ask yourself – what does it look like now?  The next time you are baffled by perspective, wave a coffee mug around, or a wine glass.  Drink the wine first, of course, that’ll help.  It will also start you wondering how this lesson on viewpoint applies to life, when people cannot understand another person’s point of view unless they have the imagination (ie. mental imagery) to picture how a situation looks from another perspective.

Most of the time you don’t have to tie yourself in knots worrying about perspective.  Just draw.   Draw first, measure later and after a while, with subjects you’re familiar with, you won’t have to measure at all.  Sometimes you can decide to ignore perspective completely in the interests of design (that’s my excuse – what’s yours?) .  This week I’ve been working on a set of notebook designs as part of our list of new designs to make this year for shops and shows.  Here’s one – but do me a favour and don’t check the perspective!

Starting a project in the morning and finishing it in the afternoon doesn’t happen often; life is usually much messier than that, especially when working on a book.  But it’s a new year with a new list of projects, one of which is a mouse mat design.  I did a similar design last year with that in mind but shelved it and then used that image elsewhere.  So starting again seemed like an enjoyable way to spend a rainy windy day.  Here it is, stage by stage:

Stage One.  Well, almost.  By the time I remembered to get the camera out I’d drawn the design in pencil, then in pen, and started  laying on colour.

Stage Two.  I don’t have a colour scheme in mind, but work it out one piece at a time.  The way to grow a painting is to pause between each stage and let the painting ‘tell’ you what it needs next, rather than rushing in and risk messing up.

Stage Three.  This is the easy bit – more colouring in!  I’ve more or less decided what colour scheme it needs.  The compass points start to come to life once I lay a darker colour on one side of each point.

Stage Four.  Ah, now it’s getting messy.  This is the stage I usually spoil it, by rushing in without thinking.   The sails and bird in the centre section are still covered in masking fluid.  It always takes time getting the spacing right on the border quote.  Lots of pencil lines to rub out!

Stage Five.  Finished – more or less!  I’ll leave it to dry and take a fresh view in the morning.  The next stage is to get quotes for round mousemats, agonise about how many to get done (write a large cheque for a big print run and get the unit price down… or not), then get the image scanned and hope to sell lots online and at the dinghy show.

The plus side of having no deadlines at the moment is the time to develop new ideas.  The minus side?  Turning images into saleable items involves spending rather than earning!  At least to start with.  Have I earned that glass of wine yet, I wonder…..

You have probably heard this analogy already, but I came across it again recently and it’s a good reminder for when life seems to get in the way of life.

Take a large glass jar and fill it full of pebbles.  Is it full?  Yes of course.  Now take a handful of gravel and put it into the jar, where it trickles down between the stones.  Is the jar full now?  Take some sand and pour that into the jar, filling the spaces between the stones and gravel.  Full yet?  Not quite.  Take some water and pour that into the jar.  Now it’s full. The moral of the story, of course, is to put the stones in first.

The stones are the important things in life – writing, creating, doing something that takes you closer to your goals or values.  The gravel, sand and water are all the small things that need doing to keep life moving, but can easily take over your day.  How many days do we fill the jar with sand and gravel and find that yet again there is no room for the rocks? Or, put it another way, if your days seem like endless jars of sand, never forget that the most creative and inspirational people are not necessarily those who have most free time on their hands.

So when you meet someone at a Christmas party who says “Yes, well, I’d love to write a book/sail round the world/take up painting, but of course I don’t have the time,” you can give them a good slap.  Or a jar of sand.

As Ellen MacArthur (and many others) have said: “Goals are just dreams with deadlines.” I’d better go and collect some pebbles…..

The snow seems to have passed us by here in west Wales so far, but it’s still cold enough to need plenty of extra chocolate and a glass of something festive to keep out the cold.  Have a peaceful Christmas, everyone, and I’ll leave you with a Christmas quacker….

My favourite Blackadder episode is the one where Samuel Johnson tries to get royal patronage for the first English Dictionary.  When told that the book has taken Dr Johnson ten years Prince George replies, “Yes, well, I’m a slow reader myself.”  Those of you familiar with the rest of the episode will understand why in our family we love Baldrick’s definition of the letter C – “Big blue wobbly thing that mermaids live in”.

Enough of that, but books are on my mind.  A Radio 2 DJ (naming no names but she’s young and was on late Saturday afternoon) made me cringe when she was talking about television and said something like, “Oh dear, if there’s nothing on tv I might have to go and read a book!”   I know it’s only banter, but it’s sad to think that reading is perceived as the last resort in the pecking order of how to spend time.  Given the danger facing libraries due to public spending cuts, I think we should make more fuss about how special books are.

Rather than witter on and preach to the converted, I’ve been on the hunt for ten good quotes about books:

“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.” (Mark Twain)

“Books can be dangerous.  The best ones should be labelled ‘This could change your life’. ” (Groucho Marx)

“A house without books is like a room without windows.” (Heinrich Mann)

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” (Richard Steele)

“You do not have to burn books to destroy a culture.  Just get people to stop reading them.” (Ghandi)

“Books – the children of the brain.”  (Jonathan Swift)

“I’m going to chop off the bottom of your trouser leg and take it to the library.  There’s a turn up for the books.” (Tommy Cooper)  Sorry about that one, couldn’t resist it!

“Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.” (Salman Rushdie)

“As long as we have books, we are not alone.”

Finally, here’s my favourite -

“Books are lighthouses erected in the sea of time.” (E P Whipple)

If it’s any consolation, I came across an extract of an article by John Ruskin who, over a century ago, bemoaned the fact that more money was spent on horses than on libraries.  It’s up to all of us, of course, to support our libraries and bookshops by using them.  Unless of course anyone out there has a cunning plan….

I’ll let Michael Rosen have the last word on the importance of books, especially when it comes to developing young minds.  His comments to the Guardian on the closure of libraries is summarised here: http://notesfromtheslushpile.blogspot.com/2010/12/bye-bye-libraries-bye-bye-civilization.html.   You do rather hope that eventually the powers that be realise that nothing improves literacy like…. um…reading!

Normal people decide they want to do for a living.  They then go and find out how to do it, do some training, go for interviews or pitch for work, and then spend their productive years putting it all into practice.  And, ideally, getting paid for it.  It’s entirely logical, but I’ve never quite managed it, having come at all my career choices the wrong way round – by doing first and learning second.  A student studying illustration at art college emailed recently, asking for tips on how to make a career out of illustration.   “Do everything that I didn’t do”, was the only advice I could give, having drifted into an artistic career almost by accident.  I didn’t know I wanted to be an illustrator until I already was one and suddenly noticed that being paid (occasionally) for sitting on a chair doodling and colouring in was quite enjoyable.  Being an author, too, was not something I aspired to before being asked if I could also write the series of books I was initially being commissioned to illustrate.   (Well I wasn’t going to say no, was I!)

The only drawback with stumbling into your career choice through the back door is that you feel like the person who sneaked into the party through the kitchen because they weren’t on the official guest list.  Ah well, blagging has got me this far in life, so it will do me for a bit longer whilst I carry on swotting up on the real skills I need to join the party properly!   I’m a great believer in the power of learning on the job, especially as the more your learn, the more you realise there is to know.

Which is why I’m off to a conference in Winchester in a couple of weeks’ time for Childrens’ Writers and Illustrators.  Because I think I’d quite like to make a career of it, if that’s quite all right with everyone,  and after six books it’s high time, if not well overdue, to find out what writing and illustrating for children is really all about. There’s an opportunity at the conference for illustrators to exhibit their portfolios, which sounds like an excellent idea. Except for one thing – I don’t have a portfolio.  (see what I mean about doing everything backwards?)  Well…. nobody’s ever asked me for one. An illustrator’s portfolio is what you put all your samples in, your commissioned work, your ideas and sketches so that a client can see how brilliant you are. That’s how the business works, apparently.  Hmm, perhaps I should be asking my art student for advice on how to put a portfolio together.  Better late than never?

In the meantime, one of the side effects of having been immersed in drawing and writing about marine conservation for so long is that there are still sea creatures falling off the end of my pencil.  Not that I’m complaining; it’s opened up a whole new world.  Here’s the pendant I commissioned clever Phillipa Lawrence to make for my jewellery range, inspired by the albatross and the Southern Ocean.

A sprinkling of seabirds and sea mammals then jumped onto the design for next year’s year planner…….. (did I mention that it’s now available from the starfishbooks website?  Just in case you might happen to want one)

That’ll do for now. I’ll be giving my pencil another shake next week and hoping some boats fall off it as it’s time to tackle The List, which includes a series of Christmas commissions.  Oops, and I need to plan a Christmas exhibition.  Pass me the pencil sharpener and a glass of wine….

I was at the County Show in the rain last week.  Not through choice; I wandered round the show with the same bemused look on my face that a farmer might have if he stumbled into a boat show.  There were children on ponies, large bulls being led round a field accompanied by men with clipboards, and ladies with high heels drinking pimms in the mud. 

I was there demonstrating watercolours in the Learning Pembrokeshire tent, where the great British (or Welsh) public could find out all the marvellous subjects on offer at adult education classes.  Generally people are interested and delightful when I splash paint around in public but there’s always an exception.  I was painting a scene from my sketchbook, not expecting wonders as the drizzle coming into the tent was stopping the paint from drying.  A chap peered at what I was doing and announced, ‘That’s cheating!’.  Eh?  I looked up at him, waiting for this expert to tell me where I’ve been going wrong all these years.  ‘You’re supposed to make it up out of your head’, he said, waggling a finger at me.  ‘It’s cheating copying from a drawing!’ .  In vain I told him it was my own drawing, and artists are often in the habit of going outdoors and… well, drawing things.  It’s what we do. 

I daren’t let him near my studio; he would probably tear up my tracing paper and use it as kindling to burn the light box.  Remind me never to admit to using reference images from google.  I realised that there was no point arguing and explaining that if you want to draw something and don’t know what it looks like, go and find out.  

As it happens, I have been painting from the imagination recently, as a holiday from the relentless demands of  book illustration.  This was from a bigger piece called ‘Hand, heart, eye’, which, as it happens, are the three things David Hockney says you need to be able to draw.  The picture here is only an extract  – not because I’m trying to be arty but because I only have an A4 scanner.  Usually my big paint brushes only get used for getting the biscuit crumbs off my laptop keyboard, but I took myself off to a day’s painting workshop with the excellent Elizabeth Haines a few weeks ago, a great opportunity to get shaken out of my comfort zone.

Hand, heart and eye – I like that.  It’s the ‘heart’ element that takes a drawing beyond copying.

Artistic people have the knack of making ordinary things beautiful.  Last week I went to a concert in Goodwick, at a church overlooking the bay.  It was an overcast evening, grey light on a grey sea and the breakwater cutting across the centre of the bay.  There was half an hour before the concert started and Elizabeth Haines (www.elizabethhaines.co.uk) was sketching the view.  Through her eyes and hand, the dull expanse of bay came alive in a swirling pencil sketch of subtle tones.  Half an hour later and the same alchemy was happening through the voice of baritone Richard Parry (www.dramaticsongrecital.co.uk) as he acted and sang his way through the cleverly composed musical drama ‘An Act of Piracy’.  Wonderful – he could have sung a shopping list and it would have sounded good.  It’s always a challenge to try and sketch moving figures, especially when they’re singing and acting,  but it’s fun to try – after all, I need the practice!  With apologies to Richard who is much better looking in the flesh that he is in my sketchbook.

Meanwhile, back in the studio:

Some people have bad hair days.  Illustrators have bad pencil days.  Sometimes I forget how to draw, which is rather inconvenient.  I looked at yesterday’s drawings and two, possibly three of them needed doing again.  There’s no excuse; sometimes you just know that pencil, hand and eye haven’t quite made the connection.  When this happens I doggedly finish the drawing, ignoring the voice in my head telling me not to bother as it’s going to end up in the bin.  This was the version I tried to persuade myself would do:

It won’t, of course.  You’ll have spotted that the arms are too long for a start and it just lacks a certain something.  In the bin it went, and I returned to the original reference sketch (drawn from a photo of James modelling for me, somewhat reluctantly).   Second attempt – that’s better.    In case you were wondering, the illustration is for a page about marine scientists conducting research.  Caption is: ‘Right, now the next question…..’

 Ah well, life’s a journey.  On my headstone I want the words “Bother, I was just getting the hang of it!”

If you’re not into watercolours I recommend a click of the mouse now before your eyes glaze over.  For those who find sketching outdoors strangely exciting and challenging, here’s another of my colour mixing rants.  It was the last day of term today for my art classes, and it’s become a tradition to escape the classroom and spend the time sketching in Llawhaden castle grounds.  Sketching outdoors refreshes the parts that copying photos can’t reach, as well as waking up your colour sense.  How do you paint a stone wall?  Is it light or dark?  Warm or cool?  It’s usually all these things, speckled with white patches of lichen just to make the task even more tricky. 

Letting patches of alizarin, cobalt and raw sienna blend on the page gets you the soft mixed shades of old stone.   Other variations of the three primaries could be used to get similar effects.  More blue in the shadows, more sienna in the sunny spots.  Plenty of white patches of paper left exposed for the lichen.  In the studio you can see what you’re doing, tubes are clearly labelled and there’s a nice big white palette (cunningly disguised as a ten pence white china plate from a charity shop) to mix puddles of colour in.  But when you’re sitting on a wobbly stool with the wind blowing and your pocket paintbox on your knee, it’s not so easy, especially when you look at the range of colours in the average ‘beginners’ sketching boxes.  Gill had 24 colours in her box, most of them unused and unusable.  Four shades of insipid pink, 4 blues all very similar but no windsor blue.  Umpteen sludgy browns, all indistuingishable.   Give it to your grandchildren and start again, I said.  You need the same colours in your field palette as you do in the studio, otherwise you might as well mix your colours blindfold.  Get half a dozen artists quality half pans in a paintbox and give yourself a chance.  The more limited the colour choices, the better your chances of consistency and remembering which colour does what.  Sketching outdoors is challenging enough, what with wind, weather, nowhere to put stuff, tourists getting in the way, getting a numb bum sitting on rocks, and insects landing on your sketchbook.  It’s tough out there, folks. 

So if all those pretty paintboxes with their dozens of obscure colours are all hitting the bins tonight, it’s all my fault.  My own paintbox is messy, but it works.  It’s still got more colours in it than I tend to use, but generally it’s easy to plonk the brush in roughly the right place when working at speed. 

Colours most used?  Raw sienna, cobalt blue, windsor blue, ultramarine, alizarin, aureolin, light red, cobalt violet, cadmium yellow.  So that’s two reds, two blues, three yellows and a voilet.  The palette could do with a wash, though, couldn’t it.  Glass of wine first, I think.

Perspective in art is a glorious illusion, something I’ve been using haphazardly for years in my paintings in a ‘hoping for the best’ kind of way.  But the great thing about teaching something is that you have to learn about it first, so over the last few months I’ve been paying more attention.  Perspective in art is defined as ‘the appearance of things relative to one another as determined by their distance from the viewer’.  Everyone knows that, but what surprises people is the extent to which distance shrinks everything.  How many student paintings have you seen with giant sheep in a distant field, or an enormous cottage on a hillside?

I was trying to explain this in the classroom on Wednesday and, as is often the case, practical examples speak loudest.    We were talking about figures in a painting, and how as they recede into the distance, the eye level remains the same but the feet move in relative to the foreground figures (assuming that all the figures are standing on level ground and are the same height, of course).

Sheila stood at the back of the room; Gill at the front.  There was probably about 30’ between them, so Sheila appeared smaller than Gill.  So far, so obvious.  But how much smaller, do you think.  Have a guess.  Their eye levels remained the same as they were similar height, so if you drew a line along Sheila’s feet, where on Gill’s body did they line up?  Would you believe me if I said that Sheila’s feet lined up with Gill’s waist?  She was exactly half her size, and only the width of a room apart.  To be able to draw, you need to remove your perspective goggles, shut your brain up and treat everything you see as if it was two dimensional. 

That’s enough of that.   I did take time away from the drawing board today for a magical walk around Dinas Head.   Kittiwakes hovered on the clifftops;  I recognised them having spent several days last week studying and drawing seabirds for chapter three.   Why does knowing the name of something enhance our appreciation of it?  I’ll have a think about that one, preferably with a glass of Chardonnay in hand.

busman’s holiday!

Several days of thinking ‘must update my blog’ usually pass before I get round to it.  The plan is always to sit down in the evening with a clear head and a glass of wine and get inspired.  This rarely happens.  The glass of wine always happens, but not the clear head, or even the inspiration.  Today I’ve been wrestling with the current page of my book about the oceans; trying to find a fun way to put across the problems of over-fishing and the environmental impact is taxing to say the least.  I did do a sketch of a fish in a tutu – the fairy cod-mother – well, it’s a start. 

I also had a slight diversion from the task in hand which was rather enjoyable, in the form of a phone call from Julia Jones in Essex, skipper and owner of Arthur Ransome’s original ‘Peter Duck’ ketch amongst many other talents.  Would I be interested in producing an image for the cover of her forthcoming novel ‘The Salt Stained Book’?    I do love a commission that’s just up my creek!  First of course I needed to read the book – this was no hardship as it’s a great story, a modern and quite edgy version of ‘Swallows and Amazons’.  I’m still working on the design, but there’s more about Julia and her various doings on www.golden-duck.co.uk.

More distraction from the business of getting Chapter Two done came my way on Friday as I was booked for an afternoon drawing lesson with the U3A group in Neyland.  It’s always great fun teaching at U3A; everyone speaks their mind and is very up front about what they want to learn. Usually my prepared lesson descends into happy chaos and I just go with the flow.  This was no exception and turned into a bit of a rant about the reason for wanting to draw in the first place – as a means of connecting to somewhere special, spending time, taking the trouble to look properly.  Contrary to what the tv would have us believe, not everthing in life is a competition; we would always like to improve the way we do things, but sketching is a personal process not open to criticism.  Do enough of it and it will get better all by itself.  Life is too short to be frozen into inactivity by the fear of not being good enough!

Here’s my own sketch of a sunlit moment on East Trewent Head on Sunday, when I decided that I’d had enough of writing about the sea and trying to draw it when I hadn ‘t actually been to look at it for months…..

The left side of the page hasn’t scanned as well as the right….. use your imagination!

That’ll do for now… there’s half a glass of wine left and I’m listening to ‘Pentangle’ on cd while the family are involved in something noisy and American on tv in the other room.