I’ve never had much to do with sheep.  My life so far has failed to equip me to deal with the problem of how to drive a car down a farm track through a field with a gate at each end to keep a flock of sheep where they’re meant to be.  Opening the first gate, driving the car through then shutting it was easy enough, but by the time I got to the second gate the sheep had trotted over for a look.  Leaving the car door open I flapped a hand at the woolly mass and said ‘shoo’ before opening the gate and diving back to the car. One sheep was trying to climb into the driver’s seat and the others were ambling with intent towards the open gate.  I chased the sheep out of the car and revved up loudly, scattering the flock, before accelerating through the gate, swinging it shut just in time.

It’s a skill that gets better with practice. By the time I’d learned how to say ‘shoo’ more robustly to send the flock packing to the other side of the field before attempting the final gate, they’d been moved to a different field and I could bounce my Fiat punto down the muddy track with only one gate to open before finding the tarmac.

There is a connection between the sheep and my disgraceful lapse of blog posts.  The boat show was three months ago, but life got in the way since then and I decided that peace and quiet in a remote cottage would be a good place to recover from a series of personal and health setbacks. Internet access here is not part of the fabric of life but an occasional luxury – and surprisingly, the sky doesn’t fall in if you don’t check your emails every five minutes. When I first arrived, I put on wellies, picked up laptop and dongle and headed into the nearest field where I was told there was sometimes a signal. The sheep came over to find out what was going on as I waved the laptop around to no avail.

I still go into the fields every day, but only to get some fresh air accompanied by the farm’s sheepdog, who finds retrieving balls far more to her taste than herding sheep. I wish I could say that not being distracted by the internet has led to a surge of creative inspiration, but it’s one of those times when I feel about as creative as a brick. I think everyone has their own journey through the wilderness at some stage in life, and you just have to believe that you won’t be lost for ever and it will all come trickling back in its own good time.

In the meantime, I’m quietly getting on with ‘Go Windsurfing’, working my way slowly through my scribbled notes and trying to get the hang of drawing people in wetsuits. Life would be dull if it always went to plan, and when things go wrong you just have to keep faith in yourself.

I’m just grateful not to be a sheep.

Everything wobbles when you stand on a windsurfer for the first time.  The board wobbles, the sail wobbles, the water wobbles and so I wobbled. Balancing on a plastic plank is a novel sensation to someone more used to being on the water in hefty wooden boats.  By the third lesson I was getting the hang of it, helped by small sails, light winds and a team of tanned, blond and unfailingly cheerful young instructors.  It’s all about balance and getting the body position right; on a windsurfer you are part of the machine.

I was doing all this watery wobbling on the island of Lesvos in Greece, courtesy of Nielson’s holidays. My mission – to learn enough about windsurfing and the methods of teaching it to spend the next nine months or so writing and illustrating the beginner’s guide for youngsters.

Not being a sporty type, I was a bit worried about whether I’d be able to keep up.  The resort offers a packed programme of activities every day including mountain biking, jogging, waterskiing, wakeboarding, yoga, keep fit, swimming, kayaking, sailing, windsurfing and volleyball.  If that makes you exhausted just thinking about it, there’s always the unofficial programme which includes sitting by the pool, watching Wimbledon in the hotel foyer, twiddling with laptops and iphones in the wifi zone, choosing cocktails, eating vast quantities of delicious food every mealtime and sitting on the veranda with a book and a glass of wine.  I had to stay fairly focussed, with windsurfing in the morning, working on notes and sketches in the afternoon, rounding off the day with a swim in the sea or pottering around in dinghy or kayak.

Instructor Rupert showing us all how to gybe; nifty footwork and flicking the sail around the front of the board is the key. Doing it on moving water? Now, that’s another story!

Oops.  One down, all down.  No, of course there aren’t any photos of me making a fool of myself – for this shot I was safely in a kayak, camera at the ready, trying and failing to photograph people at the exact moment of falling in.  There are times when research is very enjoyable!

I’ll just have to imagine what someone looks like at the moment of falling in. Something like this I guess.

Now the fun part is over and the hard work begins.  I have to work the alchemy that every writer and illustrator is familiar with – challenging the empty page with rough scribbles, both verbal and visual, then working them up into a polished series of pages that not only informs but delights the reader.

Here’s the raw material.  Very raw.  Well, I’ve never drawn windsurfers before and they kept moving around.

After each lesson, I spent time analysing what we’d been taught and breaking it down into simple stages.  You see, all good drawings start as bad ones!  And I’m not afraid to admit to starting with stick figures when I need to.

How-to books can be very dry and dull.  The joy of writing for children is that I have licence to add jokes, and explain everything in a fun, colloquial way. And if adults find it useful too, it just goes to show that we’re all children at heart!

My studio table is a map of what’s going on in my head.  Sometimes it’s tidy; mostly it isn’t.  At the moment it’s full of half finished projects. There’s jewellery making  stuff still laid out (lots of ideas, must get down to it when I get a free day).  There’s a possible design for a screen printed cushion cover, or possibly two if cashflow allows.  There’s a half finished painting on the drawing board, a half edited story by the computer.  Various bits of admin, a poster design for a sailing event, sketches and general ’stuff’.

There are also a couple of activity sheets I’ve done for the Wildlife Trust website.  The Trust have been good enough to recommend my ‘Go Green’ book and wanted to add to their range of children’s downloads to tie in with the marine conservation theme.  If there’s nothing on tv and you secretly still like colouring in, you can download them on http://wildlifewatch.org.uk/Wordsearches.  There’s nothing wrong with colouring in – I do it for a living!

The trouble with having lots of ideas on the go is that starting things is much easier than finishing them.  On the drawing board is a half finished painting of some blocks and deadeyes spotted at a recent visit to SS Great Britain – well worth a visit, if ever you’re in Bristol.  I loved the shapes, the colours and the spaces inbetween…..

I’ll try and remember to photo this when it’s finished.    Shouldn’t be painting watercolours really, as it’s hard to sell paintings at the moment, but sometimes I just really fancy it.  After a few weeks of drawing to commission, it’s nice just to splash a bit of paint around for fun.

At the laptop end of the table I’m playing with some writing projects, including my ongoing research of sea stories, currently the self imposed marooning of Alexander Selkirk.  I was reminded recently of the ‘three by three’ rule to summarise a story – I’ve come across it several times and it’s a good way to check if a story has a beginning, a middle and an end.  My challenge is to turn my collection  into proper ’stories’rather than simply narrative accounts of something that happened.   All you writers out there will have the three by three rule hot wired into your brains, but for the rest of you, take a story and reduce it to three statements of three words each.  It works with fiction (though you can try War & Peace if you’re feeling brave!) so I wanted to see if it works on my non-fiction….

Yes it does.  The story of Selkirk,  the ‘real’ Robinson Crusoe’ can be reduced to:

1.  Selkirk stays behind.

2.  Selkirk regrets it.

3. Selkirk gets rescued.

I like this – it works!   Let’s try it on Christopher Columbus:

1.  Columbus looks for China

2. Sailors nearly mutiny

3. Columbus finds Cuba

You get the drift.   Time to finish this post…… and I do need to practise finishing things.  Starting them is so much more fun.  If you don’t believe me, try it on a glass of wine!

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….

It’s hard not to take weather personally.  I know it’s pure coincidence that June’s hot spell lasted long enough to get ‘Torhilda’ painted, varnished and slipped gently back into the wet stuff at Llanion boatyard.  She had just settled prettily on her new mooring when the first low pressure system of the summer revved up over the Atlantic and swooped, wet and windy, accompanied by all its gale-infested little friends.  Trip to North Cornwall – cancelled.  Charts and tide tables put to one side.  Perhaps August will be brighter, we say, ever hopeful.   Why do we have a hobby that takes all our available cash and time and that we hardly ever get to do?  That’s a rhetorical question, as any boat owner will tell you. 

Living in a house looking at the forecast on the internet makes you cautious, but if your boat is also your home, you take the weather in your stride.  In the days when I lived on board my 24′ gaff cutter, it was a lot easier to get on with in and not spend too much time fretting over isobars.  I recall a windy trip up channel in ‘Kitty’ one year, coming back from the festival of sail in Brest and setting off from Weymouth, more or less happily, with a force 9 blowing.  Not as mad as it sounds, as the wind was behind us, it was a short coastal hop and the gale was due to ease by the time we got into the shelter of the Solent.    Dealing with rough weather when you’ve already got your sealegs is much easier than sitting indoors with the wind rattling the windows and deciding that you can’t possibly sail today because the ironing needs doing. 

Which is why I’m always fascinated and impressed by that rare breed of sailors who deliberately put themselves in the worst conditions that the oceans can throw at them – offshore racing, especially singlehanded, is as tough as sailing gets and a stark contrast to the gin and tonic pottering about that most of us do.  Sailors like Mike Golding find the extreme conditions of the southern ocean as beautiful and compelling as they are challenging.  My current book (the one everyone wishes I’d get on and finish so I stop going on about it) features a double page spread of Mike’s views on the southern ocean, a humbling and valuable perspective on one of the last true wild places on earth.  I wanted to do a picture of ‘Ecover’, Mike’s Open 60, romping over the waves, albatross in attendance.  It took a few attempts but I got there in the end. 

Back to my world of reading, drawing, researching, writing, singing and dreaming about the sea in all its forms.  Perhaps I should throw buckets of cold water over my head for more authenticity… or go sailing more often, perhaps.   I’ll work on 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.

My studio table and floor is disappearing under pieces of paper and chapter five is well under way.  Writing and illustrating a book has its own pace and momentum; you have to keep a part of your brain connected to it or it’s hard to pick up the threads again.  On the other hand, twelve hours at the drawing board (including umpteen cups of tea, hanging out washing, raids on the kitchen and periodic dips into facebook of course) are about as much as I can manage.  As well as being immersed in all things to do with rivers, lakes and reservoirs, the first few chapters are now coming back from the typesetters for editing.  I have an ambiguous view of seeing the proofs, my haphazard layouts transformed into professional looking pages.  Just don’t ask me if it’s any good or not, I haven’t a clue!  Encouraging phrases from publisher and consulting editor ping into my inbox from time to time, so I’m assuming I’m on the right lines. 

Here’s my take on how salmon are able to find their way home from the Atlantic to their home river:  Caption is ‘Right, what’s our postcode?’

Meanwhile, my Wednesday art class has a few weeks to go until the end of term so we’re spending time drawing outdoors for the last few lessons.  This week a good time was had by all in Sandy Haven.  Everyone says they find sketching from life daunting, but the results were so much fresher than labouring to copy a photo, in spite of challenges like the strong breeze and bright sunlight.  Mike had an unusual obstacle to overcome whilst sitting sketching a bank of wild daisies.  A family of six came and sat between him and his scene, laid out a rug and had a picnic, obscuring his view without appearing to notice he was there.  That’s a marvel in itself; Mike is a tall and imposing presence and had never experienced total invisibility before.  Challenges aside, a good time was had by all -  call me single minded but you can never do enough drawing.   Sketching, after all, is just thinking with a pencil.

That’s enough – brain is not firing on all cylinders tonight, must have used up today’s store of wit and creativity in silly salmon cartoons and duck jokes.  Glass of wine, anyone?

‘Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning to dance in the rain’.

Many blogs ago I mentioned our friend Ken Roberts who was setting off on a solo round the world cycle ride.  We’re still following Ken’s progress on www.acrosscontinents.org and his blogs are becoming more perceptive and fascinating all the time.  At the moment, on the brink of entering China, he has been visiting countries that most of us have never heard of or, if we have heard of them, have no idea where they are.   Many of them are torn apart by political corruption or civil unrest; none of them feature in holiday brochures, and most of them end in ’stan.  Through the middle of all of this pedals a lone Englishman, wrestling with visas and bureaucracy, unreadable roadsigns, unkept roads and extreme temperatures.  What it most striking, though, is not the expected obstacles that he faces, but the kindness of strangers.  Wherever he goes people feed him and ask no payment, help him out, offer hospitality.  Ken talks in his blog about the ‘many individual acts of generosity, the extent unimaginable in supposedly more developed nations ‘.  It gives you faith that humanity, one to one, has a connection and warmth that goes beyond nationality or language and belies the world view that the newspapers would have us believe, that the world outside our garden gate is a dodgy place.    Perhaps it confirms the view that life is a mirror to your attitudes; if you expect strangers to be friendly, they will be.  If you expect fear and hostility, that’s what you’ll get. 

Anyway, the blog is worth a look.  It also makes me realise how quickly we have come to take worldwide internet connection for granted; a few years ago we’d have had to make do with the occasional postcard.  It will be interesting to see how far the regular updates continue once Ken is in deepest China.

I think I become more interested in other people’s travels when my own adventures are mental rather than physical.  Yes, I’m still totally immersed in my RYA marine conservation book, which for a butterfly brain like mine is a major struggle.  More than halfway through now, just finished the chapter on coasts and beaches, so next up is rivers and lakes.  Apologies to all my facebook friends who have to put up with my regular rants when I get stuck and need to let off steam.  The next month or so will see the bulk of the work done, after which I am looking forward to a few days’ sailing, if the weather lets us and if I can remember how!   I did enjoy researching rockpools, though.  New knowledge makes you look at everything with fresh and more appreciative eyes.

“A painting”, said a visitor to my studio as he pondered which picture to buy, “is a conversation”.  He chose the one, I guess, that spoke to him most eloquently, and I hope the dialogue is still continuing whenever he looks at it.  It’s true that the most effective paintings are those which leave something for the viewer to do, or leave something to the imagination; one brushstroke is worth a thousand – if it’s the right brushstroke.

I don’t mean that detailed paintings are always dull.  I used to paint ridiculously detailed miniatures after all, and I think they evoked a different kind of dialogue, drawing viewers into another world.  But however well a painting engages the viewer, it’s nothing compared to the Victorian view of art.  I went to a NADFAS lecture on Victorian Narrative Painting by Lizzie Darbyshire, a brilliant revelation on how to ‘read’ Victorian art, paintings which were designed in every detail to reflect and reinforce the values of the day.   Art was big business, and viewers expected to be able to read a painting like a book. 

One example, ‘The London Visitors’, by Tissot, shows a well dressed couple standing on the steps of a London landmark.  So far, so dull.  But the critics of the day were shocked.  The lady, it seemed, was not as ladylike as her appearance suggested. Why?  Because her eyes are staring out of the picture at the viewer, rather than cast down demurely and attending to the guide book her husband is browsing.  Ladies, apparently, did not make eye contact with men.  Her reputation is further tarnished by a small detail in the corner of the painting which we didn’t notice until it was pointed out – a cigar, lit, partly smoked and then thrown down on the step.  This, according to the Victorian mind map, meant only one thing; the lady had been flirting with a stranger.  This is a huge mental leap for us, but perfectly logical for the customs of the times, which dictated that a gentleman does not make approaches to a lady with a cigar in his hand.  Search for ‘London Visitors’ on google images if you want to see for yourself.

Enough of the history lesson, but it’s interesting to see how our visual shorthand has changed over a century.  These days we are as familiar with the icons used on computer screens as the Victorians were with their visual moral messages.  My own paintings usually have to tell a story – book illustrations for one, and cartoons for another.  The style couldn’t be more different from the classical style of Tissot, but I think that our pleasure in a good cartoon is because we can read it like a comedy sketch.  Here’s one I did for Practical Boat Owner a while ago (I can’t show you the latest one because it’s not out yet!)

I can’t remember the caption for this one… and you’d need to read the Dave Selby article it was attached to, but hopefully you get the drift!  Here’s another, more recent, to go with a hilarious article about crossing an ocean with a parsimonious skipper.  I think the caption for this one was ‘Dave would have plenty of time to regret eating that third weetabix’.

I’m so glad I’m not a Victorian artist.  Apart from the inconvenience of all those corsets and dresses, I don’t think I could do ‘demure and laydlike’, and I would so much prefer to make people laugh, or at least smile, than preach moral messages!

Mill Bay looking southeast out of the haven

I went to Mill Bay last weekend, a pleasant half hour stroll along the coast path from the car park on St Ann’s Head.  It’s the first cove on the left as you sail into Milford Haven.  The path dips down to the cove where a small valley tips a stream onto a rocky foreshore.  You could land a small boat there, but I’d only attempt it in a very flat calm; negotiating the rocks and finding a flat piece of sand to beach would be tricky.  Perhaps there was more sand in Mill Bay in the 15th century.  Perhaps there was a stone pier.  But it’s still an odd choice, as another half an hour’s sail brings you to the glorious sheltered bay of Dale, which is about as perfect as an anchorage and sheltered landing place could be, and would have saved the would-be monarch from an hour’s tramp along the cliffs.  Apparently he sent some of his ships round to Dale, but he preferred to be put ashore at Mill Bay.  I bet he got his feet wet.

Even more sensible than Dale would have been to save another day’s march and take the tide further upriver, to his birthplace at Pembroke perhaps, or to Milford.  Even if the wind was unfavourable, the tide would have carried the fleet upriver very efficiently.  Perhaps he had a girlfriend on St Ann’s Head.  Perhaps he’d had enough of being afloat and was desperate to get ashore.  Perhaps nobody knows, but if you do, please let me know.  It’s always interesting to look at history from a seafarer’s point of view.

St Anne's Head - design for a postcard of Dale (not quite finished!)

If Henry’s ship’s log was still around, I’d love to see it.  And talking of log books (ouch, what a contrived link!) and with a leap of imagination back into the 21st century, my newly designed Log Books for Little Ships are back from the printers – have a look at www.starfishbooks.co.uk for the details.  When I say the books are back from the printers, what I actually mean is that my studio floor has disappeared under several dozen boxes of pages and covers, so there’s just the small business of collating and binding them.   In the meantime I’m stepping over boxes to get to my drawing board.  Ho hum…