First Attempt At Art Using Oil Pastels

Yes I know I've been a bit (a bit???) quiet on the blog this year. But this may go some way as to explain why. For some time I've been producing my pencil sketches a few every year, mainly done whilst on holiday. Last year I tried a couple of water colours over the top of existing sketches. I was fancying having a go at something more spectacular and challenging.

And this is it. An oil pastel painting based on a photograph of Villefranche which lies between Nice and Monaco on the French Mediterranean coast. There was a certain amount of preparatory work for this. I had no easel. I had no pastels... And to make it worthwhile it had to be done on a larger scale than anything I've attempted before. So the bits and pieces of equipment and pastel sticks were bought and a pad of pristine white paper in an A2 size sketch pad. I started work on the 24 January 2017 and finished yesterday morning on 3 March 2017. Not that I've worked eight hours a day every day, though... I've stuck little bits on my FaceBook account as I've been going along and a friend suggested I should collate them into an article. So this is it...

24 January 2017. The easel and paper is set up in the conservatory which will give me enough light to work with. I had been wanting to draw a colour sketch of Villefranche for some time so trawling through my photos of various visits over the years I printed one out onto A4 paper and used that as a guide. At this stage there was no real anticipation of producing anything wonderful and I didn't really think I'd be able to fit a load of detail in using pastels, but drew my usual style of pencil sketch anyway, but without any shading or detail such as foliage.

29 January 2017. This being the equivalent of four A4 sheets, there was no way of scanning it so I had to take photos of each stage. Whilst it was in the pure black and white (or grey of pencil) stage this meant I had to tweak the photo quite a bit to bring out the detail at the expense of the paper going dark and looking dirty! It took five days to get to this stage. A lot of the work got done in five minute bursts whilst I was waiting for the kettle to boil... Even as just a pencil sketch, this was still the largest thing I've ever done and I was starting to realise that I didn't want to spoil it!

3 February 2017. Very little had happened this week in fact, as other things were going on that took my attention. I had decided that I was going to use the pastels even though I might lose detail and to test this out a bit I started with the orange building on the left hand side. I tried it out on a piece of A4 paper first to gauge my technique and adjust if necessary. I bought a set of blending sticks which looked a bit like paintbrushes, but with rubber (like pencil erasers) instead of bristles at the end. I was also trying out techniques for the sky area. The first go was a real mess and I bought a cheap book on painting with pastels and tried out on another sheet of paper the techniques they described.

4 February 2017. After a couple of goes on an A4 sheet - one good, one bad - I thought "What the heck!" and went for it. I also tried out an area of distant hillside and a tiny building in the distance.

5 February 2017. I spent the morning adding in defining details to the upper storeys of the orange building and then tackled mountainside. The latter also has a few small buildings here and there. That was it for the day as we'd been invited out to celebrate a 60th birthday. Next steps will be to complete the background and do the cliffs towards the right-hand side. That was going to be another suck-it-and-see test on a fresh piece of paper before committing to the actual painting. I found that small items such as roofs and windows on the background buildings were best done with a tiny smudge of colour and then using one of the blending tools. For thin black lines I chose a blending tool shaped like a paintbrush and applied minute bits of paint by rubbing the blender on the top of the stick of pastel. I got enough pigment to do a millimetre at a time, two at the most. The hillside was done using brown and two shades of green and drawing intersecting wavy lines before blending the colours with my finger. Over on the left hand side a dark red was also added to the mix.

9 February 2017. A close up of the detail in the top left corner. Yet a third shade of green was used quite thickly to suggest trees and foliage. A bit tentatively at first with a couple of lines to suggest footpaths or roads along the mountainside, but then the yellow building got done and the cypress trees at the side of it and they were a sort of happy stumbling on something that made me use that shade quite a lot afterwards for trees and foliage!

11 February 2017. My FaceBook update went: I did quite a bit yesterday and have added to it today, but now getting ready to go hospital visiting and as it's half-term next week and we will have Grace a few days it might have to go upstairs out of the way! More hillside done, more trees and foliage added. A few more buildings done - I learned the hard way you can't mix colours easily. I'm sure you'll be able to spot where I found this out... Lower storeys of the orange building started and the car which Miss Franny said had to be blue. Suspicious now... I've never had that blue a car...

13 February 2017. I spent the previous day on the left hand side, working towards the lower part of the painting. The sea was going to be left until the very end. For one thing it was going to be complicated and needed a lot of layering of colours which I wasn't too sure of as yet. And for another, I suspected it may have to be done as one complete portion to avoid any obvious vertical breaks that might occur if I attempted t do it bit by bit. And for a third and final thing - proving that you can start two consecutive sentences with the word "and" - I always work top left to bottom right so that my hand doesn't smudge bits I've already done. I wasn't yet ready to make myself a long dowel with a small bean bag on the end to act as a hand rest whilst painting over bits already done.

Today I took a very deep breath and headed for the cliffs. One of those "this could ruin it" moments. I used grey and a dark ochre and smeared them together vertically, using the ochre to suggest soil seeping from ledges. I figured they were too far in the distance to start drawing cracks in the rockface so instead used small amounts of black to suggest the shadows caused by clefts and breaks in strata. Adding foliage along the ledges helped the illusion. I was not particularly keen on the far-too-pink building and friends agreed, with one suggesting it stood out like "a dog's..." well, never mind... I will see if I can tone it down any! Half Term starts and I move the easel upstairs for a week where it won't get knocked over accidentally.

21 February 2017. It's back downstairs and being worked. I have to hold my hand up and admit I never expected to manage this amount of detail. The sea still awaits to trip me up though. And the windows and shutters are getting smaller all the time now... I put a darker red pigment over the pink and managed to tone it down a bit.

25 February 2017. By now I was spending more time on it each day as it was starting to get quite exciting! Each time it's noticeable that the white untouched area is shrinking. A couple more foreground buildings to the right, another swathe of hillside and the large building - university, school or just apartments? - done. At the bottom, the sea wall extended and I swapped some concrete for a more picturesque Lake District style wooden jetty. Well they should have done it proper in the first place... The inflatable boat has been done and I gave a huge sigh of relief afterwards I can tell you! It will probably need a bit of tidying after the sea goes round it. And that's another serious psyching-up moment to come!

28 February 2017. The previous three days saw me just about reach a landmark. The next mark will be a seamark! The last few hotels have been done, the remaining buildings on the hillside and what looks like the old town walls at the right hand side (in the real Villefranche they support the railway!) had me trying a new technique for blending colours. I found it very hard to get a suggestion that it was made from large blocks of stone... Now the sea beckons and I need to experiment on fresh paper to get a technique for mixing horizontal splashes of colour for the sea with the verticals of the reflected colours of buildings etc. I commented on FaceBook "The next time you see it, I will either have finished or ripped it up and you will see it in the bin..." I'm pleased to say a number of people begged me not to rip it up!

3 March 2017. Sorry about the copyright notice, but despite the copyright notice already on this blog to the left it is absolutely amazing how many times my photos from this blog turn up without people having the courtesy to mention where they came from. I allow use for non-profit purposes but ask that I am credited. Most people now assume copyright doesn't matter, I've even had someone suggest I was deliberately spoiling his book by refusing to allow him to simply copy the tiny photo on here for a book without any consideration and he dismissed my suggestion that I would need to provide a large scan and then clean it up because old negatives and slides will be dirty. Duh... The Internet works at 72 dots per inch. Books work at least at 600 dots per inch. If you just lift an image for a book off here you could hope to get a good quality image if it was printed no more than half an inch wide. In the end after I refused, he protested that he was going to offer me a discount off his book (it was going to sell priced around £40!!!) Anyway, please bear in mind that I spent the 1980s and 90s freelancing to magazines. My photos were taken when it cost money to take photos and they were taken with the intention of selling them. So sorry about the copyright notice over the pic and the slight rant...

I had been seriously driving myself nuts about starting the sea area. I did a Google search for pastel paintings water reflections video and watched a few to see how people had done them. There are some really good videos about to help artists. So on the 2nd of March at tea time I started drawing horizontal lines of colour onto the sea area. The colours were all of those that would appear reflected from the relevant area above the waterline and positioned where I thought the top of the reflection would start. I ended up with a mess of horizontal lines of colour, lots of white space and my heart in my mouth.

Then where I had room, I used a finger and smeared downwards to the bottom of the paper. An artist friend - I'm going to name her, Christine (Katie) Astbury - gave me loads of help through private messages over FaceBook all the way through this artwork and never protested or dodged any of the naive and sometimes complex questions I fired at her, thank you xxx

Where I didn't have room to use my finger to smear the colour such as in the angles of sea wall and jetty, Katie suggested using cotton buds and that worked a treat. So now I had some quite vivid stripes of colour which looked rather startling. I had to tone them down and then make it appear as though they were reflections on water. I toned them down by scraping vertically downwards with a palette knife which took off quite a bit of pigment, smoothed out any lumps and gave me a fresh working surface to work on the water - as it were. This was achieved using three shades of grey, a silver-blue, a mid and a dark grey to create both short horizontal lines and random wavy lines but only straying from the horizontal a little. The dark grey was used to darken areas of deeper water away from the sea wall. Some white was added to suggest spray or eddies of water around the boats and the sea wall.

I started this as an experiment and never expected to end up with something like this. I'm every bit as flabbergasted as anyone else has professed to be. But quite pleased... My son-in-law has brought me a couple of sets of oil paints and brushes. Miss Franny is looking at the conservatory floor and looking pensive...

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World War One Era Autograph Book

Yesterday we had a motor up to Hornby, north Lancashire to a book fair that was being held in the Hornby Institute. A lovely place Hornby, I'm going to have to go back in summer with the camera I think! Small village, old buildings, tea rooms, and a bridge over the River Lune at the side of which is a small weir.

Anyway I didn't buy any books but we enjoyed a good rummage round. I didn't come away empty handed though...

This autograph book was lying on one of the stalls and I had a quick flick through it, noting that the vast majority of pages remained untroubled by ink. But of the ones that had been used there was a mix of signatures, old photographs pasted in or shoved between pages, many of them fragments of a group, some poetry, humour and pencil sketches.

This charming little cartoon was on the first page. Signed J.H. it is entitled Mischief. Whether that's the cat's name or just a description of what it's up to I'm not sure!

A group photo gummed onto a page. There's no names or date I'm afraid but leafing through the book shows that dated entries fall between 1915 and 1919. This book was carried through the First World War. Possibly into war, for as we shall see in articles to come, some have a distinctly military flavour.

The facing page has a small photograph and the signature of ... well the bits I can make out... Percy M Knowles(?) Perhaps Lieutenant Colonel(?) or is the second line Pvt CC (or CE)?

A closer and edited version of the photograph of a party enjoying a walk in the woods.

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Jukebox Show, 26 April 1998

Currently I've been going through lots of enprint wallets, finding negatives from the 1990s that have either never been scanned before, or sometimes where the prints were scanned before I had a scanner that would do negatives. The enprint wallets themselves will probably make a blog post sooner or later as there are a few different sorts! For now though, this post covers a trip down to Copthorne near Gatwick airport for the Copthorne Jukebox and Collectables Show on 26 April 1998.

Whilst you have a look at the jukes I'll just fill you in on the previous day... We decided to travel down part of the way and stay overnight at a Travel Inn or something. However there was nowhere to be found and we realised too late that it was the London Marathon on the Sunday so tens of thousands of people had descended on London and the surrounding area looking for accommodation. In fact we ended up having to drive all the way down to the south coast and managed to find a guest house in Bognor Regis at 10:00pm that hadn't shut its doors for the night.

Jukeboxes started out in shops and bars in the 1930s and 40s, when records had to be played at 78 revolutions per minute (RPM) and the needles were usually made of steel and fitted into playing heads that were measured in pounds weight rather than fractions of a gram... The records were 10 inches in diameter and the early jukeboxes generally had wooden cabinets. These were the Golden Age jukeboxes.

The Silver Age jukeboxes were those from the late 1950s through to the mid 1960s which played 7 inch 45 rpm vinyl records and had a visible mechanism so that you could watch the records being selected and played. At some point after that some boring moron said "I've got a good idea! Why don't we take away all the windows and just sell a box with a record player inside?"

A chap called Bob Thompson at the time ran a business selling old pinball machines and had a working display of over 20 machines all on free play. The machine shown is Gottlieb's 1969 College Queens, a four-player version of the company's 2-player Airport which had been released a month before College Queens. This was an electro-mechanical game (i.e. before computer chips appeared in games) and had chime bars for sound - a bit like the Avon Calling doorbell.

The Wurlitzer 1015 towards the right is the ultimate collectable jukebox with bubbles running up glass tubes and coloured plastics rotating behind the clear plastic behind the tubes so that they change colour repeatedly. They came out in the 78 rpm record era in 1945 and remained in production through 45 rpm and into the CD era. Reproduction machines can still be bought brand new.

Other collectables were on sale too. Various stands had old telephones and neon signs for sale.

A Silver Age Wurlitzer jukebox.

The jukeboxes holding 78s have a special fascination for me. The price of these though is well out of reach as working examples started at around 4,500 pounds in 1998! Note that I said "working" and not "immaculate"...

This 1950s record player was on the stall run by the chap from whom I bought a number of record players at another jukebox event - Jukebox Madness - one year. Most jukebox events have Dansette and other vintage record players for sale. In 1998 they were quite affordable, but not long after people cottoned onto the fact that they were becoming collectable and the price went up accordingly.

Ami went through a number of partnerships with BAL-AMI and Rowe-Ami being names that can be found on Silver Age and later machines. I have a Rowe-Ami RI-2 jukebox that is currently in need of a little TLC as it tries to select from the space between two records instead of plucking one out of the carousel... It's these little details that can make a big difference...

In the 1950s it became possible to produce curved glass and both car windscreens and jukeboxes were quick to take advantage of this. Here the hinged glass of the Ami jukebox has been swung up to allow access to the turntable.

The standard Wurlitzer jukebox 78 rpm mechanism stored the 78s horizontally. The holder swung out and the turntable rose, lifting the record out of the holder up to the play arm that was up at the top of the cabinet. This meant that only one side of each record could be played. Somewhere is a load of 78s that are knackered but with immaculate B sides...

Diner-style furniture and an Ami Continental jukebox, as seen in the film Ghost on the right. Next to the Wurlitzer 1015, this is the second most collectable jukebox.

The Wurlitzer 45 rpm mechanism was a carousel that stored the records which were played against a vertically spinning small hub turntable. The playing arm has a stylus fitted on both front and back to allow both sides of the record to be selected. On the small blue arm near the playing head is a small brush which brushes the stylus free of any dust or debris between each play.

I'm not sure what this jukebox is - possible a Rock-Ola which was another of the "Big Four" of Wurlitzer, Ami, Seeburg and Rock-Ola.

Another late Silver Age Wurlitzer from the 1960s.

And finally a couple of classic cars which were parked outside the main entrance. This is the first Ford Capri, a 1964 coupe model based on the company's Consul Classic, which was the first British car with double headlamps at the front.

Anyone turning up in an American vehicle could get in free. A nifty way of ensuring that some would turn up for people to look at!

Coin Slot Machines Index

Creeping Bentgrass, Golden Wedding Party in Garstang

Last night found us driving out to Garstang to play for a Golden Wedding party for two lovely people who have booked the band in the past, several years ago and remembered us from then.

The format of the party roughly followed the format of the wedding, 50 years ago, with speeches by the Best Man and Groom. There was an Irish Raffle. We hadn't heard of this before but basically prizes chosen had to remain on your table in front of you and more tickets were drawn than there were prizes. Once the stock of prizes ran out, winners were allowed to pinch a prize from someone else, which made for a lot of fun and a much-travelled bottle of champagne! The tin of beans didn't move about anywhere near as much...!

Barry and Marlene, it was a pleasure to play for you again, I just hope we have that sort of energy when another ten years goes by to Miss Franny and my own 50th Anniversary! Heck... I wish I had that much now!

And just to bring past gigs up to date, here's a couple I missed over the Christmas and New Year period...

The 29th December saw us out at Darwen, playing at the house party of some long-standing friends. Very informal and lots of fun. We were pipped at the post this year and missed out on a hat-trick of winning Brian's quiz...

New Year's Eve saw us playing at the Thurlby Club in Preston, where we had played earlier in the year. A game of Bingo was held to raise funds for necessary repairs to the roof. David won and donated the prize back with a wish that they did the bit over the stage first...! A really good night with a load of laughs!

Christmas Greetings 2016

On Christmas Day, let me extend warmest Christmas wishes for a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year 2017 to all my readers. Let me share a memory of my own childhood Christmasses.

In those less technically dominated years in the second half of the 1950s, our Christmas tree would be bought from the greengrocer and carried or dragged home depending on size, always on the very first day of December. Dad would wrap a string of lights around the tree. Not the tiny insignificant things we have today, but bulbs an inch or so long and all different shapes. Some were like Chinese lanterns, others like a moulded Santa's face. Some were like parrots.

But one year he brought home a set of lights with a large plastic base and a glass tube with coloured liquid sticking out. Once the bulb was lit and it had warmed up the liquid, it began to send bubbles up the glass tube!

Whenever Dad bought a set of lights he would always buy a few extra bulb holders and would join them into the string of lights. With all the lights wired in series, if any bulb went out so did all the others and it was a long job sometimes to find out which bulb had blown. Adding more bulbs added to the electrical resistance and stepped down the voltage. The bulbs shone that little bit less brightly. But in the days when people strung paper garlands across the ceiling it made it less likely that a bulb would cause a fire.

Our Christmas trees had movement from the bubbles, long before domestic Christmas lights would flash on and off and change colour. The lights lasted for years and spare bulbs were available right through the 1950s and 60s until the smaller fairy lights came out and the manufacturers thought of changing the fittings slightly every year, forcing people to buy a new set when they ran out of bulbs.

We would visit one set of grandparents on Christmas Day and the other set on Boxing Day. These were our Christmas Parties and there would be more presents for everyone and we would at some point all sit or stand and sing a few Christmas carols, around the sit-up piano in the front room. There would always be a moment where someone would sigh and say "Eeh, our [insert name of a family member who had died during the year] was here last year..." and the grown-ups would all look up and lift their glass of sherry or port. For a while as a child I thought Grandma kept all the dead people upstairs in her bedroom and I used to be terrified of going upstairs to the loo in case they came out wanting a Christmas hug...

Have a wonderful Christmas.

A Morning in York

Following our brilliant night listening to André Rieu in Leeds on Friday, we were extremely sorry to hear that a member of the orchestra had suffered a heart attack. As a result, the rest of the UK dates have been postponed. The musician has not been named but is a male and has been with the orchestra over 20 years, as have many of this close-knit orchestra. As a musician myself I know that you form very close bonds with people with whom you make music and I can understand their decision to postpone. I hope he recovers well and is able to rejoin the orchestra.

* * * * * * *

On Saturday morning we knew nothing of this. We got up lazily and had breakfast then set off eastwards towards York.

We parked near the famous Shambles and walked together for an hour before splitting up - we both had secrets to buy for each other. Well, I had something in mind for Miss Franny anyway - her excuse was that she didn't want to feel rushed because she was dragging me round shops I had no interest in... Me! Me who shows ... ah... er... no interest in shopping whatsoever... Well anyway I had a chance to buy Miss Franny's Christmas present and stagger under its weight back to the car to leave it in the boot, hoping she wouldn't notice how the rear end seemed closer to the ground than usual. My arms will shrink back to normal hopefully...

I had a wander around the city centre. There were several shops where I wasn't averse to having a look in the window and the atmosphere in the city on this last Saturday morning before Christmas Eve was quite wonderful. There were several groups of carollers singing and musicians here and there. A small European Market had been set up and the air was full of smells of pastries and the tang of spice from mulled wine.

I had a mooch along narrow side streets and passed the Minster and under one of the gates of the city which are known as Bars. I came to Kings Manor, now part of the University of York, but once a residence of kings on their travels around the kingdom. King Henry VIII stayed here during his ill-fated progress which would be the undoing of his fifth queen. Catherine Howard. Whatever the facts it must be borne in mind they married (she would have no choice in it) when she was 16 or 17 and the king was 49, huge and with a stinky leg ulcer from a jousting injury. Not a match made in Heaven...

I walked past the Theatre Royal of 1744. It is built on the site of a medieval hospital and a well, thought to be Roman, lies under its stage! The rough brickwork of the building attached to it caught my eye along with an intriguing feature...

This was a small patch of brickwork that was obviously far more modern. I wondered what the reason for this apparent repair was (and still do - no amount of searching seems to have turned anything up). If anyone knows, please leave a comment!