Summer is icummen in

Loudly sing cuckoo!

An old English folk song from Wessex (around 1260)

Summer is a-coming in
Loudly sing cuckoo
Groweth seed and bloweth mead
and springs the wood anew
Sing cuckoo!
Ewe bleateth aft-er lamb,
Calf loweth after cow,
Bullock starteth, buck farteth,
Merry sing cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo!
Well singest thou cuckoo,
Nor cease thou never now!
Sing cuckoo now, Sing cuckoo!

You might know it as the song Christopher Lee sings in the 1973 horror film The Wicker Man. It's also the opening track on Richard Thompson's fab album 1000 Years of Popular Music.

School's out here so people are off to foreign parts to freeze or fry depending on the season. We are enjoying a bonus holiday looking after those who are left behind. Out in deepest darkest Sussex (just - the border with Surrey is at the bottom of the garden).

The birds seem convinced, but I'm not. I've seen a few swallows and heard a cuckoo off in the distance. Flaming June in a couple of days but the only flaming has been from the log fire.

Rain, rain, rain all week, and cold too.

Yesterday evening as I was preparing to cook (ooh!) the distant migrant perched in a tree at the edge of the oak wood at the bottom of the garden and really gave it some welly! So, I dashed outside with my recording gear to capture this.

Cuckoo recording on SoundCloud

For the technically curious, I was using an old iPhone 3Gs running Imesart's Audio Memos app and a Blue Mikey stereo microphone. The Mikey is a great mike indoors but it's horribly susceptible to wind noise. Even the gentle breeze that was barely stiring the leaves was giving problems.

I transferred the .WAV file from the iPhone to my MacBook pro to edit it using Felt Tip's Sound Studio. I topped and tailed the handling noise from the beginning and end of the recording, applied a high pass filter with a 500Hz cut off to get rid of the wind rumble and some of the aircraft noise, bumped up the volume by 3db and had a fairly decent recording.

The Pricking Cradle

Whenever I think those words it's always Bill Bailey's deranged evil genius character that says them, grinning maniacally and rolling his eyes - and his Rs - whilst relishing the sheer perversity that such a Kafkaesque apparatus should exist.

I promised I'd tell you how to bind books - just in case you haven't searched YouTube and found out for yourself - so, here's a snippet.

You need a fair amount of kit to bind a book, most of it fairly simple, but there are one or two jigs and contraptions necessary for various processes. One of these is the above mentioned pricking cradle.

There are several ways to make the holes in the spines of the signatures so you can stitch them together into a block. Whoa, hold up there Awa Rich. Them's jargoon words. 'Splain the meaning of them if you please. 

 If you look carefully at the top or bottom end of a book, you'll see that it's made from lots of smaller booklets, called signatures, which are sewn together to form a block. The spine is where the pages are attached to one another. This is much easier to see if you have an old book that's falling apart.

I don't know if this is standard practice as I'm picking this up as I go along, but the signatures I've made have 4 sheets of paper folded in half to make 8 leaves or 16 sides or pages. The folded sheets are placed one inside another to create the signature and holes are poked along the fold - with a pointy thing - so the signatures can be stitched together. I'll show you how to do that later.

The pricking cradle is just a convenient way to hold the pages together when poking the holes in the fold. I used to do this by holding the signature, open in the middle, against a cork sanding block, then pushing a bodkin through the folded paper into the cork block. This worked fine but it's not very accurate and sometime the holes would go awry and would not always line up with other signatures. It still worked, as this isn't precision engineering, but it's useful to have a way to maintain consistency. 

The pricking cradle holding a signature

You can't see it in this photograph but the two boards don't quite meet at the bottom of the V. There's a narrow gap so the point of the bodkin can pierce the paper.

The whole thing was made from MDF and bits of timber I scavenged in the street or bins. I bought the steel and plastic brackets that hold it together from a DIY store, conveniently situated at the end of the street where I live.

I would have liked to do a better job but I left all my woodworking tools up north when I fled to London. I have a saw, a screwdriver, an X-Acto knife and a Dremel (it's not actually a Dremel but a no name thing I bought in 1980 for drilling printed circuit boards, but Dremel has become like Hoover - so you know what I mean if I say Dremel. I don't have to explain You just did Awa Rich) - oh, and a Leatherman. That's my toolkit.

Mary Anning

Today's Google Doodle (in the UK) celebrates the 215th birthday of Mary Anning who discovered the first complete plesiosaur skellington in the cliffs at Lyme Regis in Dorset.

I met her a couple of years ago while on a PlayAwayAwayDay with the Putney School of Art and Design Children's Book Illustration class at the Natural History Museum in London. We sat on a bench in the long corridor - where many of the "curies" she found are displayed on the wall - and spoke of many things, of ichthyosaurs and brassicas and monarchs.

She told me she'd "ben streck boy loytnin twoice!" Perhaps that's how she found herself in the Natural History Museum more than 200 years later. The lightening opened up a dimensional nexus in the timespace continuum and sucked her through. Or perhaps her doppelgänger was spirited there like in the film 'The Prestige" where Nikola Tesla's (David Bowie) lightening machine teleported duplicates of objects and people placed in its path.

More likely she was an actor acosting unwary visitors to elucidate them concerning the nature of the history and the history of the nature.

Here's a not quite finished waterclolour I did at the time. I think the project was to create a book jacket.

3D modelling - the auld way

One of the projects we were given at the Putney School of Art and Design Children's Book Illustration class was to create a storyboard for an exerpt from a book. We could choose from one of a dozen or so. I chose Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, partly because the darkness in it appealed to me but also, writing from the perspective of a character in a well known story is always interesting.

Wide Sargasso Sea is a prequal, with some overlap, to Jane Ayre from the point of view of the, alledgedly, mad Mrs. Rochester. Imprisonned these long years in a room at the top of the house. Watched over by Grace Poole, the nurse.

The exerpt described the room and Mrs. Rochester's thoughts about how she found herself in this predicament.

I'd done a few drawings with pencil and powdered graphite washed with French sepia that seemed to meet with some approval during show and tell, so I did a rough sketch using the same technique. It seemed to capture the atmosphere, especially as Mrs. Rochester describes the house as "being made form cardboard" presumably a reference to the brownness of everything.

The sketch drew a few ooh and aahs, so I started on a 'proper' drawing on some decent hot pressed watercolour paper. Midway through I decided I didn't like the point of view or the arrangement of the subjects. That's when I was stricken with that old paralysis "do I have to start again?" Yup, 'm 'fraid so. Y'should just ger on with it Awa Rich. I know, I know.

Aynho, after a spot of cogitation more like procrastination Awa Rich. Fruitful procogitation if you don't mind. I was twirling a 3D model of the scene around in my mind when I thought "a model, that's what I need!"

I considered using Google Sketchup but abandoned that idea for two reasons. The temptation to fiddle endlessly with stuff on a computer is too enticing and another form of paralysis afflicts me, what my old flatmate Eddy called the twin demons of artists and programmers CIpS and PRetS - the Continual Improvement Syndrome and the Perpetual Retouching Syndrome. Sounds like another variation on Zeno's pair of ducks Awa Rich! 

The other reason was that my previous attempts at using Sketchup models as a reference for drawing resulted in images that appeared more two dimensional that if I'd have drawn them from my imagined images. I'm sure there's a good scientific reason for that but I don't know what it is, other than it's one of those things that seems like it's the perfect solution - it just doesn't work.

It was Mrs. Rochester who provided the obvious solution. The house is made from cardboard. So cardboard and sticky tape it is then. Now, there's nothing like a dead lion barreling towards me to inspire some creative thinking. The room, cardboard - sorted, the furniture, no problem -cardboard, the people... Hmmmm? - snaps fingers Grommit fashion (see Wallace and Grommit - A Grand Day Out. The scene where Grommit realises why the rocket isn’t lifting off - the handbrake is still on) tissue paper (the sort you blow your nose on) held together with cotton thread. It worked better than I'd expected.

I didn't need a detailed model, I just wanted to see how the forms of the objects and people related to each other from different points of view - or camera angles - and be able to move things around.

The big surprise - though it shouldn't have been - was how dramatically a change of lighting affected the whole mood of the image. It's one thing knowing these things but another thing entirely when you experience it directly.

Now I have something to play with.

All wisdom is rubbish

Funny where your mind wanders off to when you're performing some mindlessly tedious task.

Disclaimer I'm not implying that your mind wanders to any of the places that mine does or that mindless tedium is in any way bad, quite the reverse. It can give your mind a brief respite from the constant demands you place upon it.

Aynho, as I was ironing four kingsized bed sheets and the same number of pillow cases, the word inscrutable drifted centre stage in the theatre of my mind. A noun, or perhaps a verb, sandwiched between a prefix and a suffix. Then a few other variants appeared. Scrutiny, scrutinise. What is this scrut anyway? Usually when you -ise something you transmute one thing to another. Vaporise - to turn something into vapour. Pulverise, to turn something into powder, glamourise to make something glamorous, you get the idea.

We certainly do Awa Rich. And your point is?

Scrutinise, to turn something into scrut. Well, when you scrutinise something you examine it closely, put it under the microscope, get the knowing of it. So scrut must be knowing or information or wisdom.

Enough conjecture, look it up Awa Rich.

Alright already! Say the madjicke word.

Witch one Awa Ritch? They're all madjicke!

Wordflex!

This is one of my favourite apps on the iPad. I used to have a hefty Grimoire called The Oxford English Dictionary. 

Int a Grimoire a book of spells Awa Rich? It certaily is, if you want to know how to spell something you look it up in the Grimoire. Deary me! You should wright The Book of Smells then you'd be Stinking Rich! Ah, The Book of Smells. The little known sequel to The Book of Kells. Er, you were saying? Oh yes.

I would spend hours pouring over this tome, as one word pointed toward another and and then another and so on. Now I can carry all that around with me.

Wordflex is the OED and a thesaurus. Enter a word to search for and it blossoms into animated flower patterns (mind maps, spider charts, yadda yadda) showing synonyms, antonyms, definitions, origins and syntax. It will even speak the words if you don't know how to pronounce them.

Meanwhile, back at the plot Awa Rich.

This is what it showed me for scrutiny. Look at the origin - from Latin, scrutari - to search. Originally to sort rubbish - scruta.

Aren't words brilliant! Iwl yes with that Awa Rich! Anything to eat?

Stinky Town Curry can label - another sketch

I was searching through my illustration books last week for some ideas, when I settled upon an old advertisement by Maxfield Parrish - one of The American Golden Age illustrators. I've been a big fan of his since I was at school. He's probably best known for his Edison Mazda lightbulb advertisement posters. I had Ecstasy on my bedroom wall - a painting of a young woman standing on a precipice with her diaphanous dress and hair blowing in the wind, rendered in Maxfield Parrish's trademark complementary colours.

Many of his other ads involve a threesome. An important subject in the centre flanked by a mirrored pair of supporting artists, a king and two pages, a cook and two lobsters. I shamelessly stole borrowed was inspired by this layout and produced this.

Stinky Town Curry label layout

I doctored it in PhotoShop to make it black and white as I drew it with my 'goto' blue pencil. You can probably see where I made a few alterations. The character on the right doesn't really have three arms.

I had thought of making the two characters either side of the bear into squirrels but then there's the problem with scale.

But it's all made up anyway Awa Rich, you can do what you like. Those lobsters in the Maxfield Parrish painting must be monsters! I wouldn't fancy meeting one of them on a dark night.

I know, but someone's bound to get all pedantic about it.

I'm pretty happy with this composition. The next step is to 'do it properly'.

Everything Stops for Tea

Where've y'bin Awa Rich?

Keep Calm and Carry On and its plethora of variations seems to thunder on unabated, especially since this year is the centenary of The Great War - I never figured out what was so great about it, maybe the event organisers know.

Aynho, this was my two penneth a couple of years ago.

Truer wordswoth never spoken Awa Rich.

Scuse me. Who are you anyway? Why do you keep innerupting my purple prose?

Up in the top right. that's me. the Hurdy Gurdy Dude. You put me there, you can't expect me to sit there for ever and say nothing. It's not in my nature to bide my time or bite my tongue. I might get bored and wander off, causing untold mischief and mayhem. Mister Clevver makes work for idle hands you know.

Right then, I'd better give you something useful to do.

Needn't bother Awa Rich. You just get on with your bit - keep writing - and I'll do what I do best.

OK, Deal!