Shipyard collages, illustrators’ nightmares and a multitude of kingfishers

Story Street #8

It’s been a while since I had time to make any personal work, but during May I found myself unexpectedly plunged into a very satisfying and absorbing project – making shipyard collages inspired by my Dad’s old photos. Scroll down to the end of the newsletter for lots for more on this…

Meanwhile my Big Wandle Mural Project is coming together, with more school workshops completed and the last two to come in June. It was particularly good to be back at Sheringdale Primary School, where my own children went many years ago! Here’s just a tiny taster of some of the wonderful nature-inspired collages that were made:

The process is that I give the children lots of pre-painted collage scraps, coloured pencils to embellish, and reference pictures of Wandle wildlife, from eels to coots. Kingfishers have proved a VERY popular choice – if only there were that many on the river in real life. I have spotted a Wandle kingfisher for real a couple of times, and last week I saw FOUR in one morning on the Thames around Wallingford (I was rowing upstream for 2 days amongst the kingcups and pink hawthorn blossom, but that’s a story for another time). After the Sheringdale workshop the children were thanking me and one of them said “Very thankyou” – I liked that feedback! Very thankyou to Higgins Homes for sponsoring this project.

If you are local to Wandsworth and you’d like to join in with this project, there’s a chance to do so on Saturday 17^th June from 12-3 at Kimber Skate Park in King George’s Park. It’s a free event, and is part of Wandsworth Arts Fringe – no booking needed, just turn up. All the details are below: 

Illustrators’ nightmares

Remember the book I was working on earlier in the year – the collage one about mice? The time finally came to make the cover, and I was happily snipping and sticking leaves, mice and tiny houses…until I had to make a RAINBOW. There’s a spread featuring one in the book, which seemed like a nice idea when I pencilled it out…but they are SO hard to do well. I tried collaging, I tried painting with ink, watercolour, and even the amazing made-in-Sheffield Brusho colours (have you tried these? They come as an intense powder which explodes with colour when you wet it).

ALL my rainbows went in the bin – too wobbly, too smudgy, just wrong. (I fished most out them out of the bin shortly afterwards to go in my collage drawer).

Next I tried a digital approach, using Procreate and importing it into my layered Photoshop document alongside all the hand-made collage. I didn’t love it, but it had to do. And then I made the mistake of suggesting another rainbow for the cover! (Stop press: I finally managed to make one I liked - in watercolour).

Rainbows are now on my list of ‘things I hate to draw’, along with cars, horses with complex harnesses, and a bicycle for 40 people (I actually had to draw this once for a Ladybird book – it’s the stuff illustrators’ nightmares are made of). What would be your illustration nightmare? Let me know in the comments!

Anyway, I can’t show you the cover yet but here’s a teeny bit of the scenery from the back cover…

May is a month when I like to be outdoors whenever possible – and it was good to be able to combine that with work when I took my students from Putney School of Art sketching at Fulham Palace Walled Garden. Here’s a couple of mini-concertina books I made sitting in the sun listening to the birds sing and the church bells ring. After 8 years teaching at PSAD, I decided I was ready for a change and have resigned, so this is my last term – and it’s this annual outing that I will miss most of all.

I had a day trip to Derby for Derby Book Festival – it’s my third time at this very friendly and welcoming event, and I specially like going there as my grandparents lived in Derby. I led three packed workshops, reading The Girl Who Noticed Everything (illustrated by Maisie Paradise Shearring) then getting children to make their own collaged ‘lost pet poster’. It was a real treat to see two very old friends there with their families, and to welcome some people who had been to my event two years ago and came back specially. It was lovely to see aspiring illustrator Nicola Phullar again too…

Caras workshops at Paradise

I’ve previously mentioned Paradise Co-Op, the beautiful community garden on Wandsworth Common. Last month I had a chance to go back there for two lovely workshops with refugee and asylum-seeker teenagers in conjunction with CARAS, making concertina books inspired by both the plant life surrounding us and the landscapes of home. It was interesting to see how the garden prompted memories for these displaced youngsters - one young man told me his grandfather had a saffron and pistachio farm in Afghanistan – and I was happy to be able to find just the right shade of red in my collage box to make the crocus stamens for his book.  Another boy from Ethopia remembered eating 25 mangoes in one day on his family smallholding, while another member of the group had come from a beekeeping family and was keen to look close up at the beehives. We baked bananas with chocolate buttons in on an open fire and feasted on pizzas while the paint dried on the book covers in the hot sun.

Shipyard collages project

Now for more about those shipyard collages. I stumbled into this project quite by accident, but it has been bringing me a lot of joy. My Dad died 18 months ago, and since then we’ve been sifting through thousands of his photos. He was a marine engineer, and a lot of the photos were taken in shipyards and show technical details that are a bit baffling to the uninitiated. But some of them are filled with interesting shapes, colours and textures, and I brought a little stack home thinking they might come in handy for an art project of some sort. Below is the one that inspired the collage at the top of this newsletter, taken on Tyneside in the late 90s:

Then a couple of weeks ago I was teaching my students at Putney School of Art how to make a John Piper-inspired ‘inky collage’. When I was looking for something to demonstrate with, my eye fell on the photos – and I ended up making eight collages and getting hooked… I like to think of it as a collaboration between me, my Dad (John Porter) and John Piper – the three JPs.

Since then, I’ve got into a habit of making a shipyard collage most days – I have already made over 27. It’s a nice morning warm-up and I am finding it rather addictive. Many of the source material photographs are of WW2 Destroyer HMS Cavalier – my Dad was involved in the restoration of the ship in the late 90s in Tyneside, before she was moved to her permanent home at Chatham Historic Dockyard.

So what have I learned (so far) from making these collages? It’s been refreshing to dive right in with no anticipation or preparation – all the collage pieces are leftovers from other things I’m currently working on, and I picked out all the rusty orange and warm green-greys that I had actually originally mixed to represent wildlife in the river Wandle.

The very first of the shipyard collages I made in front of my students with no planning whatsoever, so I worked very instinctively and fast. Since then, I’ve had time to think a bit more about the process – looking out for the main blocks of shapes and tones in each photo, throwing in some interesting texture and adding the ink at the very end with an old chopstick – though funnily enough it’s often the hasty inky bits that bring it all together. Not overthinking it – and no digital tweaking – has been liberating.

I wish I could show my Dad what I’ve been making, though I think he would notice many technical mistakes and mishaps. This one (below) shows the mess room for Three Quays Marine Services, who he was working with at the time, and was a difficult one to do. As I looked more and more closely at the photo, I realised that it’s Dad’s coat hanging on the peg, and his hard hat on the bench, which brought it home powerfully that he’s not here any more.

I’m still contemplating what to do with all the work – I’d love to make them into a book or exhibition, so watch this space. I’m also wondering about making some paintings based on the collages – so using the collage to abstract from the original photos, then taking it a stage further. If you have any ideas, do let me know in the comments…

It's been a good month for book launches. Here’s Ruby Wright at the launch of her debut picture book, Animal Crackers (Rocketbird Books) – and JUST LOOK AT THAT JUMPSUIT! Ruby actually designed a fabric based on the endpapers of the book, and a friend of hers make it into the ULTIMATE book launch outfit. The book is delightful too, by the way.

I also enjoyed the launch of Watch Out, There’s A Monster Coming by Karl Newson and Zehra Hicks at the indie bookshop Tales on Moon Lane. This book is a terrific readaloud and the artwork is full of fun – tried and tested with my weekly under 5s art group.

If you’d like to buy either of these books (or any of my books), I have a handy link for you here (scroll to the bottom for the ‘recommendations’ list):

Organ nostalgia

A couple of weeks ago I went to a spine-tingling performance at the Royal Festival Hall – Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony. It’s a really exciting piece of music, but I especially enjoyed it because it reminded me of one of my favourite ever projects: ten years ago I worked with the Southbank Centre and two schools to create a children’s guide to the RFH organ, by and for children. One school was in Balham, the other in County Durham – and we visited Harrison and Harrison, the workshop that restored the organ and still tunes the pipes to this day. Here’s the organ with the cereal packet ones we made at the Balham school:

– and you can find out more about that project here and here and the final outcome here.

And now here we are in June! What will this month bring? I’ll tell you all about it next time… and maybe see you at the Skate Park?