The Old Yew Tree Inn pub sign designs

The favoured calligraphic design  © Peter Gander

I recently posted about my postcard painting at The Old Yew Tree Inn, near my club’s fly-fishing lake at Westbere, Kent. Well, chatting to Mark and Anna, the proprietors recently, I suddenly became involved in a project to design and paint a new pub sign for them to replace their weatherbeaten version which has seen better days. The tradition of pub signwriting is a dying art nowadays as pubs are dying out, especially in rural areas and pub chains produce digital signs with little regard for the provenance of the pub itself, often renaming them too, thus swathes of inns have little visible heritage but the building itself. From a design point of view, Mark and I were keen to reflect a contemporary attitude (food etc) within this 14th century pub (Kent’s oldest) whilst trying not to ride roughshod over its significant history. I looked at illustrative and calligraphic design icons that respected the pub’s historical roots (forgive the pun) with the Yew Tree on centre stage. I drew up five black and white sketches (or ‘scamps’ as we call them in the trade) for Mark and Anna to choose from.

Scamps A to E  © Peter Gander

Scamp (D) proved to be the favourite and next steps will be to look at the colour palette.

The pedalling painter 1: Reculver and back (12k)

The artist © Peter Gander

In little less than a year I will be doing a cycling tour along a portion of The Compostela di Santiago (The Pilgrim’s Route) -  in the south-west of France, with my brother and old art college friend Ben, a trip of at least 600 kilometers and today it was time to start something resembling a training regime. Admittedly a 12k round trip is no big deal at all, (even the paper boy would scoff) but not having cycled properly for some years I needed to set my sights, well, on Reculver Towers, 6 kilometers away and just visible from Herne Bay’s seafront. It’s an ancient Roman monument which bizarrely was only partly demolished in the 1920s. They left the towers to the front of the building in situ as a navigational aid to passing ships. Anyway, my wife Fiona is far fitter than I and regularly runs 5k or so which she takes, erm, in her stride. And she dutifully ushered me along the way with the odd reassuring word and the habit of disappearing over the horizon like a out-of-reach carrot to a hungry donkey, in a similar way that my brother did when we recently did a ride or two in France. Still, I was enjoying the 20mph cold north-easterly gale in my face, supressing my forward progress like I had the ‘bike handbrake’ on. And I use the title ‘The Pedalling Painter’ in a wishful sense, as it really was howling with wind, plus we had to be back for an appointment, so the chances of sketching en route were very unlikely (I’m hoping for more balmy weather too in France). Thus Fiona took this shot which I opened up on the Mac and sketched from a distance, freehand. Cheating perhaps, but better than nowt. Future Pedalling Painter posts will be from longer rides with a proper sketch stop built in, something I hope to carry on doing on our French trip at the end of the day or during a lunch-stop. Ink and brush with Winsor and Newton watercolour on 210gsm Khadi handmade sketchbook.

Chessell Pottery fish plate

Fly-fishing plate © Peter Gander

Last week during half-term, we took the kids over the water to the Isle of Wight, to Fiona’s bungalow in Ventnor, which is looked after by friends Helen and Frazer of Vintage Vacations. We were only there for a few days and the autumnal weather called for an afternoon’s leisure indoors. We picked out Chessell Pottery Barns near Calbourne on the island. We selected our blanks, a piece of slip-cast pottery, choosing from bowls and egg-cups to mugs and vases. I picked out a large 10 inch plate, the best and biggest ‘blank canvas’ available. I set out with a technique called ‘sgraffito’ in mind, where the paint is applied then scratched away by a metal tool called a fettling knife (just visible in the top photo).

Laying down successive layers of black paint (3 were used in total)

Hand-lettering the words with bottle of paint

Scratching in the scale design with the tailormade fettling tool

The final piece showing pallette, fettling knife and squeezy paint bottles

Lettering was done by squeezing a matching paint through  a fine-tipped plastic paint bottle, icing- bag-style. Cutting through the now-dried layers of rock-hard paint with the knife was hard going, fluid, curved lines must be very tricky but mine was a relatively simple design. I added a decorative couple of blocks of water and the fly and job done. As our plates needed firing to glaze the design and we were due to leave the island the next day before a firing day was due, we will have to wait until next year to collect our pieces! In any event, were soon distracted from that glitch by the Barn’s legendary cream tea to finish a great afternoon off!

Conkers & acorns © Peter Gander

Autumn in England. Conkers and acorns. Whilst out walking the dog I crunched underfoot this unfeasibly long acorn, minus its little cradling, egg-cup-like stalk. It was bigger than a nearby conker which was missed by schoolboys looking for bigger prizes as they clacked their sticks up at the boughs of the horse chestnut, shielding their faces as the sticks came down again, peeking hopefully at a shower of prize conkers, thudding on the wet grass, nestled inside alien spiky green cases. Winsor & Newton watercolour and charcoal on handmade Indian Khadi (210gsm) rough paper.

Still life, petit chien © Peter Gander

On a recent trip to see my brother where he lives in Navarrenx, a Béarnaise area of south-west France, I perused a wealth of bric-a-brac that sits on the mantel piece on top of his giant fireplace. I chose a grouping of this wooden Indian scuttle, porcelain dog and wax cactus candle to sketch. It’s actually painted in the main with white gouache on Raven Black paper, with sanguine and white Conté details plus charcoal pencil.

Nude by bath © Peter Gander

An experiment in combining traditional and digital techniques. The nude is drawn with a charcoal pencil, highlighted in white and sanguine Conté, then scanned. I also scanned the background Kraft paper (or ‘brown’ paper as we poetically call it in the UK), seperately. The patches of aqua, green foliage, sienna border and model’s back highlight in white were then added as tints (in Photoshop/Wacom pen & tablet). Looks Anglo-Chinese perhaps?

Herne Bay Pier Trust’s web page

My recent postcard for The Herne Bay Pier Trust (THBPT) appears on their website today. The demolition of the Sports Pavilion, which the postcard commemorates, begins this week. The original painting will either be auctioned or raffled off soon, so we are hoping to recreate the success of the recent Pilgrims Hospices Charity Postcard Auction with the sale of the painting, 100% of the proceeds of which will go to THBPT.

Mackerel on stone © Peter Gander

Note the canvas-like toothy texture of this mould-made paper

The mackerel, a fishy favourite of mine, both in eating and illustrative terms, with its iteresting body pattern which I have visited before, of course. Another painting on Two Rivers paper, a substrate so well-suited for this study of the fish lying on a stone surface, as it’s rich in texture, most notable in the close-up. Note also the huge brush that I use, which I also keep at arms’ length in order to keep a freer, looser feeling to my work than if I used a tiny brush up close. Winsor & Newton watercolour on 400gsm Two Rivers (Somerset) deckle-edged, handmade paper.

The fish padlock © Peter Gander

I started this painting of my beloved fish padlock a couple of months ago. The padlock is a weighty lump of hand-incised brass and is accompanied by a more golden-coloured key. I bought this beautiful piece of handmade Indian art on Ebay a few years ago from India and though I wish I could say I had an exclusive ‘fishing tackle shed’, it does appropriately guard my fishing gear in my garden shed. Painting-wise, my original, half-baked creative attempt was painted in gouache and not working at all on the strongly-coloured pastel paper, so I abandoned it. The whole thing was wishy-washy, so undeserving of something so chunky and strong and I didn’t know what to do with it. Revisiting it today, I covered the whole coloured image in black Indian ink, creating a black silhouette and started again. This time with soft pastels working in darkest colours first over the black, finishing with the highlight. I then painted the scales, keyhole and fin lines in ink and finally, acheived a good result. Indian ink and soft pastel on Daler Rowney Murano (warm colours) Pastel Paper (160gsm).

Ye Olde Yew Tree website

Ye Olde Yew Tree website

Back in the spring I painted the above pub image on a postcard whilst sipping a pint of Harvey's in the garden of this quintessentially English icon, The Olde Yew Tree Inn, in Westbere, Kent. The owners soon asked me over for a futher pint or two of Harvey's which I duly bartered for said postcard and now it adorns their website and has also been made into punters’ postcards in a nicely rounded twist of events. Do pop in for pint if you’re in the area, it’s Kent’s oldest pub at nearly 700 years old and that is surely worth raising a glass to!

Local (Margate) mackerel for Pilgrim’s Hospices Postcard Auction

Local (Margate) mackerel © Peter Gander

Based on my original ‘Local mackerel’ of the Whitstable variety, I have donated this Margate version to The Pilgrims Hospices current Postcard Auction exhibition. The show starts this weekend (3rd Septeber 2011) and culminates in each anonymous postcard being auctioned. My fish will appear alongside eminent artists’ work such as Tracey Emin’s (she lived in Margate). See also www.flickr.com/photos/43044290@N06/6096327495/in/photostream  and http://www.pilgrimshospices.org/news/mystery-art-lover-bids-more-than-2000-for-postcard/   Waterproof drawing pen with Winsor & Newton watercolour on The Langton 300gsm paper. • SOLD Saturday 10 September 2011