Drawn to Drawing

By Richard Coppin

The making of pictures has always fascinated me; each blank sheet of paper I got hold of as a boy

offered me all kinds of intriguing opportunities to create something artistic. I’d discovered the

enjoyment of drawing at the age of seven after visiting HMS Victory in Portsmouth on a family holiday.

Back at the hotel I was bitten by the bug to replicate on paper the image of the magnificent vessel I’d gone to see; so much so that a painting of it was entered into a multi-school competition held in the town hall in Newark in 1962. Mine was in the 7 to 9 year old Junior’s age group. I was bowled over to win first prize. Flushed with ‘victory’, I knew that drawing was going to play a big part in my life.

Showing signs of age; my 1962 painting of HMS Victory at sea, which won first prize when I was just seven years old

Life, as we all know, is not as straightforward as we’d like it to be and the twists and turns I encountered did not bode well for me to make headway with an artistic career. And that was how things were fumbling along until I met my wife Andrea. Her belief in my abilities and her practical guidance set me on the road to a truly professional approach to turn a hobby into the means of making a thriving business from it. This was also around the time that Andrea was moving to the Grantham area which gave me the chance to see how my fortunes would compare here as opposed to my faltering progress in Newark. The move provided a stark contrast; Grantham was so full of optimism and drive. I found a ready market to sell what I can only describe as invisible merchandise; my imagination delivered through the medium of graphic design, coming up with company logos, illustrations for advertising, sales and promotional material and as 1984 loomed, exhibition stands; for this was the time of Expo 84, a Grantham Chamber of Trade led initiative that culminated in repurposing the old disused factory site on what is now B&Q’s car park into a bustling and exciting exhibition venue. It was so successful that three years later Tradex 87 used the same site to hold an even more ambitious event.

Well, the domino effect of life eventually led to the Grantham Civic Society seeking ways to

create information boards to be placed around the town and so I came onto their story. By the time the Civic Society and I had crossed paths, I had developed several drawing techniques; one using ballpoint pen for highly detailed fine art, another with pen and ink and finally a preference for creating colour illustrations with a combination of fine line marker pens and pencil crayon; the versatile Caran D’Ache coloured pencils made by Prismalo. Tell you what; let me show you a few of them and talk you through their creation.

Newton’s statue. The St. Peter’s Hill Information Board

The bulk of Sir Isaac Newton’s bronze statue was made from a Russian cannon captured during the

Crimean war. It was erected in 1858. Originally it was protected by an iron fence which circumnavigated it. As this illustration was intended for historical reference I decided to draw it as it would have looked back then. The body of Newton is drawn almost completely in fine line marker pen and permanent marker infill’s with grey crayon to blend in to convey its roundness. The plinth is all in pencil crayon apart from the railings.

St. Wulfram’s Church. The Swinegate Information Board

The design for this board didn’t leave me a great deal of room to show off the immense height of this glorious church, although I had to find a way to achieve it. In the end I opted for a view close to the foot of the tower, giving a perspective as if one was craning one’s neck to take it all in. The result, as far as I was concerned, displayed a far more powerful effect, paradoxically conveying the tall spire in such a squat area. The arches and some of the more precise details are made with a fine line marker but the majority of it is drawn with pencil crayon.

Grantham House. The Swinegate Information Board

Again, this is a combination of fine line marker and crayon. The trees to the upper left are drawn

completely in pen. On the day I went to begin this drawing the lawn was yet to be mowed. I therefore used the angles of the chimney tops to triangulate down to where the vanishing point on the horizon line would be. I then used this to work out the lines of where the lawnmower would have gone, using alternating dark and light green shades to give a newly mowed appearance. Not an easy thing for a colour blind artist I might add.

The Old King’s School. The Swinegate Information Board

The most challenging part of drawing this building was illustrating the stone work in the east wall. For a long time it seemed to lack any flatness, given that all the stones were not of uniform shape. Continual shading and redefining them paid off in the end. This was drawn at a time when the snow guard at the roofline was in place. For some reason it was removed just a few weeks after this picture was drawn.

The Market Cross. The Market Place Information Board

Originally, the Market Place was located in the grounds of St. Wulfram’s church. Around the year 1280 it was moved to its present position and this medieval cross erected on it. Then in 1779 it was removed, only to be returned a year later due to local protests. In 1884 however it was thought to be in a dangerous state and replaced two years later by a granite obelisk. When the old cross was discovered by chance in a builder’s yard in Wharf Road it was brought back by popular demand and inaugurated with a civic ceremony in 1911. From a drawing point of view I discovered that the smooth stone effect could be achieved by working the ink while still wet with the nib of a variety of tan and grey coloured crayons.

The Vicarage. The Swinegate Information Board

A technically demanding drawing that required immense patience. Each window pane had to be

carefully drawn in pen to leave white lines to show the frames; making sure that any detail of reflections or objects behind the glass was drawn as accurately as possible. Depicting the foliage was time-consuming but nothing compared to the vicarage brickwork. The construction pencil work had to be precise for the guidance of what came next; the alternating shades to recreate the pattern made by the bricklayers. Every individual brick drawn was the result of re-sharpening the crayon every time; a job that seemed to take forever. It’s easy to take this work for granted looking at it now.

The National School. The Swinegate Information Board

In addition to a pen and ink drawing used in the school’s report covers

Here are two contrastingly different approaches to drawing the same building. I used a similar technique of blending the ink and crayons together to try and capture the stone work in the colour picture; the one that was used on the Civic Society’s information board. As a Victorian school I wanted the drawing to have an element of its history coming through; something of the days of harsh discipline that made up school life when this building was new. The simpler and to me, more friendly pen-and-ink drawing appeared on lots of the National School’s literature. I even have it on a mug somewhere.

The Guildhall. The St. Peter’s Hill Information Board

The Guildhall is a building crammed with as much detail as its history. I spent days on the pencil

construction lines alone, making sure that every decorative feature fitted in with the essential structure of its architecture. The reason for the picture was to show the moment the ornate Victorian wrought iron ‘birdcage’ finally came crashing down in a high wind in the 1960s. Every bit of this drawing was created with pencil crayon; almost thirty different kinds of them. To maintain this level of detail they had to be constantly sharpened. The only aspect that seemed to threaten the entire project was the depiction of the brickwork. It was obvious that I wasn’t going to be able to use the same technique as I’d done with the vicarage drawing, but what? In the end I experimented with drawing horizontal lines with very light brown crayon, keeping it needle-sharp, ensuring each line was forced deeper into the paper. I then used a soft russet crayon to work over these lines and then blowing off the residue leaving the lighter lines to show through the colour of the bricks. The sky is made using powdered crayon shavings, blending various shades and mixing them on a separate piece of paper. These piles of powder were then worked in with a well-worn and therefore very soft piece of tissue, drawing with it to create a flat and uniform surface. Several shades were used to give the sky a brooding and stormy appearance.

Catlin’s Restaurant

History records that this building, which dates back to 1550, is where William Eggleston accidentally

invented Grantham Gingerbread and later, for many years, it was home to Catlin’s Restaurant. Drawing it was pure pleasure as I love working in pen and ink. There is always a stark choice about what to draw and what to leave out. The ground floor windows were fun to do as they were drawn to show not only the casement frames and reflections but also the features behind the glass using little more than vertical lines of various thicknesses.

Living Health

Anyone living in Grantham knows this building to be the birthplace of Britain’s first woman Prime

Minister; Margaret Thatcher, or Miss Roberts as she was then. I remember meeting Carole Thatcher and giving her a framed copy of this drawing. I was forced to use a lot of cross-hatching on the door and outside panels. The profile of the panelling was made by either emphasising some of the shading and leaving other parts out. As drawings go, it’s a fairly simple piece.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this wander through a small part of my portfolio. If nothing more, it just goes to show how many beautiful buildings exist in Grantham and how lucky we are that organisations like the Grantham Civic Society keep their welfare in the public spotlight. As their motto states, they; ‘Preserve the good in the old, encourage the good in the new’.