Welsh Nursery Rhyme Book Illustration

Cover image by Robert Karr

Oes gafr eto? Oes heb ei godro

Ar y creigiau geirwon

Mae’r hen afr yn crwydro,

Gafr wen, wen, wen,

Ie finwen, finwen, finwen,

Foel gynffonwen, foel gynffonwen,

Ystlys wen a chynffon wen, wen, wen . . .

 I’ve never been a huge fan of facebook but it was the means by which I was invited, last Spring, to contribute an illustration to a book of Welsh Nursery Rhymes to be sold to raise funds for the St David’s Day celebrations in Los Angeles.

I've lived in Wales for just over ten years but I didn’t know that there were specifically Welsh Nursery Rhymes. Nor did I know that St David’s Day was celebrated in Los Angeles, although my overseas sales of St David’s Day greeting cards has suggested that March 1st is an important date in Welsh communities worldwide.

I chose a rhyme about goats, partly because of my brief but unforgettable experience of keeping goats when my children were young and partly because I had already been sketching goats for my ‘Chinese Year of the Goat’ greeting cards. But I think what actually decided me was that when I read the English translation, I knew instantly how I would approach the illustration.

“Is there another goat? Yes, not yet milked

On the rough rocks

The old goat is wandering

White goat

Yes,

Bald white tail, bald white tale,

White side and tail, white, white white.

And the second, third and fourth verses just substitute ‘red’, ‘black’ and ‘blue’ for ‘white’.

I challenged myself to make the coloured goats look reasonably natural by making the most of the lighting in the background landscape – eg one goat looks black because it’s silhouetted against the bright sunlight and another looks blue-ish in the shade of the tree. 

A soft pastel painting I had made previously of the Sugarloaf mountain, provided all that I needed by way of backdrop for my goats.

Which just left me with the question of what to do about the fact that the rhyme implied two people conversing. I decided on two elderly, rather Welsh-looking, country folk, possibly goatherds, although I had never been aware that goats were kept in Wales. I had thought of making their smocks a nice bright colour so that they would stand out from the background, but a google search identified that only creamy white smocks were worn in Wales.

So I was left with the decorative border to provide colour and what better than the bright red berries of the Rowan Tree or Mountain Ash, which grows plentifully in Wales! (Its Celtic name, ‘fid na ndruad’, means Wizard’s Tree.)

I had the drawing finished during the summer but, with the Surface Pattern course beginning at the end of August, it was a rush at the end to get my illustration painted in time for the December 1st deadline!

The launch will take place on Sunday, March 3rd

Click

HERE

for

DRAGONS & DAFFODILS,

St David's Day Greeting Cards & Gifts

(many with greetings in Welsh)

Daffodils 'snapped' in my garden in Wales on Feb 17th

A Tale of Two Goats

It’s been a while since I painted anything but flowers. 

And with the next Chinese Year of the Goat as far off as 2015, you may wonder why I’ve been drawing and painting goats. The reason is that I am getting into practice!

Some months ago, back in the Spring, I was contacted through facebook and invited to contribute an illustration to a book of Welsh Nursery Rhymes to be published next year to raise funds for the St David’s Day festivities in Los Angeles. I didn’t know that there were specifically Welsh Nursery Rhymes and I had no idea that St David’s Day was celebrated in Los Angeles. It seems that the Patron Saint of Wales enjoys far more attention abroad than here at home in Wales!

I’ve never seriously done any illustration work before but it’s something I’m very interested in, so I didn’t hum and hah for long before I agreed to have a go.

But what has this to do with goats?  

I was sent 14 Welsh Nursery Rhymes to choose from and although I’d have happily given any of them my best shot, it had to be the rhyme about four goats. You see, goats and I have history!

Last week I posted a photo of our family home in the ‘70s. It was a large house on a much bigger plot of land than we'd ever had before. We moved into the house in the February and began the inevitable process of putting my stamp on it through alterations and new decorations.

We were so engrossed by the newly emerging inside of the house that it was early summer by the time that we noticed that Nature had been busy on the outside! Suddenly, it seemed, we had bought a field of waist-high grass and cow parsley.

‘Get a goat!’ advised friends and we thought they were joking. But by the end of the summer, as we battled unsuccessfully to tame our wilderness, we decided that maybe it was the best thing to do.

So we found a gentle-looking Toggenburg goat for sale and the owners agreed to keep it for us until we returned from our holiday. Unfortunately, when we arrived back two weeks later, they had sold the goat to someone else and my eight-year-old daughter was devastated!

The only goats advertised in our local paper were two sisters, Tina and Petula. I thought from the start that they looked rather belligerent and their legs looked long, suggesting that they might be fast runners. And these two had horns! But we managed to get them home in the back of our car, with some rather strange looks from passers-by whenever we stopped at traffic lights!

Tina and Petula polished off all the greenery in our garden in a couple of weeks and thereafter we had to buy food for them – not what we had in mind! They practically demolished the elderly shed where they were kept at night and they chewed through their tethering ropes on a daily basis, resulting in phonecalls from our neighbours to tell us that our goats were ‘dancing’ on their well-manicured lawn!

If they didn’t go next door, they led me a dance around our orchard. They would allow me to creep up on them to catch them, staring at me with their creepy, horizontal-slit eyes. Then, just as I was about to reach out for their collar, off they would prance – and I was right, those long legs did take them well out of my reach!

My daughter was far better at handling them than I was but she had to go to school so then it was up to me and it wasn’t what I thought I’d signed up to! But I was the only one who managed to milk them, though my one attempt resulted in about a quarter of a pint of milk and Petula’s foot in the bucket!

 So you see, I feel I ‘know’ goats! And I’ll enjoy working on the goat nursery rhyme. I’ve suddenly realised that the deadline, Dec 1st, isn’t as far off as it was and with my Surface Pattern Design course beginning in less than three weeks’ time, I need to make a start on it! 

The 'Year of the Goat' greeting cards and all these little 'back-of-the envelope' doodles are just a ‘warm-up’! I'll post again as the illustration begins to take shape.

Ironically,  I've discovered that, according to the Chinese Zodiac, I'm a 'goat'!

You can read about the character traits of the 'goat'  HERE  

Any more goats out there?