Oh, we've got the giggles. This is a good start or a bad start. You
Katie:Merry Christmas from The Good Ship. Illustration for this episode, we have decided to introduce you to our good friends, Ron and Betty Frampton. Okay,
Helen:so I was visiting my friend a few Christmases ago, and he bought himself a Christmas present put under the tree and said it. He said, I always write from love from Ron and Betty Frampton. So this has become a tradition amongst their family and my family. If any of us want a Prezi and nobody's going to buy it for us, we buy it. We stick it under the tree. It's love from Ron and Bay. So we're giving all of us, all of us in The Good Ship family, permission to buy themself a Prezi and write love Ron and Betty Frampton. So Katie, what will Ron and Betty Frampton be buying you this Christmas, right?
Katie:Ron and Betty, very generous couple. They know you so well. They know me so well. And the first thing they got me was, well, what they're gonna get me sorry because I haven't bought it yet with it. I have bought it and opened it. I'm using it, but it was one of those lights that is the sad lamps that makes you happy. You know, with the good light in them, I've got a bright yellow one for my desk. What is it? It's just a lamp, basically a really funny it's a Lumie yellow lamp, but it's got the special light in it that stops you being depressed in the winter. If you get sad over the winter, I don't really get that sad, but I was just like, it's bright yellow. It's gonna be a good light. So that's the first thing Ron and Betty got me, and then maybe some Palomino black wing pencils. That's what
Helen:I was gonna say. Ron and Betty have got mine on order. They haven't arrived yet. Yeah, the black wing pencils, they're so expensive.
Katie:How much was the sharp cause? I remember you talked about the palamino, the Black Queen. I've
Helen:forgotten. It's a fortune, and you know that you can buy the little rubber replacements at the top as well. They expensive, really expensive. Ron and Betty will be buying me those. Yes, definitely.
Tania:Just so generous. If they really are that generous, will they buy me that the tech setup that I wanted so that I can draw on an iPad with an Apple Pencil, with Photoshop? I don't
Helen:know if Ron and Betty are very techie. They might
Katie:Ron's nephew is good, ah, so it get Ron's nephew in to set that up for you. What was it like Photoshop, talking to the iPad, talking to the computer so
Tania:I can bypass Wacom, yeah, you need a paper like screen cover as well. Yeah, we want that too. But if all that's too much, I just want that really fancy gouache, acrylic, the Japanese brand,
Helen:no, I don't know any
Tania:any of it, as long as they're not the one that they give to children at schools.
Helen:Yeah, yeah. What else am I thinking about? I often look at that. Rebecca green often talks about that paint set where she has her lovely drawings on the outside and the palette is her palette. Oh, my God, I fancy that.
Tania:Are those straight gouache, not gouache, acrylic.
Helen:I don't know what they are, whatever they are. I don't really mind. I just want it.
Tania:I want the ones where you can paint on top and it doesn't pull the paint up underneath an acrylic does it, doesn't it, so that seals it off. Acrylic is good for that paint on top.
Katie:If Betty wanted to get me something else as well. This is like an extra thing. My favorite pens are those Uniball I finds. A few years ago, I bought myself a big box of them, but they're running out, and I might need a top of yeah,
Helen:they're good because you can draw if you're really speedy drawer drawing from life in a cafe or something, you draw really fast you if with a ballpoint pen, sometimes you can get little gaps because the pen can't keep up with your speedy drawing. So those are perfect for that. They're really juicy as well.
Unknown:And that's on top of
Tania:paint and stuff that is all so glad you get them from anywhere, anywhere. Yeah, that comment, they're like all over the place, COVID, the Tesco ones you liked. It didn't. Yeah,
Helen:there was something I used to buy that was available in Asda
Tania:supermarket, Art Supply.
Helen:Well, there was the bingo dabber dabbers. We went mad for bingo dabbers at art club for a while. I love a bingo dabber Greaves. Must have
Tania:got quite rich on that. I think so hard to get we went mad at the corner stores. I remember,
Katie:went to bingo. Last Christmas. We saw professional bingo. Ladies, they had good bingo, but bingo dabbers, they did.
Helen:But do you remember at the break they brought everybody, it was Christmas, and so at break time, in the middle of the bingo, they brought out two little, tiny. Bowls. And when I say tiny balls, I mean a bowl that you might get given in a cafe to put your tea bag in that size. One had crisps in it, and one had a few crisps. There were about four crisps and four sweets and good ship side of the table just immediately tucked into them, and then the ladies wouldn't speak to us for the rest of the evening. Do you remember? Yeah, I think we stored their share, not just
Tania:that. They could see we were bingo amateurs. We were ironic bingo players, and they sensed it. And I perhaps they thought we were laughing at them. We really weren't. We were just so excited
Katie:we didn't give bingo or the snacks the respect they deserved. Yeah,
Helen:I'd still like to go back with you. Oh, it's a really good evening. We haven't had a proper Christmas do this time round, I wanted to win the twiglets on that table. Do you like twiglets? No, but I like them as a prize. You have to if you're gonna choose a prize, it's the twiglets or the lavender soap, isn't it? I was gonna say if Ron and Betty wrap up a tub of twiglets. Do you know Ron and Betty every year they get me those may not Maynards, the sugared fruits. You know, they look like a little hot orange segment, but it's sugared. They always get me one of those. They look like, Yeah, completely frosted, yeah.
Katie:Not a couple of years ago, but Fortnum and Mason, super fancy with mid Cameron had been looking at the candied fruits in this they look so exciting, so good. They were horrible, but it was really exciting to buy them and look at them. That's
Tania:what a lot of Christmas presents look like. There's a certain sector of Christmas presents that is just about being excited when they're open. Yeah, the later bit isn't any fun and they cost a fortune. Those kind of sometimes it's all about the packaging, isn't it? Yeah, I love a good bit of packaging. You'd be better off with some good sketch books. Definitely,
Helen:definitely, that's what I bought my two nieces. I've got a writer niece and I've got an artist niece, and the writer one is getting a very fancy note. I hope she's not listening. She won't be listening. Really nice notebook with some nice writing pens, and the the drawer is getting a pith sketchbook so gorgeous, and they open up flat and the paper is a bit creamy, generic as well. There are pals, and I got some bat wing pencils too. Oh, wow. She loved the best Pencils of pencils, Pencils of anyone on her course.
Tania:Can we just divert I have colored pencil crisis, because all the words run around in my head. Luminance, yeah, what are the best ones? Aquarelle, Oh,
Helen:I love the loom, the luminescence, luminance, I love those. So gorgeous. The color range is beautiful. But then I also discovered, is it that, you know, the pencil Museum in the Lake District, Derwent pencils, the Derwent color pencils are gorgeous as well. Really, really high pigment, loads of different shades, just amazing. I
Tania:like them when they're a bit waxy and you can draw on top of other, yeah, me too, a bit pastely, and as they're drawing, I don't like that. It's a waste of time. They're all going to fall off the page, yeah, especially on paint. Okay, which
Katie:ones it was with the Edinburgh College of Art shop had really nice pencils, and I used to buy myself, like, one a week in, really good, like magenta and then, like, turquoise, really good. I think
Helen:I might illustrate. Katie and I are writing some stories together about salty who is part of The Good Ship crew? Salty Dog, if you go on the website, you probably see him over there. We decided to write some stories, and Walker books are going to publish them probably next autumn, I imagine. I'm not sure, but I was thinking of illustrating those with those luminescence pencils. That'd be nice. The colors are so lovely. And when I illustrate bigger, I'll use a Karen dash neocolor, wax neocolor. I love those. Love them. But even when you sharpen them with a knife and you get a nice fine point, they're good for a picture book scale image. But because these stories are for older children, they're in a smaller book. So the drawings are more like vignettes. They're too chunky for that. So now I'm thinking that the line might be one of the Lumines. Lumines. I said luminescence, luminance, luminance, luminance. I might use those
Tania:when you draw for your books. Do you draw one to one ratio?
Helen:Yeah. And most people draw like 110% but I don't want the drawing to tighten that up, so I just draw 100% Yeah, even 110 percent.
Tania:Yeah, even 110 is quite close to it. I What do you do? Do you? Do you draw bigger for your well, it's digital, so it's slightly different. And I'm really fascinated by that thing of, you know, size to reproduction when it's hand drawn stuff, because when you over reduce something, it's so horrible. Yeah,
Helen:I don't want to draw smaller, obviously, because then you're going
Tania:to lose really small and blow it
Helen:up. I like that. I love doing that. A tiny, tiny drawing blunt. You remember when everybody when they were old photocopies everywhere, and you could blow a tiny drawing up on a photocopier and patch it together to make it up as big as a wall. They were gorgeous, weren't they?
Tania:It's such a magic trick, but, you know, it's still irresistible when someone does it now, tiny, little pencil drawing and blow it up massively large. I
Katie:love that when you do a little throwaway drawing, and then you sort of use that as the basis of a another drawing, like, remember you drew, was it a little pig that you drew on an invoice? Yeah,
Tania:on the back of a bill. And the pig was really quite nice, and then I think I could use him everywhere.
Unknown:Exploit the pig last
Helen:year, last year, Christmas, good ship, art club last year, in December, on the 10 second animal segment, we must have given ourselves more than 10 seconds because we were working with collage with scissors, and we'd have chopped our fingers off, but maybe we would say it was 30 seconds. I did a 32nd cut out of a reindeer. It was the best thing I'd done in the entire year, if not the best thing I've done in my life. I love that little drawing.
Tania:What? Why am I talking about that again? Because it was quick and throw away. Oh, quick and throw away. Stupidly, you showed it to the car?
Helen:Well, the carpet fitter told me that he'd hadn't drawn since school, but he'd done some drawing recently. And then he looked through his phone and he found a drawing he'd done of a lion, very realistic rendered drawing of a lion. And I said, Oh, do you want to see the best thing I did last year, because it was on my kitchen table, because I was cutting more out to make Christmas cards. He said, Yeah. And so I held up this 32nd cut out of a reindeer. And he just went, she's
Katie:delusional. She's not actually an illustrator. He went over to his wife, like for the carpenter, for this woman, she said she was an illustrator, but I don't know. Well, we hope Ron and Betty Frampton bring you everything you wanted. Maybe
Helen:Ron and Betty Frampton might bring them freak flag. Freak flag, because
Katie:it'd be remiss of us not to mention that they've very quietly, probably not very quietly at this point in the game, but
Tania:banging on about, yeah, tell, tell what Ron and Betty frampton's Nephew, he'll know about buying stuff online. They do it. He's hot
Katie:on it, and he knows about the five Pay option as well. No, the doors are open. So if you want to find your creative voice and fly a freak flag enough, nobody, rudely, nobody's bought you it, you can treat yourself and just say that Ron And Betty did.
Helen:Happy Christmas. Happy Christmas. Happy sweet, bye.