Raymond Sheppard and the Rolling Year - Original artwork

Rolling Year p. 216
"Man doth not live by bread alone"

Rolling Year p. 178
"An Old Water Wheel"

The two pages above appeared in Rolling Year by W. J. Blyton. If you want to know more about the author follow this link to my previous article

Clouds (a)

Clouds (b)

I thought it might be interesting to look at these two pieces of art as I now own the originals. They look, at first appearance, to be a scraper-board technique. Several of Sheppard's early illustrations appear like this. But I wondered if this was true when looking closely at the clouds in the picture of the church. There appears to be little or no scraping in this area.

David Slinn, who regularly writes to me about Sheppard, amongst other things, commented it looks like ink on a china clay surface and then scraped Why? Because the artists back then were brought up on woodblock in books previously therefore they have an inkling of that method of scraping, etching.  I think you’ll find quite a bit of evidence of the use of a scalpel – both on illustration board and (it would seem) actual scraperboard in a few instances – amongst the images included from Round the Year Stories: Summer Book. Your expressed concern “...why are the lines predominantly ‘crude’...”, possibly has as much to do with the method of the book’s production. The culprit being retouching work on the negatives during the plate making process... perhaps absolving Raymond Sheppard from blame. But also bear in mind that black and white work of this type was, generally, considerably less well rewarded than you might think.

SPECIAL BONUS
This is a photo I took - forgive the pen intruding on the image! - of the pencil rough with Sheppard's notes underneath whilst visiting Christine Sheppard. It's interesting to note that "More than half the people go to church", an actual quote from the text, was not used in the finished version.

Pencil rough of page 216