Royal Mail commemorative stamps?

This month's posting shows a collection of Great Britain (GB) Christmas stamps -- both the modern self-adhesive types; and the bigger, older gummed types. (Proper Christmas stamps!) A couple of decades ago, I would have listed stamp collecting as one of my pastimes, but in the mid- to late-1990s I lost interest. I had been a collector of both Canadian and GB postage stamps. I suppose I had other things to fill my free time. I was also getting irritated by the more frequent issues, and the bigger sets of commemorative stamps. It felt as though Royal Mail in particular were exploiting the collectors.

Jump ahead to late 2016, and the postage stamp world looks a different place. Self-adhesive stamps for everyday use have replaced the ones that you had to lick, and any form of postage stamp on mail to the home is a fairly rare event. Except of course for Christmas, when people still trouble themselves to send cards and Season's Greetings. This is the only time of year that I receive stamps other than the usual definitives. Even then, they are mostly definitive-size Christmas stamps, so nothing really to catch the eye.

This got me thinking. Why does Royal Mail still apparently issue dozens of commemorative stamps if no-one, except for collectors, actually sees them? What is the point? (Apart from screwing more money out of collectors, of course, which the collectors themselves realise.) Why do these stamps never seem to be marketed to the general public? In the past, it was a way of drawing attention to notable events and people, or promoting something about (Great) Britain. Have the management decided that this publicity is an unnecessary cost?

It probably doesn't need an MBA to discover that stamp collecting as a hobby is not what it used to be, and the cash cow that it might be now is going to fade away in the next decade or two, as collectors drop off their perches. I get the feeling that little young blood is coming into the hobby -- I suspect that the likes of mobile phones and social media offer a more instant gratification.

While I am criticising Royal Mail, why is it that they cannot cancel a stamp and put a (legible) postmark on an envelope? Surely with modern technology it is easier than ever, but I receive a noticeable proportion of mail with uncancelled stamps. On the day of writing, I had a card delivered and the envelope was in pristine condition with no clue as to where it had come from or when it was posted.  What is the use of that! And yet, Royal Mail have developed devices on stamps to deter their re-use. (I appreciate the concerns about forgeries.) Wouldn't it be better to ensure that the stamps are properly cancelled (and postmarked) in the first place? Like it used to be done in days of yore?

Despite the criticisms, Royal Mail still do a good job of delivering post straight to my front door in all weathers -- and long may it continue. I will try to support the UK's postal system as best as I can, even though I probably only add to the woes at Christmastime...

Best Wishes for 2017 to everyone!

An Andre Fontaine original

This painting hangs in my living room, and invariably invites comments.  It has been a part of my life since the early 1980s, when it was a conversation piece in my parents' dining room in Sillery, Quebec, Canada.  My father was presented with it for conducting the marriage ceremony of the artist, Andre Fontaine, at Chalmers-Wesley United Church in Quebec City.

My father was told that use of a blacklight would bring out another dimension to the painting, but as far as I know this was never tried.

Andre Fontaine was certainly a character as I recall, and if my father was still alive he would surely have had a few entertaining anecdotes to relate.  I thought that an internet search would have turned up more examples of Andre Fontaine's distinctive work, but I found very few, so I am sharing it here.

I am especially intrigued by the texture and the techniques used in the painting.  I guess that an airbrush was used for the fluorescent colours?  Or spray cans?  The painting must now be around 35 years old and has mellowed a little with age (like me!) -- but it still evokes fond memories of good company and happy times.

Borders for paintings?

This probably dates me, but I remember when (Instamatic camera) colour photographic prints were square and came with narrow white borders on each side. Some time in the 1970s, this changed, and the default borders on snaps disappeared, to my delight. (I suspect this might in part have been due to a change in photographic paper, with the introduction of resin coating.) Even when I took to printing my own black and white prints for a few years in the 1980s, I would make them without borders in order to make full use of the photographic paper.

When I first started out with watercolours, it seemed natural to continue to avoid the use of borders and maximise the painted area, so my first three small efforts were effectively borderless. It did not help that none of the watercolour books in my possession dealt directly with the subject of a border (or margin) around one's painting, but made assumptions that this would happen anyway.

I subsequently realised that a border all around was a good thing, for a number of reasons.

First of all, the border is the favoured means to attach the paper to the work surface -- whether you use gummed tape, clips or even staples. It is an area outside the painting. Watercolour books tend to assume that you will, of course, stretch the paper in the traditional manner, and a natural border will result once you remove the tape. (Unless you cut out the painting to release it from the tape afterwards!)

The border is a good place to touch paintings with bare fingers. If you are blessed with oily skin as I am, then excessive handling will likely cause grubbiness and yellowing over time. A dirty finger print on the painted part of a picture would be bad news indeed, and most likely impossible to remove without damaging the painting.

If you use clips or staples, then the border strips -- if wide enough -- can be used to test your washes before committing them to the painting. This saves using a matching scrap piece of paper for testing, but is not so useful for larger swatches of colour.

And finally, the border comes into its own when the painting is framed for display. The conventional method is to use a glass picture frame with a framing mat -- a thick piece of card with a specially cut aperture (usually rectangular) -- and place this in the frame with the mat on top of the picture. The mat presses against the border, leaving an air gap in the aperture between glass and painting.

How wide you should make the border on your painting is up to you, but for framing purposes a minimum of 1/4 inch (six millimetres) is often mentioned on internet framing sites.

It is a little surprising that the few watercolour books I have encountered, aimed at all levels including beginners, fail to mention what is fairly basic information for anyone starting out. Hopefully this has been food for thought to someone...

Ken Bromley artists' watercolour paints

In common with many hobbies and pastimes, watercolour painting can prove to be expensive, especially for those on a limited budget. It is all too tempting to try new papers, paints and brushes in the quest to achieve that "look" -- and before you know it, the bank balance is considerably reduced!

While I would always recommend supporting a local business if you have one (use it or lose it!), one way of saving the pennies a little can be to shop on-line and buy in quantity to offset (or reduce) the delivery charge. I have heard good things about Jackson's Art Supplies, but I have been a repeat customer of artists' materials supplier Ken Bromley Art Supplies for a few years. In common with Jackson's, Ken Bromley market their own branded range of artists' watercolour paint, so I was curious to find out more about it.

The website says that the paints are made in the UK: this is printed on the tubes as well. The 14 ml size of the paint tube and shape of the cap looks remarkably like the packaging of Winsor and Newton Artists' watercolours up to 2012. However, the similarity ends there, as the paint colour numbers match neither W&N, nor Daler-Rowney for that matter.

The range is currently made up of 41 colours, all supplied in 14 ml tubes, most of which are priced as Series 1. (There are nine colours in Series 2.) Twenty-six colours are single pigment, eight are two pigments, four are three pigments, and three are made of four pigments. Catalogue prices for Series 1 is £4.32 per tube, and for Series 2 £4.73 per tube. (They usually go on offer at least once a year, so a further savings can be made.) To the experienced watercolour paint buyer, I suspect it sounds more like a student range in terms of number of paints, series and pricing.

Some of the pigment choices seem a little unusual, especially given recent findings about lightfastness. Both Alizarin Crimson (PR83:1) and Aureolin (PY40) are listed in the range. Alizarin Crimson is notorious for fading badly on exposure to light, and Handprint recommends that PY40 is best avoided. Fortunately, the Ken Bromley website lists pigment information with a mouse click, so it makes sense to do a little pigment research first before you buy.

In my examples, the tubes themselves were well-filled, and I had to be careful not to get paint everywhere! I had no difficulty in filling empty half-pans from the tubes. Once the paint in the half-pans had dried, it re-wetted easily and performed as well as it did fresh from the tube.

What are they like to paint with? Well, so far I have only made some small colour swatches and run a lightfastness test. I found that the paints compared favourably to Cotman colours in most cases, although I hoped the Burnt Umber (Dark) would have been at least as dark as the Cotman version -- which it wasn't in my sample. Permanent Rose (PV19) was redder than I expected, and not like the Cotman colour of the same name and pigment. But on the whole, the paints seemed at least as good as the Cotman equivalents.  (Another unscientific comparison, then!)

With some caveats, I would recommend these paints (to less-experienced painters like me), especially if bought on offer.

Digital camera colour...

To start this posting, I have included a hasty photo of my back garden -- not simply to show how poor a gardener I am -- but to show the sort of image that might be produced from a compact digital camera on the Auto setting. (Just point and shoot!) It wouldn't surprise me to learn that this is the setting that most people use on their digital cameras, even when their devices are capable of some creative decision-making by the photographer... It is a JPEG image straight out of the camera, apart from being scaled down in size to be more Internet-friendly. What do you think about the resulting colours? I think they are too blue.

I regard a camera as principally an image recording device, able to make a record of light in a moment of time. The matter of reliable colour reproduction is rather more complicated: I understand that museums and art galleries sometimes use multiple monochrome images and colour filters in order to accurately record colours for posterity... Therefore, wishing for reference colour from a camera could be big ask!

When film cameras were the norm, achieving even reasonable colour was a challenge for the enthusiast. Kodachrome slide film helped reduce the number of variables, but still left correct exposure and light temperature (white balance) up to the photographer. Consumer print film and mini processing labs made things even more unpredictable. No wonder that black and white film was still readily available decades after colour film entered the market.

Digital photography seemed to offer a new freedom for enthusiasts. Using a computer and printer, colour printing could now be done at home -- with better results than the consumer film processing labs. Photographic film and processing became a niche market. And digital cameras should have produced consistent colour results, regardless of the make and model of camera? Er, no, not in practice.

The camera manufacturers realised that most people don't actually prefer realistic colours, and found that by boosting certain colours, the digital results were more appealing. Consumers were inclined to choose the digital cameras that made the colours "pop", rather than the cameras that more faithfully captured the scene they had viewed. People wanted their skies to look blue and their foliage to look green, as well as their people to look healthy, even when they weren't necessarily so in life!

Once it had sunk in that my small collection of digital cameras was not doing as good a job at reproducing colours as I had assumed, I was determined to do something about it -- ideally without having to spending more money. The first thing I did was to make sure that the computer and monitor combination that I normally use to view (and sometimes post-process) my images was calibrated. I have a Mac, so this was easy to do without needing to use an external device and associated software. This helped me to see better what was wrong with my photographs.

My memory for colour, like many (most?) people, is not reliable, so I needed some sort of colour reference that I could photograph and then compare with the results. I could have bought a purpose-manufactured colour card -- probably with related software -- but decided that I had the materials and it wouldn't take me all that long to make my own. (I used Cotman watercolours and Cotman 90 lb Not paper.) The result is shown here, and measures 16 cm by 12 cm in real life. Most of the colours were taken from a paintbox which has been equipped with a secondary palette.

To use my colour reference, I position it close to the monitor, and photograph it with the camera I wish to check -- using the Custom White Balance setting adjusted for the natural daylight illumination. I find it helps to increase exposure by 2/3 EV over normal exposures. It only takes a matter of seconds to view the resulting image on the computer, and I judge by eye as to how well it resembles the reference. Then I make a slight adjustment in the Custom Color settings in the camera, and keep repeating the process till I feel I have the closest match. Not very hi-tech, but it works for me... (Fortunately, the compact digital camera that I used here has a limited amount of individual control over red, green and blue colours -- something surprisingly not available in some more expensive DSLR cameras.)

For comparison, I conclude with another photograph of my back garden taken only a few seconds later, using the same camera as before, but this time with the adjustments that I feel produce a more pleasing and realistic result. You are free to disagree of course; but it looks more like my garden to me and I'm happier. Perhaps the greens are still a touch on the blue side though?... (For the record, the camera was a Canon PowerShot S95 in P mode, with Custom Color set to Saturation -1, Contrast -1, Sharpness +1, Red +1, Green 0, Blue -2 and Skin Tone +1. Exposure used Custom White Balance.)

Now made in China

When I first started dabbling more seriously with watercolours in early 2012, my Winsor and Newton  Cotman paints were labelled as being made in England. Not long afterwards, the packaging was revised on all ranges, and to ring in the changes, the labelling on the Cotman range indicated that it was made in France. Now -- perhaps predictably -- Cotman paints are made in China.

Snippets of information on the Internet reveal that this came about because Winsor and Newton is a part of ColArt. The W& N paint manufacturing factory in Harrow was closed in 2012, and production transferred to the Lefranc & Bourgeois factory in France. As of the time of writing the Cotman and Galeria ranges are now manufactured in China.

Humbrol paints -- popular with model makers -- followed a different path a number of years ago, but also ended up being manufactured in China. Then, users started to complain about quality control in the Chinese-made paints. Some paints were so viscous as to be unusable. Other tinlets contained paint with poor covering power. Matt paint dried satin or gloss. Not at all like the old reliable Humbrol paint from Marfleet, Hull. Thankfully, Hornby Hobbies (the owner of the Humbrol brand) took notice of the adverse comments, and brought paint production back to the UK -- and quality seems to have since improved.

Hopefully, Winsor and Newton have done their research, and will not repeat the Humbrol mistakes. With its quality somewhere between artists' and students' watercolours, Cotman may not be unduly affected by the move to China. But it would be a pity if in the pursuit of profits for shareholders, the Winsor and Newton reputation for reliability and quality is lost.

Who Downed Roger Coverley?

Today, 15th September 2015, marks the 75th anniversary of what the United Kingdom remembers as Battle of Britain Day, recalling a Sunday in September 1940 when it was made clear that Fighter Command of the Royal Air Force (RAF) was still very much in being. An invasion of Great Britain was postponed two days later. Sadly, it was also the day that the body of Flying Officer W.H. "Roger" Coverley was found hanging from his parachute, caught in the top branches of a tall tree near Tunbridge Wells in Kent. F/O Coverley had been shot down eight days earlier during the first Luftwaffe daylight attack on London, his aircraft crashing near Tonbridge.

It is not this "downing" that I am interested in, but an earlier shooting down of F/O Coverley on 25th August 1940, as recorded by his commanding officer, Squadron Leader Sandy Johnstone in his book Spitfire Into War. Coverley and Johnstone were both pilots of No. 602 City of Glasgow Squadron, a well-trained and well-organised unit formerly based in Scotland. They were sent with their squadron to Westhampnett in Sussex, at the height of the Battle of Britain in August 1940 to replace a depleted Hurricane fighter squadron, and soon found themselves in action.

I read Sandy Johnstone's account in the late 1980s on the recommendation of a friend, and I remember being enthralled by this account of a close call during a sortie on 25th August:

. . . A quick glance in the mirror showed a 109 glued to my tail, when I pulled back hard on the stick, expecting it to pass underneath. But he was a wily character and clung on, while I continued to urge every last ounce of power out of the trusty Merlin. But it was too much for it. I suddenly flicked over in a violent stall turn.

   The manoeuvre must have taken Jerry by surprise, for he hesitated momentarily and, before he could get out of the way, I was almost on top of him as he presented a broadside target, which even I could not miss. I can still see the look of agonised surprise on the German’s face when his canopy shattered around him and the Messerschmitt went into an uncontrollable flat spin, from which it never recovered. I followed him down until he crashed into a spinney on the outskirts of Dorchester and burst into flames.

Earlier in this action, Sandy had also shot down a Messerschmitt Bf 110 twin-engined fighter, as he mentioned that the entire tail unit exploded and the crew baled out. It was noted that the squadron lost two aircraft in the engagement: Sergeant M.H. Sprague baled out over the sea and was rescued a Walrus amphibious aircraft; Flying Officer W.H. (Roger) Coverley baled out of his blazing Spitfire over Gloucestershire, but was unhurt.

In the early 1990s, I discovered the existence of the book The Battle of Britain Then and Now, and soon acquired my own copy. (The Mark V edition.) A must-have for students of the Battle of Britain! As well as an abundance of photographs, and histories of all the fighter aerodromes involved in the Battle, the book contains the daily damage and loss records from all units on both sides involved in the conflict between July and October 1940.

It then occurred to me that I could use the Luftwaffe's daily loss records to tie-in with Sandy Johnstone's account. In theory, yes, but I found that considering the number of aircraft involved -- and the number that crashed into the English Channel -- it is difficult to link losses to a particular squadron, let alone a pilot!

But what of Sandy's Bf 109 that crashed near Dorchester on 25th August 1940, and was so vividly described? Surprisingly, Then and Now has no clear record of it, although a Bf 109 was force-landed at Tatton House Farm, Buckland Ripers, near Weymouth. Could this be the same aircraft? (The claim went to a 152 Squadron pilot, with no mention of 602 Squadron involvement.) Four twin-engined Bf 110s from four different units are listed as missing around the time of the engagement, only one of which crashed on land -- so one of these could have been the aircraft that lost its tail after Johnstone attacked it? But no German aircraft are recorded as having crashed near Dorchester on this day.

The 602 Squadron losses do tally with Sandy's account: Sergeant M. H. Sprague baled out unhurt and was rescued from the sea, while his aircraft crashed into the sea off Portland. But there is a startling difference in the entry for Roger Coverley, which I reproduce in full. Spitfire P9381. Shot down in combat with enemy fighters over Dorchester. Crashed and burned out on Galton Heath 5.47 p.m. Flying Officer W.H. Coverley baled out unhurt. Aircraft a write-off.

Galton Heath appears to have been closer to Warmwell than Dorchester. It is certainly not Gloucestershire, which would be something like 100 miles away to the north west as the crow flies! Sandy Johnstone's recollections are in general remarkably accurate, but this seems like an anomaly. I hate to suggest it, but there is a hint that this might have been a blue on blue incident, but we will probably never know -- and it is not important.

What is important is that 75 years ago a group of young pilots -- supported by capable men and women on the ground -- resisted the onslaught of what had been an unstoppable force of death and destruction, and prevented a hostile invasion of Great Britain. They, The Few, are my heroes: I will always remember them and the sacrifices they made for freedom.