I’m delighted to have made it into the Pink Pig catalogue (educational version) which has just dropped through the door. This is a sketch I made of the railway embankment in my Holly Green Sketchbook.
I feel it’s appropriate that I live just five miles from what might well be Great Britain’s biggest sketchbook factory, the rate that I get through them. On several occasions I’ve called there to pick up a bundle of a particular size of sketchbook, most recently I upgraded to their own brand of 270 gsm watercolour paper, Ameleie, in an 8 x 8 inch format which I’m intending to reproduce in print using one of the digital book printing services.
If you’re sharp-eyed you might spot a couple more extracts from my Holly Green Sketchbook in the catalogue and by coincidence I’m sharing a page with fellow ex-Leeds and Royal College of Art student, John Ross. John spent most of his time at the RCA in printmaking, mainly in etching, ultimately producing The Biggin Hill Frescoes. My Royal College publication was A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield.
John’s got as far as Andalusia but here I am still beetling away with my sketchbook in the country round Wakefield.
(That’s not quite the whole story because John recently spent a year in a project to restore the most Gothic of Huddersfield’s leafy parks, Beaumont Park).
Link; Pink Pig sketchbooks (they supply direct to the public but you might be lucky enough to find a stock of assorted Pink Pigs in your local art shop, which enables you to get the feel of them).
Another link; my work also appears in a newly revamped website of Simply Fires. A small detail but I think it gives the site a warm and friendly look; which is just right for a family firm that supplies wood-burning and multi-fuel stoves!
The drawing of the coal bucket on their contact page was one I made when I stayed at Langsett Youth Hostel, which had just had a new stove fitted. Sadly, ten years later, the Youth Hostel has now closed, which is a shame because they would have been guaranteed a full house in ten days from now when the Grand Depart of the Tour de France passes within a hundred yards of their front door.
Looking back at this post, I have to say that I am very fond of my Pink Pigs (which I originally bought because you recommended them) 8 x 8. Bought a bunch and so I haven’t checked them for some years and didn’t know about their landscape size.