There isn’t time to add colour when drawing passers-by and when I start writing notes it soon gets a bit complicated. ‘B’, for instance, could stand for blue, black or brown.
I’ve used the colour printer’s CMYK – cyan, magenta, yellow and ‘key’ colour, which is usually black.
A capital letter indicates a strong or darker colour, lower case a paler version, so my ‘gB’ is supposed to indicate blue with a touch of green in it.
I’ve drawn ducks, pond life, trees and flowers at Newmillerdam, so I thought that it was about time that I turned my attention to the people visiting the country park.
These guys weren’t actually feeding the ducks, just taking a break on a bench by the war memorial.
I’m drawing this with a scratchy dip pen with an F. Collins & Co. Tower Pen brass nib, made in Manchester. The elegant pen holder, which I bought in France, has a satisfyingly robust brass ferule at the business end and a dangerously sharp point at the end that is nearest your eye.
I’m using Rohrer’s Black which, of course, isn’t as free-flowing as the inks that I use in my Lamy fountain pens but it has a dense ‘inky blackness’.
It felt awkward drawing the pepper, as if I was drawing everything overhand. Perhaps if I’d been drawing it facing the other way, the curves would have felt more natural to draw: they might have sloped more naturally, like the slope of cursive handwriting.
Home-grown
But the scratchy line suited the wayward growth of the plant. I grew it from the seeds of a pepper from the supermarket, using our own home-made compost.
We’ve had only two peppers and we’ve used them green as they were showing no sign of turning yellow or red. They’re not as fleshy as the supermarket variety, but they’ve got more of a fresh crunch to them.
We grew peppers last year from seeds that a neighbour gave us. This year’s have a better flavour: last year’s were rather bitter, perhaps because of the weather or the variety.
Florence celebrated her birthday and moved up from Woodland School to Primary a few weeks ago, so my card was a tribute to Leo Baxendale and David Sutherland of the Bash Street Kids comic strip in the Beano. One of the highlights for me of V&A at Dundee was the original artwork for a Bash Street spread.
Florence moved up schools but sadly that’s not the case for schoolgirls in Afghanistan as secondary schools are not strictly male pupils and staff only.
“I am so worried about my future,” said one Afghan schoolgirl who had hoped to be a lawyer.
“Everything looks very dark. Every day I wake up and ask myself why I am alive? Should I stay at home and wait for someone to knock on the door and ask me to marry him? Is this the purpose of being a woman?”
Speaking to the BBC, her father said: “My mother was illiterate, and my father constantly bullied her and called her an idiot. I didn’t want my daughter to become like my mum.”
It’s a change to draw a duck that doesn’t need an an animated bill like the cartoon characters that I’ve been drawing recently, although as I drew I was listening to the great Yorkshire accent of one of the customers at the cafe who was giving a blow-by-blow account of his team’s weekend football match and thinking that he’d be perfect for one of my ducks.
Dragonflies zoomed around us and rested briefly on the path as we made the full circuit of RSPB St Aidan’s reserve. They were flying high too and a hobby was making the most of it, arcing high above the reedbeds to catch and eat them on the wing.
A few spoonbills were resting amongst the reedbeds by one of the lagoons.
Michaelmas Daisy and drone fly.
Alongside three ringed plovers on one of the lagoons was a little stint, a wader no bigger than a robin.
We took a break halfway around at the Rivers Meet Craft Cafe, crossing the railway at a level crossing by the former station and passing this Victorian postbox.
Craft Cafe
Just in case you couldn’t find everything you needed in the craft shop at the Rivers Meet, the Mobile Haberdashery van had called.
Fifty or sixty years later, our local patch of countryside down by the river and canal in the Calder Valley near Wakefield isn’t the place where, as a boy, I could wander at will with my friends. There were no public footpath signs in those days, so the presumption was that we were free to explore any well-worn path.
Old mineral railway from Hartley Bank Colliery to Horbury Bridge.
As an art student, I shot a short and suitably arthouse Standard 8 film on location in the valley, including a scene in which my brother and his friends, who were roped in as the cast, run along the top of the derelict colliery railway embankment that straddles the floodplain between the river and canal.
A few years later, as I started trying to make a living as a natural history illustrator, I painted a detailed acrylic of a bramble bush drawn on the embankment, which was then greening up enough to attract local wildlife, including a rabbit and a song thrush that I included, life size, in the composition. I exhibited, and immediately sold, the painting at the Ruskin School in Oxford, and the painting was featured on the cover of The Artist magazine, so the old mineral railway provided me with inspiration, some welcome publicity and a much-needed financial lifeline in my attempts to keep my head above water as a freelance illustrator.
So do I think that it’s a shame that I can’t now walk along what is now could be a short railway walk nature trail? Not necessarily: as it’s now out of bounds behind a high and spiky security fence, it acts as a pocket-sized conservation area where birds can nest with minimum disturbance.
In so many ways, my local patch has improved since my childhood. It’s hard to look over this view from The Balk, Netherton, and remember that in the 1970s the recently mown field, below the sandstone ridge of Hartley Bank Wood, was an opencast mine with just the pylon left in place, standing on a pillar.
You wouldn’t now guess that the spoil heaps of Hartley Bank Colliery extended over most of this southern side of the valley. Now restored to farmland, the naturalist in me still kind of wishes that the barren slopes of red shale and muddy gulleys between could have been left to natural regeneration. I suspect that fifty years later, we would now have wall-to-wall birch, ash, sycamore and oak woodland, rather than the patchwork of heath, wetland and meadow that it might have become in my imagination.
At the old lock-keeper’s cottage, the Rottweiller is really as intelligent as those graffitied reading glasses suggest but although he’s better looking than in his security guard mugshot, he doesn’t sport a handlebar moustache.
As I walk into the woods above the Boathouse at Newmillerdam, I feel as if I should be switching a light on. The leaf mosaic – still green – of the tall, straight-trunked beeches cut out so much of the light on what is already a dull and overcast morning. Not surprisingly, it’s this white fungus on a sawn-off stump that catches my eye.
On the pond cam, apart from the usual wood pigeon, the goldfinches have been coming down to drink, one of them fluttering low over the surface before realising that the duckweed isn’t going to be a safe surface to land on.
We feel that we’re getting some of our autumn regulars back at the bird table: a regular nuthatch, a single long-tailed tit and, swooping through at top speed, a large (so probably female) sparrowhawk, which soon went off and put up a flock of goldfinches which were probably feeding on thistle seeds in the meadow.
We haven’t recorded a fox at the end of the garden on the trail cam for weeks now so, as we’ve recently trimmed back around the pond and scooped out the duckweed, I’ve set up my Browning Strike Force Pro XD trail cam there. This morning at 10 it recorded a dunnock (above) followed a few minutes later by a house sparrow.
Ten minutes earlier this greenfinch had been down at the pond’s edge.
It looks as if it’s drying itself off after bathing but, if it had been, the camera didn’t catch it. I need to clear out the last of the duckweed to give the birds better access.
At eleven o’clock yesterday the inevitable wood pigeon waddled by and a squirrel bounded along, slightly blurred on the photograph.
With a closer camera angle and a bit of stage management of duckweed and pebbles, this could be the perfect spot for a back garden stake-out.
