Month: May 2023

Sandal Motte, 1964

Sandal Castle, 1964

More of my 127 mm black and white negatives (colour added in Photoshop) and this is the climb up the motte at Sandal Castle in 1964.

This is looking back to the south-east across the bailey with the ruins of the Great Hall on the left and the Presence Chamber on the right, with the houses along Manygates Lane, Sandal, beyond.

Milnthorpe Woods lay in that direction along the ridge and it has been suggested that this was the weak point for the castle, the route the Lancastrian force from Pontefract Castle was likely to have taken when they attacked the castle in the Battle of Wakefield, on 30 December, 1460.

Link

Sandal Castle

booklet

Sandal Castle my illustrated guide

Paperback, 32 pages,
black and white, £2.95, post free in the UK.

Thornes Park

Also available in the same format, £2.99:

Thornes Park, where there was once an unlicensed castle, perhaps a bit of rival to Sandal.

Chairs

The view from the waiting room is of a blank pebble-dashed wall, so I get another chance to practice drawing chairs. The blue chair was drawn using my usual method, lifting my hand from the paper frequently to check proportion and having a couple of goes at a line where necessary. The red chairs were drawn (almost) without lifting my pen from the paper. The disadvantage of this method is that for most of the time most of the drawing is covered, but I do like the wayward wobbly line that this results in.

Moth Orchid

Our Phalaenopsis orchid, also known as the moth orchid, is doing well on the kitchen windowsill. It probably appreciates the sometimes steamy atmosphere. We’ve kept it in the transparent plastic pot it came in as it’s important for the roots to be exposed to light, although the transparent pot is inside a plant holder, so it doesn’t get the full sun.

Pelargonium

Pelargonium

After a year, our zonal pelargonium is beginning to look a bit leggy.

Drawn in Procreate on the iPad using the Tinderbox virtual pen from the Inking section. Having got through all three of my PenTips 2 soft Apple Pencil tips, I’m now back to a plain Apple Pencil tip but the canvas texture of the PenTips Magnetic Matte Screenprotector is working well for me, an improvement on drawing on the iPad’s glass screen.

Stitched Up

I struggled to identify this flower, photographed with my iPhone as we walked around Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust’s Idle Valley reserve a couple of weeks ago. I think what’s happened is that greater stitchwort flowers are growing up amongst the foliage of some kind of cranesbill.

It was drawn in Procreate on the iPad but if I’d been drawing from the actual plant in my sketchbook I might have realised that they’d got mixed up.

Unless you can suggest the identity of a plant with stitchwort-type flowers and cranesbill-style leaves?

Spires

Spires cartoon

From crocketed to classical, gothic to plastic, happy birthday to superfast sketcher (and meticulous painter) Helen.

Hill Country

landscape

Another colourised dip into the envelope of my negatives from 1964 and this one is a mystery. As I develop the other photographs I’ll get a better clue to the locations that I visited during that year. I still have a Letts’ Schoolboy’s Diary from that year which should give me some clues.

Horbury, 1964

Horbury Church, 1964

I took this photograph of Horbury St Peter’s Church in 1964. That’s Ingham’s upholstery workshop and hardware store on the left. The advertisement was for Royal hardboard. I’ve colourised this photograph and the yellow and blue are as I remember them (but possibly not as they actually were).

I was using an Ilford Sprite 127mm camera and developing my own film at the time. This proved to be such a disaster that it’s only now, sixty years later, that, using my scanner and Adobe Photoshop, I can salvage images from the scratched, uneven home-developing disaster.

original photograph

Dipping into the envelope of negatives is like opening a time capsule. Some of the locations I’m having difficulty recognising.

town hall

Not this one though which is Horbury Town Hall, which still looks very much like this today.

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Categorized as Drawing