Author: Richard

The Night before the Night Before

The Night before Christmas rough

The night before Christmas: ‘a fire place with roaring fire & stockings hung down. Maybe a chair & table & treats left out for Santa on the table . . .’

That’s what we’re aiming for, now all we have to do is work out how to fit all that into the Redbox Gallery, the old telephone box on Queen Street, Horbury.

Christmas set rough

I’m designing the stage set and it will be up to the local Brownies to add the decorations. I think that I could fit a small fireplace diagonally across the far corner of the box but that doesn’t leave any room for a table and chair, so I’m imagining those as illustrated cut-outs, as if we were looking at a pop-up Christmas card.

The View from the Terrace

Newmillerdam

This morning our pond had frozen over but a month from today the days will start getting longer.

On the little roof terrace at the Boathouse Cafe, Newmillerdam, black-headed gulls glide past the castellated balustrade a few feet away from me at eye level, a fluid, effortlessly elegant flight. A grebe preens out on the lake, a male goosander swims by, crisply black and white in the low winter sun.

A coot calls tetchily, mallards quack and the smell of fresh coffee drifts up from the kitchen below.

Whitby Ammonites

Ammonite in boulder clay cliff
ammonite cartoon

As we walked along the beach between Sandsend and Whitby on Friday morning, I spotted this ammonite fossil embedded in the boulder clay cliff. The closely spaced ribs are almost straight, so that it reminded me of a section of reinforced hosepipe.

Dactylioceras was a slow swimming ammonite from the Early Jurassic. This looks like a fragment of the shell of Dactylioceras tenuicostatum, a common fossil found in the Whitby Mudstone Formation at locations such as Port Mulgrave.

calcite crystals

The hollow chamber inside the shell has been filled with calcite crystals.

Hildoceras

Hildoceras ammonite fossil

Hildoceras, also from the Early Jurassic has sickle-shaped ribs and a groove along the triple-keeled groove along the outer edge of the shell.

Hildoceras keel
Triple-keeled groove of Hildoceras

Hildoceras features on the title page of my book Yorkshire Rock, a journey through time, which was published 25 years ago by the British Geological Survey (see link below).

Yorkshire Rock

There’s a folktale that they’re the fossilised remains of serpents, driven from the cliff top at Whitby by Abbess St Hilda.

Link

Yorkshire Rock, a journey through time at my website Willow Island Editions

S’mores Kronut

Drawing the dogs and trying the s’mores kronut, a cross between a croissant and a donut, at the ØL cafe in Horbury this morning.

dogs

The dogs took so much interest in their surroundings that they soon wound their leads around table legs and chair legs.

Howgate Wonder

Howgate Wonder apple branch

We had seven or eight Howgate Wonder cooking apples from our double cordon by the patio this year, enough to stew to add to our porridge for a week or two.

Rowan

rowan leaf

I’ve done so much black and white work recently that I thought it was time to return to base and go back to brown Lamy pen and my Bijou watercolours to draw this rowan leaf from the front garden. Unfortunately my Pentel Water Brush is all but clogged up now, so the watercolour wash is a bit limited.

Published
Categorized as Drawing Tagged

Pots of Pens

pots of pens

Mustard pot, yogurt container and treacle tins on my shelf in the studio.

Published
Categorized as Drawing