Yorkshire colour swatches for a Dalesman article that I’m working on. Unfortunately it hasn’t been so colourful today.
The hill-top ruin is Sandal Castle where Richard of York gave battle in vain, resulting in the mnemonic for remembering the traditional colours of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
There’s some discussion about whether indigo should really be in there. It’s a useful colour in my larger watercolour box but I’m not sure whether I can really see it in a rainbow.
Novelist Stan Barstow at Lumb Bank, leading an Arvon Foundation creative writing course, 1975. Drawn from a photograph, photographer not credited, in his 2001 autobiography, In My Own Good Time.
This is the first drawing I’ve made using Procreate on my iPad Pro for quite a while. I used one of the new brushes from the latest version of the program: the Bellerive brush from the Pens folder. It approximates my Lamy fountain pen drawings.
In her studio in Wakefield’s Art House, down in the southern corner of Yorkshire’s Rhubarb Triangle, textile artist Kirstie Williams is checking out the possibilities of rhubarb root as a natural dye.
She creates swatches using traditional dyestuffs, such as oak bark, madder root and marigold heads, but recently she’s also experimented with avocado.
Rhubarb root gives a buff orange dye, a colour described by Scottish painter Patrick Syme in his 1821 version of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours as resembling the ‘Streak from the Eye of the King Fisher.’
Farrow & Ball colour chart and facsimile of Syme’s 1821 catalogue of colours.
Rhubarb & Iron
Kirstie found that adding an iron mordant resulted in a deeper brown, described by Syme as a Reddish Orange, resembling the ‘Lower Wings of the Tyger Moth.’
A mordant combines with the dye and helps it adhere to material.
On the Farrow & Ball colour chart, I’d go for Fowler Pink and Red Earth as nearest matches to the rhubarb root dye, without and with the iron mordant.
In the Winsor & Newton range of watercolours the nearest to Syme’s Buff Orange is Naples Yellow Deep and his Reddish Orange is equivalent to their Brown Ochre.
In real life my shoe is charcoal grey
I wouldn’t want too many earthy colours in my watercolour box, it can get confusing. I’ve tried to mix something similar from yellow ochre and sepia, but the colour hasn’t caught the character of Kirstie’s experiments.
Soda Ash
Rhubarb root with soda ash modifier.
Kirstie’s Soda Ash modified rhubarb dye is something close to Farrow & Ball’s Calamine.
Rhubarb dye with soda ash.
I wondered what my studio might look like if I went for one of these rhubarb-themed colours:
Photograph, Kirstie Williams
Thanks to Farrow & Ball’s AI-generated ability to try it on a photograph of your own room, I can try out the effect without committing myself. For a studio I’ll stick to white, but I’d quite like Red Earth for an old-fashioned study or library.
On a recent rainy walk along the shores of Lake Windermere, my seven year old haversack was the worse for wear, the rubberised lining disintegrating, so I chose this Osprey Daylite Plus for our latest walk on the Thames path a couple of weeks ago.
I drew in bamboo pen in Noodler’s black ink and, as the blotty bits are going to take a long time to dry, I photographed the drawing, rather than putting it on the scanner.
My thanks to Florence for this portrait, drawn at Isabel and Declan’s wedding celebration in Mexborough last month. Colour added by me in Adobe Illustrator. That’s how I’d like to look (I requested a bit more hair on top) so I’ll update my social media.
Setting out for the celebrations, I packed everything that I needed for sketching – fountain pens, water-brush, A6 sketchbook – then forgot to pack the bag itself, so for the weekend it was back to basics, borrowing Barbara’s Uniball signo gel pen, which is great for drawing, and her notebook, which luckily is unlined.
View from our room at the Pastures Grange Best Western Hotel.
Five minutes walk down the road from our hotel, the Pastures Grange at Mexborough, Denaby Ings Yorkshire Wildlife Trust nature reserve lies alongside the river on the Doncaster and Worksop extension of the Trans-Pennine Trail. Gadwall and heron joined mallards, coot and moorhen on a small reed-fringed lagoon.
After the buffet . . .
As soon as the music started I had to give up any attempt at chatting and switched to drawing.
Florence joined me and we took turns with the one-and-only sketchbook.
I was impressed by the way she caught the action of the dancers, including the bride performing a forward roll.
A watercolour workshop led by Neil Pittaway at the Rich & Fancy Cafe in Horbury on Sunday was an opportunity for me to try some alternative techniques to my regular tried-and-tested approach.
Masking tape experiment.
I remember one piece of advice that I’d heard years ago which was that you should never paint with watercolour straight from the tube (or, in my case, the tray). Always mix the colour you need.
Wet-on-wet and graduated washes.
In the first exercise (top) we ignored that advice and painted swatches of the traditional primary colours – cadmium yellow, ultramarine and cadmium red – directly on the watercolour paper. When they’d dried off for a while we mixed secondary colours by painting another primary colour over each of them, so blue over the yellow gave us green and so on.
Further washes resulted in brownish or greyish tertiary colours.
Wet-on-wet.
We experimented with masking tape – Neil isn’t a great fan of masking fluid – then wet-on-wet washes and graduated washes.
For a final piece, predictably for an illustrator like me, I decided against the more spontaneous techniques – which included running the tap over your work! – and instead I went for a fairly controlled set of overlapping swatches, inspired by some Paul Klee abstract and semi-abstract watercolours we’d been looking at.
My recycled materials made-to-measure for A5 sketchbooks drawing board is proving useful as a lightweight outdoor studio/nature table.
I wouldn’t normally pick anything on a woodland trail to draw it but I don’t think anyone would object to me taking a closer look at this honey fungus, provided I don’t go spreading the spores around.
I’ve passed this old honey fungus a couple of times, deciding that I’d prefer to draw a fungus that isn’t so overgrown with dead grass stems and starting to get buried in fallen leaves.
But that’s really the story of what’s going on here. The honey fungus are returning these birch logs at the edge of the path in New Hall Wood into the leaf mould of the woodland floor.
The Amethyst cover of the sketchbook includes strands of banana fibre.
This A6 Pink Pig is my current sketchbook for when we’re off on day to day errands, so it starts, on the basis that you’ve got to start somewhere, with a very quick sketch of a block of flats in Wakefield (below, left).
A6 is a perfect size for when you haven’t got the time to do anything more ambitious.
I had a little more time for panorama from the Shelley Garden Centre.
If I haven’t got a wider view I’ll draw a close up of a plant . . .
Chinese Taro
Chinese Taro (right).
I drew Chinese Taro at another garden centre, Carr Gate. Also known as Chinese ape, Buddha’s hand and hooded dwarf elephant ear, Alocasia cuccullata, I’m surprised to learn in Wikipedia that it’s a member of the Arum family. I would have guessed at a Ficus, a relative of the rubber plant.
If nothing else is available, I’ll draw a chair. I’ve drawn them hundreds of times but I still struggle with them.
I always find myself looking for the negative shapes between the legs as a way of checking proportions. This goes right back to my grammar school art teacher Reginald Preston, who in one of his art lessons challenged us to draw a teetering pile of school chairs.
On any appointment in Horbury I can usually find an interesting architectural detail if I’m looking out on the High Street or Queen Street. It will usually be a Victorian chimney pot but this buttress above the Spice Kitchen takeaway could be much older. Some buildings in Horbury date from medieval times but the original timber is usually hidden behind later stone or brick facing.
My hand: a go-to subject when nothing else is available.
This final page, so far, includes a weeping willow in the back garden of the Quaker Meeting House on Thornhill Street, Wakefield, drawn at last week’s Naturalists’ Society meeting.
I didn’t attempt to identify the succulent in the little pot on the table at Sainsbury’s. It’s plastic.
The man of the moment: I was delighted to get the chance to interview him for an article in this month’s Dalesman.
No, not Elon Musk, who addressed the Unite the Kingdom rally in Trafalgar Square via a video link yesterday, but Wakefield comic artist and New York Times bestselling author Darryl Cunningham, who has just launched his latest book Elon Musk, American Oligarch, described by Alan Moore as “an exceptional piece of work, right when we need it most.”
September’s Dalesman also includes my regular Wild Yorkshire nature diary which focuses on Addingford Cutting, a surprisingly well hidden local landmark.
