Seed heads of tansy, from a rough verge in Ossett and yarrow from a grassy area at Newmillerdam.
On Monday morning wisps of thin vapour blew over the surface of the ice. There was a hollow clacking as a child three chunks of ice and rock onto the frozen surface of the lake.
One of a family of four swans touching down at the far side of the overshot the landing site and went skimming along the watery surface of the ice. A drake mallard landing on ice near the open area by the war memorial did something similar but managed to do an about turn and slid back towards the other ducks he’d landed with.
Mallards at the Boathouse Cafe yesterday and the Calder below the weir from the Hepworth Cafe today.
Drawn with Lamy Safari, ‘M’ nib, Lamy ink, plus a bit of Pentel Brush Pen.
I like that these trainers are made from recycled materials and, as the name suggests they’re light and flexible. Amazingly they’re available in my size: 13, a size that other manufacturers seem to have more or less given up on.
Toebox
The only problem is that as they’ve got such a minimal toebox they seem to be crushing one particular toenail – the second largest – on my right foot. Possibly there’s a bit of a crease in the uppers when I lace them up. I can’t say for definite but I first noticed that I had a bruised and broken nail after walking a few miles in them.
After that I wore them just for around town or going out for a meal, but so often after I’ve worn them I notice it’s happened again. Perhaps just running up the stairs can be enough to break the nail.
100 day trial
Vivobarefoot do a 100-day trial, so you can return them for a full refund if you have any problems, however I liked these so much that I’ve hung on to them for far longer than that, so these will be going to their Take Back Programme. Last year they ‘received 2,600 pairs of old Vivos, which were refurbished for resale or saved from landfill’.
I started this sketchbook 50 years ago today, on Thursday 21st December 1972, title inspired by hearing Gawain and the Green Knight on the radio on the Monday. I’d stocked up on Daler 10×7 inch sketchbooks the day before in Leeds, buying a year’s supply as I suspected that size was about to be discontinued and I thought that A4 was just bit too large, A5 a bit too small. But 10×8 was just right!
But coming back to 50 years ago today . . .
At Hartley Bank Wood from my A5 page-a-day diary
I recorded in my regular diary that after a morning Christmas post round which I didn’t get back from until 1.20 pm (‘longer than expected; almost missed Pogles Wood; but watched the programme on Verulamium), I ‘did a couple of sketches down Addingford’.
Helpfully a passing dog walker, a school boy with a red setter, advised me that ‘You should come here in the spring, there are bluebells all over.’
The red setter was barking. ‘I don’t think he likes you said the boy’. Probably he realised that I was a postman. Temporarily.
Here’s Hartley Bank, an outcrop of sandstone, with its scarp edge wood of sessile oaks, as it is today, photographed this afternoon (disclaimer: barbed wire and electric fence in foreground removed in Adobe Lightroom!)
But 50 years ago a railway embankment follow the line of the hedge coming down the slope at the left edge of the wood. I must have paused to draw the willow on my walk home, before crossing part of the Hartley Bank Colliery spoil heap, which a few years later was opencast and landscaped and restored as farmland.
The cat curled up in the Windsor chair is Burke.
My students living next door to me in the college hostel must have cursed Ray Piggott and his wife for suggesting that I learn the recorder but they should be grateful that the musical couple dissuaded me from taking up the violin!
Just one last art bag, a Jack Wolfskin crossover bag that’s just the right size for an 8×8 inch (approx.) Pink Pig sketchbook. This is supposed to be a more serious version of a natural history art bag, including Olympus Tough camera, hand lens, pocket microscope, a geologist’s grain sorting chart and a monocular, the latter not likely to be useful as I’d always have my binoculars with me on a field trip.
The Winsor & Newton watercolour box is a bit of a work in progress. It is still basically the palette of colours that I took with me on my Richard Bell’s Britain sketching trip over 40 years ago but today I’d replace one of the reds with a permanent rose or magenta and the charcoal grey with a neutral tint or Paynes grey.
Also possibly on the transfer list would be the viridian and the dark greeny blue (indrathone?).
I might try and build up a palette that would be particularly useful for wild flowers, including an alternative violet or purple.
Do I really need a Pacsafe Anti-theft Crossover Bag for a sketchbook and a few pens?
Well it saved the day on a quiet cobbled back street in Avignon when three nimble-fingered young women padded along behind us and got as far as unzipping both my bag and Barbara’s. I think that I might have felt the slightest of tugs but what made me turn around was that I happened to tread on a piece of plastic.
The young women smiled and hurried on ahead, but luckily our passports were still in Barbara’s bag. I’m not sure that they would have been so very pleased to have fished my travel sketchbook from the bag but I would have been upset to lose it.
There’s space for twelve half pans of Winsor & Newton Professional Watercolours in their Bijou box if you slot extras into the space where you could keep a little brush.
Along with two Lamy pens filled with De Atramentis Sepia Brown ink – my favourite colour for drawing natural history subjects – I’ve got a TWSBI Eco T fountain pen, also filled with sepia and with a fine nib that gives a line that reminds me of when I used to work with a fine-nibbed dip pen with a Gillot 1950 nib.
As this bag is for natural history, rather than swanning around town, I’ve got a Silva key-fob compass and thermometer attached and a Buff and a pair of clip on sunglasses (Chemistrie ‘eyewear that clicks’, thanks to tiny magnets in my regular varifocal glasses) stowed away in one of the pockets inside.
My urban sketching bag, a Trespass Mini Belt Bag, just right for an A6 landscape Seawhite travel journal, a small box of Winsor & Newton watercolours and Pentel Aquash water brush, a Pentel brush pen and Lamy fountain pens filled with black De Atramentis ink, except the yellow Lamy Safari which has a regular Lamy ink cartridge.
Sadly the pen that didn’t make it into the final selection was my Lamy Vista with an extra fine nib. After several refills and flushings out the ink still isn’t flowing into the nib.
My friend John Welding headed for the Hepworth garden this morning but even he didn’t last long in the -2 ‘but feels like -4’ temperature. I headed straight to the Barbara Hepworth sculpture gallery for another attempt at this rock at the foot of the weir.
Why so many Lamy pens? Well I’ve got fine, extra fine and bold nibbed pens filled with sepia brown De Atramentis ink for natural history and another set filled with black for general sketching and for comics. Plus two for lettering and one with a non-waterproof black cartridge.
The Lamy ink in the cartridge just a bit more freely than the De Atramentis, so I use that for quick sketches when I’m not going to go add a watercolour wash, such as yesterday evening at the Wakefield Naturalists’ Society.
I’ve drawn a sketch which is a combination of some of the poses of the Canada geese that I photographed last week.
Our next assignment in the Domestika course, Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate with Román García Mora is to roughly drawn in the underlying bones. For this I referred to a photograph of a goose skeleton that I’d found on the internet.
Next the main muscles. If goose has its wings folded the cover the top leg muscles and the body muscles such as the large breast muscles, the Pectoralis. I’ll try this exercise with a four-footed animal where all that will be more visible.
But at least if I’m called up to carve a roast goose this Christmas I’ll have a vague idea about what’s going on.
Colour added using the neural filters in Photoshop.
Today, for the first time, we’re visiting – snow over Sheffield permitting – what was the Swift family home on Nether Edge Road, Sheffield. Number 77 was where my mum, Gladys Joan Swift spent her childhood but 82 years ago tomorrow, on the evening of the 12th December 1940, it was damaged beyond repair by an incendiary bomb in the Sheffield Blitz.
The Rolls Royce in the driveway looks impressive but the explanation for that is that my grandad was a funeral director.
Here’s my mum (on the right) with her neighbour Marjorie from number 81.
Living next door was my mum’s grandma, Sarah Ann Swift. She didn’t join my mum and her parents, Maurice and Ann Swift, in their stoutly built concrete air raid shelter at the end of the garden on the night of the raid, preferring to stay in her cellar, but unfortunately her side of the semi-detached house, number 79, was so badly damaged in the raid that she had to be rescued through the coal chute, along with her little dog Queenie.
To judge by the photographs, those two went everywhere together. She bought herself a house in another part of Sheffield when she was made homeless by the raid . . . a house that would cause a bit of a stir when she didn’t leave it to her son Maurice (my grandad) in her will. He felt as he’d paid off her mortgage he would be in line to inherit it. Why he didn’t I’m still not entirely sure . . .
My grandparents Ann and Maurice get the Photoshop neural colorisation filter treatment. I wonder what colour Ann was wearing?
My mum gave the impression that Maurice could be a difficult character and I think that is borne out by the fact that on my mum and dad’s wedding photograph, taken at the end of the war, he is the only guest who isn’t smiling!
Like Great Grandma Sarah Ann, he’s a character I would have liked to have got the chance to get to know. I remember him and I was fascinated by his interest in home movies – wish we still had those.
He had some talent as an artist and, I believe, as a designer of furniture. Here’s watercolour drawn when he was aged 13, which I think would have been in 1890.
