As we sit in Pizza Express in the White Rose Centre, there’s a constant stream of passers by. As there’s so little time, I start with one man’s head but then add the next man’s body. No, that’s not going to work because everyone has a distinct overall character: Man One wore an anorak, Man Two had a brisker gait and held his head more erect.
If I mix and match, I’m not going get the jizz, as birdwatchers used to call the characteristic impression given by a particular species.
So the remaining four figures are mental snapshots. I follow a figure’s progress across the entrance hall then, only when they vanish from sight, attempt to draw the whole figure.
I add the watercolour twenty or thirty minutes later, after a Leggera Padana pizza, when the Noodler’s ink has dried. I can remember the colours of the coats pretty well but there’s a bit more guess work on the colour of trousers, bags and footwear.
Leggara Padana pizza, only 465 kcals . . . chocolate brownie to finish, er, another 235, then there’s the cappucino . . .
Reviewing my A6 postcard-sized Pink Pig landscape format sketchbook for this winter, you might think that my life has been dominated by a search for the perfect scone. It has, and we’ve got our visits to Nostell timed to coincide with when the scones emerge from the oven, however these freshly-baked scones, were at the Rich & Fancy Cafe on Queen Street, Horbury.
Woman in audience at Wakefield Naturalists’ Society.
But I don’t insist on Bake Off standard cakes to draw; I equally enjoyed drawing the salt and pepper pots and the sauce and vinegar bottles on my brother-in-law’s dining table. These drawings are all larger than they appear in my sketchbook because I like the texture of pen on cartridge paper, which I lose at screen resolution. Drawn with my favourite pen, a Lamy Safari with an extra fine nib filled with brown Noodler’s ink.
I’ve got another Lamy Safari filled with a cartridge of Lamy black ink, which I blotted with a water-brush to get this wash effect on a brooding morning at Charlottes. Again during a coffee and scone break. A pattern is emerging.
We’re having wintry showers this morningbut it’s milder so the sleety rain and wet flakes of snow are actually clearing the pavements of the snow and ice that have covered them during the last week.
We’ve decided that it’s a good day to stay put and catch up, so we’ve got a batch of dough rising above the hot water tank in the corner of the studio, ready for knocking back, and I’m delving back into my sketchbooks to catch up with my blog posts.
When I drew at Charlotte’s at the end of January, patches of snow on the distant moors were imperceptibly disappearing into the mist.
I drew these in my pocket-sized notebook, which has such small pages that you can pick it up even when you’ve only got minutes to spare.
Shopper at Trinity Walk, Wakefield.
That morning I also drew cushions on my brother-in-law John’s sofa and a crow by the boulders in the goat enclosure. They’re similar subjects; when I can’t get out to draw rocks, cushions make a reasonable substitute.
The goats love climbing and settling down at strategic look-out posts on the rocks but during the winter they’ve been confined to the stables. Hopefully they won’t have long to wait before it’s suitable for them to live in their outdoor enclosure again.
The Old Cart Shed
The old Cart Shed at Blacker Hall Farm dates from c.1620, so the old beams always appeal to me as a subject.
Holmfield Tree
The little sketchbook was handy again when at a family meal at Holmfield House in Holmfield Park, Wakefield, I drew this tree.
View from Charlotte’s Ice Cream Parlour, yesterday morning. Even in the mist and rain there’s something to draw in the panorama of the Calder Valley.Houseplant, Howarthia, a South African succulent, a member of the lily family, Filmore & Union, Redbrick Mill, Batley.
In search of a drawing for my latest Dalesman article, I’ve been delving back through my sketchbooks of ten and eleven years ago. Browsing through pages that I drew while we were travelling or at family gatherings, I realise that it’s time for me to get back into everyday sketching
As a small start, here are a few pages from my current pocket-sized Leuchtturm 1917 notebook. It’s paper isn’t intended for watercolour but, inspired by those 2007/8 sketches, I feel that colour adds a lot to rapid line drawings; not just extra information but also mood.
If you use a sketchbook as a visual diary, colour can evoke a memory more effectively than black and white.
So far, it hasn’t been a hard winter, but it has often been drearily wet so the veg beds in our garden are sodden and the paths in the wood muddier than usual, but snowdrops and winter aconites have been in flower for weeks and we do keep getting brighter days, encouraging Barbara and I to begin to thinking about setting off for the coast or the hills or to take a city break or a Eurostar break.
When we do I want the sketching habit to have become second nature.
Spurred on, I drew people on the platform at Leeds station last week, adding colour from memory later.
I’ve taken to scanning my sketches a high res, 300 dots per inch, then scaling them down for the web, but seeing the full res version on screen, I realise that I lose a lot of texture in the smaller version. In fact, I can see the drawing better blown up on the screen of my iMac than I can in the original sketch.
This figure pulling along a case is just an inch and a half tall in my sketchbook.
Hatstand at Peter’s Barber’s shop.Peter the barber, drawn yesterday in Ossett.
My iPad copy of the 1773 etching by M Darly. There’s no indication of colour in the original, so I’ve loosely based that on the Willison portrait, see below.
I was determined not to do any research for my comic strip, working title Adam and the Gargoyle, but here I go again . . .
My characters might have been reasonably convincing in the pencil roughs but, when it came to inking and resolving the details, it didn’t seem to be working. I realised that, for instance, I don’t know what kind of tailcoat my architect character, Robert Adam, might have been wearing c. 1770, when he was busy with improvements and decorative schemes for Nostell Priory.
Of course, I’m creating a pantomime version of Adam but it needs to relate the historical character so I was delighted when Google turned up a caricature, an etching dated 11th October 1773, by the prolific satirist Matthew Darly(fl. 1741-1778), now in the collections of the British Museum. It occurs to me that this might be the work of his wife Mary Darly(fl. 1756-1779), who was was also a publisher, satirist, teacher and caricaturist.
The ‘Antique Architect’, one of a series of Characters, Macaronies & Caricatures that Darly published, most probably depicts Robert Adam (1741-1797) as Robert and his brother James had recently published their first volume of Works in Architecture.
Porte Crayon
As I copied the etching on my iPad (in Clip Studio Paint, as usual), one detail that I found odd was the writing implement. It looks like a double-ended pen, topped and tailed with steel nibs, which I imagine would have been impractical to use.
Again, thanks to good old Google, I’m able to identify it as a porte crayon, a travel pencil: a piece of bamboo split at both ends to accommodate two crayon leads, with two brass rings to keep the leads in place. In the one that I’ve drawn from a photograph on an auction site, there’s red at one end and graphite at the other.
Robert Adam portrait
Image re-used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence
Hellebore: Noodler’s Ink won’t dry when it’s so cool.
Today is the first day of spring, at least meteorologically speaking, but, with a cool breeze this afternoon, the temperature here in the back garden is a wintry 45°F, 7°C.
As a change from Apple Pencil and iPad in the comfort of my studio, I decide to spend an hour drawing in the garden.
The Noodler’s Ink in my Lamy fountain pen won’t dry when it’s so cool, so I move on to a UniPin fine line fibre tip.
Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night
Perhaps encouraged by the supermoon – which was 10% brighter than the average full moon – a blackbird was singing at 2.30 this morning.
Long-tailed tits feed on the fat-balls a couple of yards away from me as I draw the hellebore.
A wood pigeon flies overhead, spots me and veers away.
A blue tit eyes me suspiciously from the feeding pole.
Snowdrops
The fibre tip isn’t fluid enough for me to work as quickly as I’d like on sketch of a log pile by the holly hedge, so I try my Lamy Safari fountain pen. Lamy ink isn’t waterproof, so it runs into my watercolour but I try to make the most of the effect.
Snowdrops do well around the pond and under the hedge at the end of our garden.
This stone lion, reclining on the lawn, always takes me by surprise as we walk past a large evergreen oak and it springs into view. Surprisingly, a real lion was once kept here in the Menagerie at Nostell Priory, just yards from the Doncaster to Wakefield turnpike road, behind a high stone wall in an old quarry. There’s a story that it once escaped and roamed around the area.
Once again it’s an iPad drawing, which has the advantage that, even after I’ve added the colour, I can hide the paint layer and turn it back into a line drawing with one tap of my Apple Pencil.
This gargoyle guards a collection of medieval finials, pillar fragments and a battered font housed in one of the stalls in the stable block at Nostell Priory.
Drawn – closely following a photograph I’d taken – in Clip Art Studio with an Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro.
I’ve taken my iPad Pro on location for the first time and drawn this view over the Calder Valley around Mirfield from the shelter of Charlotte’s Ice Cream Parlour, Whitley.
As usual, I used an Apple Pencil and the iPad version of Clip Studio Paint.
I started with the Transparent Watercolour brush then used the Uneven Layering Brush for the wet-on-wet blotches on the clouds.
On a new layer I used the pen tool with the G-pen nib to add the white patches were distant snow on the moors between Brighouse and Haworth.
I used mainly paint swatches directly from the standard palette but decided that the brown that I’d used to suggest trees and field boundaries was too dark, so I gently rubbed over it with the Soft Eraser tool.
In my art college days, back in the late 1960s and early 70s, if you looked down Manor Road, Ossett, towards the newly constructed M1 motorway (this section opened in 1968), you’d see, not the tree-fringed grassy slope Lupset Hillthat I sketched last week (left), but the spoil heaps of Roundwood Colliery.
The name Lupset might be from the Norse ‘Lufa’s, or Luppa’s Headland’.
Mosaics, presumably from a Roman villa, were reported from Lupset in the nineteenth century, but they have since disappeared. As a boy, William Briggs, a market gardener from Thornes, saw:
‘Some Roman tessellated pavements just beneath the surface in the field between Snapethorpe Hall and the road leading to Ossett (Ossett Street-side) . . . he had bared them with his cap in order to look more particularly at the pattern.’
Wakefield, Its History and People, J W Walker, Chapter II
So, if you live between the A638, which follows the course of a Roman road, the Via Vicinalis, and the site of Snapethorpe Primary School (the site of the old Hall) and you keep finding small square tesserae when you’re digging the garden, you might be on the site of a long lost Roman villa.
