Category: Drawing

Travel Sketches

AFTER OUR WEEKEND trip to Glasgow we returned to Wakefield Westgate station exactly 48 hours after we set out. Travelling by train gave me a rare chance to sketch, so here are yet more drawings from our travels that I wasn’t able to fit into my last posting. I couldn’t have done much drawing if I’d been driving but the main reason that I was able to be so productive – in terms of sketchbook pages – was getting away from the distractions of home life and running a business.

Dark Angel

It’s a 4½ journey but on the way out the daylight only lasted for the first hour and a half or so, about as far as Durham, so the grim outline of the Angel of the North was the last thing I drew. He doesn’t look like an angel about to take flight. I’d hate to look out each morning on such a doom-laden figure, weighed down by his iron wings, which are surely shackles of imprisonment rather than a means of soaring to escape. It seems churlish to say that I’d rather look out on a utility than a work of art but the pylon that stands in the field above the wood is light and airy in comparison with this grim apocalyptic figure.

Early Start

On the return trip, looking around for something to draw at Glasgow Central station, I had a wobbly attempt at the Uppercrust refreshment booth. It often takes me a while to get started in the morning. I don’t always feel like bursting into a drawing, especially when I’ve got a train to catch which makes me feel unsettled, but doing some kind of drawing is better than doing none at all.

It gets me started.

The pigeons coming down for scraps of sandwiches were a better warm-up than those tricky parallel curves of the sandwich booth.

At our stops at York, Edinburgh Waverley and Newcastle, the cast iron pillars seemed the obvious subject to draw. As in all the other views from the carriage window, I added the colour later. There’s hardly the time to draw a tree or building as we hurtle past, let alone add colour, so the drawings are from one landscape, the colour from another, or from memory.

Wild Tracks

I drew these cattle and sheep as we crossed through the Scottish borderlands, heading for Berwick on Tweed. Where the line runs close to the cliff-top, we looked out for seals in the rocky bays below. No seals and we didn’t see much in the way of wildlife at all so to spot a woodpecker as we sped along was a bit of a bonus.

Barbara thought it was a green while I thought it was great spotted but we both agreed it was a woodpecker from its size and its bobbing flight as it crossed an open field, heading away from a nearby copse.

The motion of the train makes for a jerky pen line.

As we came back into Yorkshire, the North Yorks Moors loomed above the farmland. They’d been almost imperceptable in the mist on our outward journey, their tops hidden by a long low cloud.

Inky Black Bag

 

I felt the need to do an inky drawing: a new nib, a new wooden pen holder and an old bottle of Indian ink, only a quarter full and turning lumpy. I bought the new bag in Marks & Spencer’s in Glasgow at the weekend. The excuse was that I needed a new one to match my outfit!

Black strikes me as a good colour for an art bag, especially if I’m tempted to go back to dip pen and Indian ink, as the odd spill won’t show. It was labelled as ‘Fisherman bag’ and made from oiled cotton, which should be water and stain resistant.

Leaning against the window ledge in my drawing, it appears square but in fact my A4 sketchbook fits snugly inside the main compartment. There are sufficient smaller pockets – six in all – to take my basic kit of art materials and other bits and pieces.

Link: Pure Cotton Cross Body Bag on the M&S website; there’s even a video of a bearded man on a remote Californian (?) road modelling a brown version of the bag and looking as if he’s wondering when the next bus will come along. Perfectly illustrates the sort of adventures I have in mind when I set off along the trail with my new art bag.

New Sketchbook

A NEW SKETCHBOOK and, I hope, a new start. I’m pleased to consign my finished 6 inch square sketchbook to the plan chest drawer, dominated as it was by drawings I’d done during visiting time in the cardiac ward and in the hospice. At least I kept up my drawing as much as I could. It’s now four weeks since my mother-in-law’s funeral but it hardly seems it as there’s been so much to do.

With my new sketchbook I’m broadening my outlook; it’s A5, 6 x 8 inches, as a opposed to 6 x 6, so there’s that extra space to breath. More depth, I hope, in dimension and in intention. And I’m feeling the urge to travel . . .

One of the reasons we miss Betty is that she’s no longer there to call on and to tell her tales of our travels – for instance on Friday when we took a relaxed shopping trip into Leeds. But at least we did a lot of travelling with her, when she was fit enough to get about. Even when she wasn’t so fit, for that matter.

Travelling in by train from Dewsbury is my favourite way to commute to Leeds. There’s no winding about on motorway feeder roads as you approach the city centre. Although it’s such a short journey there’s still enough time to take out a sketchbook and draw the passing scene or – in the long tunnel deep beneath Morley – commuters in the carriage.

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Categorized as Drawing

Chairs

I have been drawing recently but you wouldn’t know it from my sketchbook; these are all I have to show for the last week or two. I’ve been drawing the maps for Walks Around Ossett in the odd hours I’ve had between family matters and parcelling up my books. Parcelling up books and shipping them out to customers never seems like real work – it’s therapeutic but hardly taxing – but it is, after all, the way I make my living, so I shouldn’t grumble!

I think that I can see a patch of calm, clear water ahead but at the moment I really feel as if I’m swimming against a backwash and getting nowhere and that is reflected in this handful of sketches:

  • a couple of people at the Wakefield Naturalists’ meeting on Tuesday
  • a newspaper drawn when I waited to have my hair cut last week
  • two chair backs

The chairs are entirely typical of my unsettled life at present; I started drawing one chair then got moved on after I’d drawn two lines then – at my next port of call – I’d no sooner started drawing a second chair when someone came along and moved it!

Rhubarb Rootstock

Finally, this afternoon, after a morning painting scenery and an afternoon at a farm shop event, I got the best part of an hour to sketch. As it was a Rhubarb Festival event the most appealing subject to hand was a basket of forced rhubarb and an example of the rootstock from which the shoots are grown, at this time of year, in total darkness to ensure an early crop, at a time of year when there is a break in the supply of soft fruits.

Birds at a Glance

chaffinchThese aren’t drawings of the birds’ ‘true’, accurate appearance – it would be easier to study a bird book for an authoritative version of that – but they aren’t drawings of the birds as I saw them either; they’re drawings of the way I remembered the appearance of the bird after I’d looked at it for as long as possible, which wasn’t long enough, through binoculars.

This way of drawing varies from my normal approach where I look and look and look again, building up a drawing from dozens, probably hundreds, of little observations. blackbirdThat’s not an option with most of the birds in our garden. I took mental notes of shape and colour during my one lingering look at each bird and then tried to stick to that, rather than revert to the familiar picture of, say, a Blackbird, that I might already carry in my mind.

I gave myself license not to worry if the final drawing didn’t look all that much like the bird. As I say, I could have referred to a bird book if that had been my aim but these are the colours and the shapes, as accurately and honestly as I could transfer them from memory to paper.

The species I drew are male Chaffinch, Starling, female and male Blackbird, Great Tit and Woodpigeon. I used an ArtPen with brown Noodler’s waterproof ink and Cotman watercolours.