Category: Art

Carnosaur!

  • Dilophosaurus

When drawing dinosaurs, I get all the reference that I can find together and reconstruct the animal by drawing a rudimentary skeleton and working up a particular pose but wouldn’t it be great if I could set out with my sketchbook and draw the living breathing animal? That would probably be unwise when it comes to the carnosaurs but I had the chance to do the next best thing back in October 1997 when the Carnosaur! exhibition of animatronic dinosaurs was showing at the Yorkshire Museum.

Link: The Yorkshire Museum

The Harrogate Train

Harrogate station
Harrogate station

phone manUsually, as soon as I start drawing a commuter, he or she will change position or get on to a train but I thought that I had a chance with this man, sitting nursing his luggage and thoroughly absorbed with his phone. After five minutes our train started moving away but I’d made a mental note of the colours and I quickly added them. I like plain inky drawings but usually I feel that sketches like this come to life when I add a bit of colour; there’s so much more information in a drawing which includes colour.

‘You are now entering a great crested newt site’ a notice on the trackside near Hornbeam Park informs us.

Drab, Dry and Dusty

hill houseThe countryside has a late summer look to it. Oaks near Horsforth now look drab, dry and dusty. The flowers of creeping thistle have largely turned to downy seed heads. There’s a decadent feeling that the party is almost over, frothy creamy white flowers of Russian vine and trumpets of greater bindweed are festooned over fences. The waste ground flowers that I associate with the end of the summer holidays have appeared: Himalayan balsam, rosebay willowherb, common ragwort, goldenrod and, looking rather dull and mildewed even at its freshest, mugwort.Leeds sketches

park bloomIt’s the first time that we’ve visited Harrogate for years but we’ll certainly return. We walk up through the Valley Gardens then through the pinewood on Harlow Hill. We don’t get chance to walk around the Royal Horticultural Society gardens at Harlow Carr because we spend so long queuing for a leisurely lunch at the deservedly popular Betty’s Tearooms.

Waiting Room Sketches

watch and fasteningshandWe’ve got an appointment at the doctors’ this morning. As a change from drawing my hand, I start drawing the clasps and fastenings on my art bag and the back of my watch, which is the type that recharges its battery kinetically.

We’re back again in the afternoon. This time I revert to drawing my hand. I prefer drawing something organic to something mechanical.

In the Auditorium

hand

Black-headed gull on lamp by Starbuck's, Birstall.
Black-headed gull on lamp by Starbuck’s, Birstall.

How do you get that great feeling of being part of a winning team; of striving against the odds and getting to the top of your game?

According to the commercials screened as we waited to see the new Star Trek movie, all you need to do is subscribe to a particular broadband service or choose the right brand of fizzy drink. I couldn’t quite follow the logic but then I was drawing my hand . . . and foot. Colour added later in Bella Italia.

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Hiking Boots

hiking boots

hiking boot
Detail, full size.

These Trezeta hiking boots have stood up to a lot of wear, mainly in Yorkshire but they’ve been as far afield as Switzerland and Corfu.

I’ve drawn this in my A4 sketchbook to make it easier to include the details. The full size of the drawing is 8 x 5½ inches.

Link: Trezeta

Feet

feet feetI was drawing sandals yesterday so this  evening I’ve moved on to feet. I often draw my hand if I’m stuck somewhere waiting but what I can’t do is draw one of my hands clasped in the other (how would I move my pen?!), so I tried different ways of drawing my two feet together.

These feet look elongated but that’s the shape my feet are. Greg Davies, who is 6 feet 8 inches tall and has size 13 feet  was grumbling in this week’s Radio Times that the author of his Wikipedia article had increased that to size 17: ‘I’d be a human right angle.’

I’m only 6ft 4in but I’ve got size 13 feet, so I guess that I’m on my way to being a human right angle.

feetThese four sketches took 70 minutes and 54 seconds to draw. I know that because we were listening to Abba Gold. I needed music that would help keep my pen moving and most CDs have a slow number in them somewhere: not Abba Gold!

Walking Sandals

sandalsYesterday was the hottest of the year so far, a chance to wear sandals again.

Drawn with my Lamy Safari fountain pen with the broad nib, as I wanted a bold inky line. I went for an A4 sketchbook, larger than the sketchbooks that I normally take on location because I didn’t want to start putting in detail, and consequently tending to work larger, and then find that I was running off the edge of the page.

Lamy Safari with Z24 converter and broad nib, filled with Noodler's Black ink.
Lamy Safari with Z24 converter and broad nib, filled with Noodler’s Black ink.

I was going to add colour but then decided that I like the line just as it is. The everyday but for me rather challenging subject brings back memories of art homework from school days: going back to the rudiments of drawing.

Bamforth & Co

Bamforth'sBamforth signIn Holmfirth restoration work has started on the former premises of Bamforth & Co in Station Road. For a number of years as we drive I’ve been thinking that I really ought to stop and take a photograph of the sign because I remember it from the early 1960s when, for a while, we used to drive this way on Sundays to visit my grandfather in a nursing home in Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire.

As we drove past today the sign had finally been removed so these are images from Google Maps street view. In my memory, the sign was a vertical one that you saw on the corner of the building as you approached down the hill:

BAMFORTH & CO. LTD., ILLUSTRATORS AND PUBLISHERS

Even aged nine I wanted to be an illustrator, so I assumed that this was the kind of office/factory in which an illustrator would work. I’d be intrigued to know more about the building’s history. Bamforth’s started in 1870 as a portrait photographers, so that could be a Victorian photographer’s studio running along the second story of the building.

Bamforth’s later specialised in producing magic lantern slides and later saucy seaside postcards. Between 1898 and 1915 they produced black and white silent films, so perhaps this was used as a studio. 

Link: Bamforth & Co, Wikipedia

Records of Bamforth and Company are kept at the Tolson Memorial Museum in Huddersfield.

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