Category: Art

Between the wars, for a period of 12 years, you could have boarded a Bradford-bound train at St Pancras (not Euston, as I’d previously written in this post) and travelled through this railway cutting at Newmillerdam. The Midland Railway opened this line in 1905 and it closed in 1968.

I’m walking the full circuit of Newmillerdam Country Park, keeping to the paths nearest to the edges of the woods.

Snaking ironwork is a local feature, which I’ve seen on the footbridge to the island at Walton Hall and on a balustrade on the side staircase at the Bingley Arms at Horbury Bridge. If the wavy spikes on this gate at Newmillerdam were supposed to warn off poachers from raiding the Chevet Estate, it didn’t work.

In Clip Studio Paint, you can, as I have here, construct 3D objects from ‘primitives’ such as cubes, spheres and polygonal shapes or you can import ready-made objects such as the figure and the cart. I’ve followed these closely as reference, drawing in my normal pen and tone method on the iPad.

The advantage of constructing a setting like this is that I could then have the figure walk around to the other side of the scene for the next frame in a comic, or even show a bird’s-eye view.

A confused Great Dane attempts to take a drink from the pond below Joiners Wood. On the Lower Lake mallards and a single mute swan have gathered in the one corner that is still ice free. A shoveler drake and two females rest at the edge on the ice.

By midday the sun has got out and the expanse of white parkland in front of the house has turned green, with just a few frosty patches remaining in the shade of trees.

The low winter sunlight was perfect for macro photography, so I took my Olympus E-M10II fitted with a macro lens to Newmillerdam this morning.