Category: Art

The Night before the Night Before

The Night before Christmas rough

The night before Christmas: ‘a fire place with roaring fire & stockings hung down. Maybe a chair & table & treats left out for Santa on the table . . .’

That’s what we’re aiming for, now all we have to do is work out how to fit all that into the Redbox Gallery, the old telephone box on Queen Street, Horbury.

Christmas set rough

I’m designing the stage set and it will be up to the local Brownies to add the decorations. I think that I could fit a small fireplace diagonally across the far corner of the box but that doesn’t leave any room for a table and chair, so I’m imagining those as illustrated cut-outs, as if we were looking at a pop-up Christmas card.

The View from the Terrace

Newmillerdam

This morning our pond had frozen over but a month from today the days will start getting longer.

On the little roof terrace at the Boathouse Cafe, Newmillerdam, black-headed gulls glide past the castellated balustrade a few feet away from me at eye level, a fluid, effortlessly elegant flight. A grebe preens out on the lake, a male goosander swims by, crisply black and white in the low winter sun.

A coot calls tetchily, mallards quack and the smell of fresh coffee drifts up from the kitchen below.

S’mores Kronut

Drawing the dogs and trying the s’mores kronut, a cross between a croissant and a donut, at the ØL cafe in Horbury this morning.

dogs

The dogs took so much interest in their surroundings that they soon wound their leads around table legs and chair legs.

Rowan

rowan leaf

I’ve done so much black and white work recently that I thought it was time to return to base and go back to brown Lamy pen and my Bijou watercolours to draw this rowan leaf from the front garden. Unfortunately my Pentel Water Brush is all but clogged up now, so the watercolour wash is a bit limited.

Published
Categorized as Drawing Tagged

Pots of Pens

pots of pens

Mustard pot, yogurt container and treacle tins on my shelf in the studio.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Stump Fungus

fungus sketch

When you look closely at this fungus growing on a stump by the lake at Newmillerdam you can see that the cap is dotted with scales and the stem looks rather shaggy.

fungi on stump

The nearest that I can get to it in the field guide is honey fungus, but I hadn’t realised that the stems could be so shaggy.

bark

On a felled log, water had gathered in a hole in the bark, creating a temporary habitat.

carved head on former Ossett bank

On our errands this afternoon, I drew one of the carved heads on one of the former banks in Ossett and the door in the Carnegie Free Library in Horbury.

library door
Published
Categorized as Drawing