Category: Farmland

Chewing the Cud

This Highland calf was keeping out of the sun in the shelter of a mesh awning, venturing out only briefly to check out the food trough.

In his recent book How to Look, Draw & Paint, Matthew Rice argues that you can manage without earth colours by mixing your own, more varied, versions of them from the brighter colours in your palette (see below). I’m keeping this in mind but for speed today I went straight for the yellow ochre, raw sienna, indian red and sepia when I added the colour to my sketches

My aim is to get out drawing in some of our local natural habitats such as heath and woodland this summer but, with only a couple of hours available, I realised that I might find myself spending the first 30 minutes deciding what I should draw, so I headed to Blacker Hall Farm where I knew that I could sit down and get on with it straight away.

Matthew Rice’s Watercolour Palette

watercolour swatches from 'How to Look, Draw & Paint' by Matthew Rice.
Watercolour swatches from ‘How to Look, Draw & Paint’ by Matthew Rice.

I was so taken by Matthew Rice’s go-to watercolour palette, featured in How to Look, Draw & Paint, that I checked to see if it was available as a ready-made selection. I’d love to try it but that would be rather extravagant, as I’ve got equivalents to most, if not all, of these in my Winsor & Newton watercolour boxes. I just need to check my usual tendency to go for the duller earth colours when I’m drawing natural history, landscapes, portraits and architectural subjects. On most occasions for any of those I’d be dipping into the yellow ochre.

Rice’s favourite watercolours are Schmincke, which he finds are the brightest. Despite his suggestion of avoiding duller earth colours, his Indian Yellow appears to be similar to my much-used yellow ochre and raw sienna.

Pigmy Goats

goat sketches

Drawing the pigmy goats at Blacker Hall Farm reminds me of the two-minute pose warm-up drawing at the start of a life-drawing class.

goats

The only poses that do last marginally longer are when the goats are feeding on hay but unfortunately that means their heads are hidden in the feeder. Eventually one or two of them settle down, but they’re easily distracted.

more goats

The most dynamic poses are when the goats are grooming or scratching themselves. They can scratch the back of their necks by leaning their heads back to use the tips of their backwards-curving horns or they can reach almost the same spot with a balletic stretch of a rear leg. Hope we don’t get that one as a warm-up exercise at our Tai Chi class.

There’s a brief bit of head-butting: a larger female putting a smaller goat in its place at the hay feeder. It wasn’t especially aggressive, perhaps more of a social interaction or even an element of play-fighting.

yet more goats

I could collected a whole bunch of accurate information about their appearance by taking photographs this morning, then draw a detailed illustration using the photos as reference but I’ve done a lot of that recently and I need to free up my drawing. I want to try to draw the behaviour of the goats rather than minutely record their appearance.

and just in case you hadn't seen enough goats . . .

On the shorter-haired goats, I like the way you can see more of their anatomy. This white one has a structure with the organs of its body suspended from the skeleton.

Soot-blackened Sheep

Sheep

The hill sheep I saw on an an archive ‘Look at Life’ film on Talking Pictures TV looked strikingly grey. The round-up was filmed in the Peak District, c.1960, so I don’t think these were some rare breed that I haven’t come across, it looked more as if they’d been downwind of the smoky chimneys of the Manchester’s textile mills and picked up a good sprinkling of soot.

Common Orange Lichen

lichen

Alongside a track through fields of seedling oilseed rape there’s a stretch of hedge where many of the branches are encrusted with this yellow foliose (leaflike) lichen, Xanthoria parietina, sometimes called common orange lichen. It will grow on twigs, branches and stonework, even on painted surfaces, especially where extra nutrients are available – for instance from bird droppings. In this case the extra nutrients might come from overspray from the field and to a smaller extent perhaps from the exhaust from the occasional passing vehicle on this quiet country lane.

Horseplay

brook in flood
New year, new sketchbook, an A5 Pink Pig.

Smithy Brook has spilt over onto the pastures a the lower end of Hostingley Lane by the Go Outdoors store. A dabchick divves amongst the beck-side trees.

pied blackbird

At the far end of Low Lane, a male blackbird with white head and a small patch of white on the shoulder.

Yesterday morning: a buzzard on a fence post.

ponies

A bit of rivalry amongst ponies in a muddy pasture on Sandy Lane.

Broad Cut

There are plans to build 4 million homes on the green belt according to today’s Telegraph.

‘Sandstone causeway north west of Junction 39. Hawthorns and ash tree 8th March 1983.’

There’s a triangle of countryside at Broad Cut Farm, Calder Grove, near Wakefield, that has survived between to the river and the M1 where there’s a now plan to build a hundred of those homes plus 10 manufacturing units..

Google Maps 2024

The causey stone public footpath in my 1983 drawing was originally a colliery tram road, where horse-drawn trucks were taken to Hollin Hall Coal Staith just downstream from Broad Cut Lower Lock. There’s a row of six ‘Old Limekilns’ next to them.


1854 six-inch Ordnance Survey map, made available by the National Library of Scotland

The small building at ‘Th’ Owlet Lathe’ in the top right corner of the map was a dovecote.

I perched on the southbound side of motorway embankment in 1983 to draw it:

Room for 260 pairs of pigeons

A ruinous dovecote stans close to the motorway embankment at Owlet Laithes, just north of junction 39. It is built of handmade bricks on a ssandstone base which acted as a damp-course. The roof is of large Yorkshire stone (andstone) flags held on to a rough-hewn timber framework by wooden pegs.”

Unfortunately this old building disappeared within a few years of me drawing it.

Link

Broadcut Against Development BAD Facebook Group

Hill Country

landscape

Another colourised dip into the envelope of my negatives from 1964 and this one is a mystery. As I develop the other photographs I’ll get a better clue to the locations that I visited during that year. I still have a Letts’ Schoolboy’s Diary from that year which should give me some clues.

Rainshadow

Rainshadow
OS 10 inch rainfall map, 1881-1915, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland, maps.nls.uk

You wouldn’t think it this morning but we live in a rainshadow area. This OS Rainfall Map from 1915 records over 60 inches average rainfall on the crest of the Pennines above Holmfirth and less than half that amount, around 24 inches down in Wakefield just 18 miles away.

So that’s about 5 feet of rain per year on the moors, 2 feet in Wakefield and getting on for 3 feet in between around Emley, where we’re heading this morning.

Thorncliffe

A rainy day proved a good opportunity to catch up with my Wild Yorkshire nature diary for The Dalesman but a trip to the Thorncliffe Farm Shop at Emley, gave us the excuse to see the outside world.

I drew these sycamores, almost devoid of leaves now, from the cafe.

Thorncliffe

I put the Chicken Superheroes artwork this morning but there were some familiar looking characters in the farm shop cafe . . .

chicken draft excluder
It’s those Chickens again . . .
(It’s a draft excluder, would go well with any chicken-themed interior design scheme)

Saltholme Pools

Salttholme Pools
Cattle grazing at Saltholme Pools drawn from the comfort of the two-story hide.

On Wednesday morning the farmer was moving the cattle that graze the marshes at RSPB Saltholme from Paddy’s Pool over to the Saltholme Pools.

The bull at Saltholme