Combining a shopping trip with a brief visit to Harlow Carr and a walk through the Pinewoods and Valley Gardens into Harrogate.
Shopping for Clothes
Category: Urban
Spider
I wonder if this spider, photographed on our bedroom window yesterday, is one of the spiderlings, now grown up, that we spotted in a cluster by the front door recently.
Bird Life
Middlestown, 10.20 am:Forty or more starlings wheel about overhead and a female blackbird with food in her beak calls in alarm. Possible dangers for her chicks include a black cat which has just walked into the hedgerow and a crow keeping watch from the roof of the health centre.
The shoppers and the mating sparrows were drawn at Birstall.
Bicycles
It’s not set to last over the weekend but it felt like being in a continental city in Leeds yesterday, sitting sketching a bicycle on Brewery Wharf at the Cafe YumYum.
It was our first day browsing around Leeds since just before the first lockdown, so it was good to feel things getting back to some kind of normality.
Rainy Morning, Birstall
A rainy morning in Birstall and my Falcon Housewares enamel jug.
Queen’s Drive
Black-headed gull, wood pigeon and a small flock of starlings fly over Queen’s Drive, Ossett, as we have lunch at the fish and chip restaurant.
With less than a week to go before the start of meteorological spring, I’ve just started a new A6 landscape sketchbook, having just finished an even smaller pocket sketchbook, best suited to pen only. It’s good to be working in colour again.
Redbrick Colour Swatches
Our first visit to The Redbrick Mill in Batley since before the pandemic. On a grey windswept morning it was good to see so much colour, artfully balanced by dozens of restfully grey sofas.
Persil Factory, Warrington
When I travelled around the country drawing and writing my Richard Bell’s Britain natural history sketchbook, I found that pages including manmade objects in a natural landscape – such as an abandoned forestry lorry on a track through a pine plantation – often worked best.
The Persil factory had made an impression on me as I passed through Warrington on the train.
It appeared as a thumbnail sketch on one of the maps in Britain and when my editor Robert MacDonald suggested a sequel, focussing on industrial Britain, I returned to draw it.
I did more drawings closer to home, one series documenting the last coal barges to operate between British Oak, near Crigglestone, and Thornhill Power Station.
The Persil Factory made it onto the cover of the dummy of the proposed book, but the project never got off the ground, however I did sell the original pen and watercolour at one of my one-man shows a few years later. I was quite honoured that my French teacher from Grammar School days, Miss Deacon bought it.
This mock-up of the cover is a hand-coloured photocopy, as this was long before the days when I would have a scanner in my studio.
Heaton Junction
‘Britain’s Biggest Model Railway’, the 200ft-long Heaton Junction layout, on show at the Old Market Hall this weekend, evokes the railway that I remember from school cross country runs in winter. The River Calder was often the colour of the resin used in the model, occasionally tinted dull indigo, probably when they were dying textiles upstream at Dewsbury.
The construction team have gone to great lengths to capture the sights and sounds of the Calder Valley in the post-British Railways era but fortunately they haven’t added the smell of the local sewage works.
The wintry feel and rusty, oily ambience is just as I remember it. I’m looking forward to the Heaton Junction layout moving on to stage 2 as their next project is to recreate a marshalling yards based on Healey Mills, which lay at the foot of the slope alongside a section of the river that had been diverted to allow the construction of the yards. Scale models of the lighting towers will be included.
Navigation Walk
Drawn this afternoon at Navigation Walk, Wakefield, colour added in Photoshop.