Shorter Days

The colour soon drained from the sky after I'd taken this at sunrise one frosty morning this week. Barbara had called me to look at the intensity of the red but by the time I'd grabbed the camera and got back up to the studio window, it had already started to slide from deep magenta crimson to this shocking pink.

Later in the day, at 3.20 pm, as we catch a train back from Leeds, there's a mauvy grey, gold and rosy sky with cloud banks in the south west.

I started the drawing of the inside of the carriage as we waited in the station on the left and drew in interlocking shapes as I went, so this wasn't a case of setting up a perspective grid, it came down to fitting shapes together and relating them to each other, like a jigsaw. I came back to the drawing as the train went into Morley tunnel and the trackside landscape disappeared for a while.

Birches and willows are still clinging onto ochre leaves.

There isn't much bird life in evidence, on the journey back to Dewsbury I spot just one magpie.

In the evening, using a fine-nibbed Staedtler mars professional felt-tip pen, I return to the fruit bowl for want of a better subject.

Richard Bell, richard@willowisland.co.uk