The day was so persistently wet, and flat, and grey/white. I’ve kept the pencil for the most part very light touch too. There’s a lot of pencil on here, but also a lot of white paper. I hope you can get a reasonable impression of it on your screens. It came out beautifully in the calendar, available here: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/WaterDrawnArt
“Rainy Rydal”
It’s a curious fact that rain makes water flat. You’d think it wouldn’t work – you can pat soil or sand flat with your hands, but you are patting down the high points. But raindrops can do it too, though they pat the surface everywhere.
The rain – a quietly determined Cumbrian rain, no fuss, set in for the day, pacing itself – patted Rydal Water so that the lake was completely flat and stippled, almost unreflecting. The clouds and the damp washed out all bright colour. And into this ethereal scene stepped Francine and I.
We made ripples, we brought bright colour and chatter into the quiet lake, we enjoyed the peaceful still monochrome, even as we disrupted it. The rain made no comment on this invasion, it just continued patting the water flat, damping down the colour and the sounds and our ‘dry’ things under the trees.
And then we were gone again: in meteorological terms not even the blink of an eye, in human terms an hour, two hours, a morning to catch up. And after we left the weather continued, eternal.
WaterDrawn 