With the seasons changing it is good to get out on the nicer, sunnier days. For me that meant a trip out to Northleach on the eastern fringes of Gloucestershire.

Northleach is one of the old ‘wool towns’ of the Cotswolds. most known for its large wool church, although it has many other old houses built in that Cotswold limestone. One of my favourite buildings is The Tudor House which is just a short walk from the main town square. This is somewhere that I’ve drawn before, hence the title of this piece.

Setting up to draw, here is my view

This is the view from across the carpark. Although I had originally set up to draw sitting down, that altered the viewpoint a bit too much and didn’t feel that safe because of the possibility of cars just driving into me. There was a solution – to borrow a wheelie bin from the local supermarket and draw using that. That worked surprisingly well and prompted thoughts of getting some kind of stand to draw from in the future… Anyway, here is my in-situ sketch.

Drawing something like this can be difficult and I find getting the general proportions correct can be problematic – it is probably best to be flexible and not necessarily get everything right. Here you might notice that I extended my sketch out on to another sheet- sometimes that’s a solution too.

Later I scanned in my sketch and cleaned it up a bit – here is the result.

For comparison here is a watercolour version of my earlier sketch…

… and a watercolour of the butchers shop -W.J.Castle -from a slightly different angle

The Tudor House is a subject that I imagine I’ll come back to, weather and perseverance permitting. For a previous post click on the link below

The Tudor House on The Green, Northleach