An arty farty tweet up in Matlock Bath
Barely a week seems to go by lately without me having some sort of tweet up! I do love my tweet ups! And what better place to have one than the gorgeous Matlock Bath in Derbyshire. If you haven’t been, you really should. It is the seaside town of the East Midlands… errr, there’s no sea, but apart from that, it really is as seasidey as it gets. No windmills either… or sea breeze… BUT, during the spring and summer months, it is teaming with leather clad bikers, the buzz of happiness and the smell of chips, and it doesn’t get a lot better than that!
I went with the lovely Angie Shawcroft (@Angie Shawcroft on twitter) who is a very talented graphic designer and illustrator, and who I met on Twitter a few months ago. We like our gad abouts, which normally involve sketching, but have also been known to involve giggling in a bird hide, driving through a field (Dukes of Hazard stylie), eating bacon butties and catawauling to Lana Del Ray!
On this occasion we were quite well behaved (I said ‘quite’) and had a good old sketch by 
the river at Matlock Bath, with only one minor digression when we… okay… I… got sidetracked by some of the afforementioned leather clad bikers *mops brow*. You can probably get quite a feel of the place from this pic!
We took a fair bit of rammel with us. For any readers not familiar with the word, rammel (a personal fave of mine,) is stuff! Stuff you take with you or accumulate, some of it useful, some of it not. The Free Dictionary, on the interweb, describes it as ‘disgarded 
or waste matter’. I find that a bit insulting to my rammel! As a word, though, it is on a parr with gubbings, which The Free Dictionary does not acknowledge (shock, horror!) but which means the insides of a thing, and numpty, which The Free Dictionary does acknowledge and describes as ‘a stupid person’. It is a Derbyshrie favourite! We both took arty stuff, but failed to take anything to eat… oh, I tell a lie. Angie had a fudge, which she kindly shared with me. As you will know, a fudge is little more than a finger, so we had half a finger each. We were famished and ended up buying a heaving and pulsating hot pork and stuffing cob, which, it has to be said, was possibly one of the most animal fat riddled things I have eaten for some time! I’m not planning on repeating the experience!
As is always the case with these arty tweet ups, we produced two really different drawings. Angie focussed on a group of trees closer to her and the old building in the photo at the top of this blog, and did this stunning, very atmospheric pic using pencil, pen and Inktense pencils, which I think is just fab…
and I produced this rather more surreal pic, using pen and Inktense pencils…
from this view across the river…
We both ended up finishing our pics at home, despite being sat for two hours working on them in situ. Really enjoyed doing this one though and so far, out of my tweet up sketches, this has to be my fave! Today, I am dragging my ten year old dort with me to Matlock ~ she’s become so interested in my sketching trips that she has requested one of our own. Of course, I am happy to oblige. There may be a picnic on the grass too!
Roll on the next tweet up!
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