Petergate

It's raining when I get to York so I head straight for my favourite café, the Café Rouge, and - three café lattés, one chocolat, a croissant, a croque and a citron pressé later - I've done as much as I think I ought to do on this pen and ink drawing of Lower Petergate.

A friend said that if I was going to spend the day drawing in York I had to promise not to draw the Shambles but I've ended up with a similar subject. I had intended to focus on some of the things that the tourists don't notice but this was the view through the window, so there it is.

It's great to have the time to relax over a drawing and make efforts to get the rooves, windows and signs in just the right relationship to each other. It's satisfying the way all those triangles, rectangles and parallelograms lock together; drawing a subject like this is a bit like doing a jigsaw.

I know the basics of perspective but I'd find something like this, with it's multiple vanishing points and walls that aren't quite on the alignment you'd expect, difficult to analyse. Better to just draw as near as I can what I see.

Richard Bell, richard@willowisland.co.uk