WIP… but this painting’s nearly finished now, my first oil piece in quite a number of years. It’s been a strange kind of reunion. I usually work digitally these days (tablets, layers, quick edits, overpainting photos, composites, undo buttons… what’s not to love?), but something in me wanted to pick up a brush again and see what happened.

It was a bit tricky at first. Oils are much slower, less forgiving – once it’s down, it’s down, and I had to re-learn a few things. But once I found the rhythm, it all came back. Maybe like catching up with a messy, smelly old friend you haven’t seen in ages but still somehow know.

My main issue this time was canvas size, way too small for how I like to paint. Next time I’ll go bigger, or maybe even go back to making DIY canvases out of cardboard and sacking. Might be fun. I’d like a bit more texture to paint on than what you get from those flat, shop-bought ones.

The Gloamrats have made their way into this picture now, a group of small, damp, paper-crowned figures slinking through a rainy ginnel behind Mill Street. The whole scene’s soaked in that damp, forgotten Harrowden atmosphere I love: slick cobbles, dripping brickwork, and that eerie stillness you only get in backstreets when the rain’s coming down.

Just a few finishing touches left now, and then I’ll let it sit and dry before sharing the final piece with you fine folk. Been good to step back into this kind of making – even if the digital realm is still where I feel most at home.

This bank holiday I’m heading out with a friend to dig… not just into the ground, but into fire, memory, and myth. It’s part of a new Harrowden art piece, but the line between fiction and the real world is burning thin here… excuse me while we snap a little back to reality…

My dad told me about this old cotton mill where they used to chuck “soot stones” straight down a steep banking into the river, hot black lumps, ball baring size fire spat out the furnace, still crackling. There was no bother for pollution or health and safety back then. Just tip it in, let the river take it… He said him and his mates used to play on the slope, slipping down it like it were a playground in the 60’s…

We’ve managed to piece it together and found the spot on google and an old map, the actual mill has gone now but it looks like it’s still wasteland, sat by another set of abandoned mills still there. We’re going to try excavating this Saturday. If it’s anything like the “big crackleblacks” we found from the last remains of the old coal power station early this week, it might still be there, buried cinders waiting to be brought to the surface.

In Harrowden, these are called Crackleblack, industrial relics that hum with leftover heat, fossilised labour, the detritus of soot-belching machines, the history of one thousand hard shifts. I want to collect them, preserve them, build something from their smouldering silence.

There is also another personal story in this place we are going. Just across the river from the site is where my gran arrived from Ireland, a teenage girl entering the country with forged documents from her village priest. She came to work the mills, and stayed in Mill lodging in a place called “The Bleachery”. She’d send money home as Ireland was dirt poor back then and her mother had younger mouths to feed. A fire… this time not in the ground, but burning in her need to survive, to shape something better out of cotton, cinder and ash. And why I am here…

The mills and cotton run through my family, we all worked in the textiles factories including myself…

So yep… its an art piece, But it’s a bit like digging through cinders to find where I come from… An act of remembrance… An excavation of family, flame, and forgotten furnaces.

I’ll keep you folk updated and post what we find, if the land’s in a giving mood! 🖤❤️

Spent the afternoon diving into a proper painting for the first time in a long while, and back to oils, no less. Picked up a fresh canvas this morning, on a bit of a whim.

Before I moved over to digital, I used to work a lot in traditional media charcoal, ink, collage, and of course, oils. I use to love doing huge expressive paintings with a brush, but it’s just something I gradually drifted away from really, especially working day jobs where I mostly do digital art. These days I mostly use my tablet (with layers, undo buttons, over painting and all that good stuff), but it felt right today to return to something more tactile.

This piece is still a work in progress, maybe halfway through. Not gone too badly, considering half the oil paints had gone strange on me, and I was working with nothing but big daubin’ brushes.

I’ve got some new paint and brushes on the way, so once they arrive I’ll start tightening it up and bringing in more detail. I reckon there’ll be a few Gloamrats sneakin’ about in this one, possibly a cat watching from the shadows.

It’s rough, it’s unpredictable, and I’ve missed it. Just wish I had more time, it’s a much slower process.

Every spring in in Harrowden, when the chimneys belch blacker than usual, they come… nothing is official, like. No fliers, no town notice. But folk know. They always know, when it is, it comes with a hush leading up to it that settles over Harrowden like damp fog.

Just as we think we’ve made it through winter’s grip… just as the days stretch long… then comes the Blackheart Friday Parade…

Some say it was rooted in the strikes, others claim it goes back to when the moors were worshipped and the bogs were sacred.

Ain’t like no parade you’d boast or clap for. Figures cloaked in rags rubbed black with mill ash, faces covered with masks stitched from sackcloth, burnt lace, cracked doll-heads. Lanterns made from bones and rusted old tin cans swing from chains. The gloamrats and other young’uns march ahead, wearing paper crowns too damp to hold shape. There’s no music as such, the soundtrack is these strange droning booming sound systems pulled on carts, singing industrial noise like frantic ghosts remembering the factories of old.

It’s a protest, some say. A warning, say others. But the older people reckon it’s an old pact kept barely alive. An appeasement for what sleeps down by Gallows Bog, for what happened… Either way, folk shutter early. The Velvet Toad closes up, pretending it never existed, the rich, landlords and mill owners nowhere to be found.

What sets most uneasy ain’t what walks, it’s what floats. Look up, and there they are: the Varnlings. Massive, drifting’ shapes gliding through the sky like oily smears on the clouds, dripping thick black as if the sky itself were weeping soot. They make no sound, but their presence hangs like a held breath. No one knows if they follow the parade or if they are in fact leading it. But they always come, drifting like rot in the wind.

Some folk reckon they first showed when them from Frostmere drifted in, salt in their lungs and secrets in their eyes, but don’t pay too much attention to that there’s always been a strange chill between Harrowden and Frostmere folk. A sense that they don’t quite belong, no matter how long they’ve been here.

And so it goes, every year. The Blackheart Friday Parade comes, a strange and twisted ritual woven into the very fabric of Harrowden’s dark heart. It’s something talked about, yet no one dares understand fully. Perhaps it’s better left as it is, a reminder of the town’s restless past, of old divisions and things better left unspoken.

So… am I too late for this whole doll trend that’s been circling social media like a moth round a strip light?

Probably.

’Cause I raided my mum’s cupboards and went full Blue Peter, didn’t I!

Knocked up my own “Cut Out & Dress Up” vintage-style paper doll with cardboard, sticky back plastic, and a good dose of Harrowden weirdness.

She’s none other than Lenore Blackwell, the moody lass from your soot-smeared dreams, complete with walkman, tape, dog collar, safety pin and her DIY denim jacket.

She’s joined by two of the red-eyed Harrowden cats, creeping out the corners like they know too much (because they probably do).

Might make a few more. We’ll see. 🖤

Download Print At Home Worksheet

• Next stop: East Harrowden.
• Time of arrival’s uncertain.
• Make sure you’ve got all yer personal realities with yer before stepping over t’other side of t’gap.
• This is the end of the line.

“See summat? Say nowt. Stay quiet.”

“Scrawlin’ t’Brassmind,” Gloamrats muttered, “red eyes watchin’ like boggart. Or back ward d0g.”

Folk talk about them hares that slink through Harrowden’s mist, always close but never quite there when you turn to look. Puddle, Hob, and Loom, black as soot, quick as thought, loping through ginnels and lurking in the hedge-shade. They never leave Ammie Thornwick’s side, though none can say if she called them or if they found her first.

They are not tame. They are not friendly. But they are hers.

The Gloamrats haunt the ginnels of Lower Harrowden, where soot is thick and bog mist slithers through broken brick. Quick as a blink, quiet as dusk, they slip from shadow to shadow, hands black wi’ grime, eyes keen as crows. They bed in drain tunnels and tumbledown shacks, taking nowt for granted, living sharp, fearing nowt.

Rain clagged thick in its brackenfur as the grim cat slinked through the backlanes, tail low, lugs twitchin’. Red glim eyes cut through the gloam like cinders in soot. Thunder clattered over Tallowton Mill, shivrin’ windowpanes and clatterin’ rust gnawed signs.

A thousand glare-hollows fix on the black cat as the sky rends wide, yawning raw and wrong. They peer at it from glow of their portal to this world as they try sleep, from the crookshadows in their safe home… yer not just lookin’ You feel it, dun’t yer too? That gnawin’ pull where the world frays like old warpcloth… But yer not just glentin’…

Your through now. There’s no slippin’ back.. The storm soaks into bone and blood, whispering through the drift…

Harrowden never forgets its own…