Dolbadarn castle lends itself to the artist. Perched on a knoll between the waters of Llyn Padarn and Llyn Peris, and glowered down upon by the Glyderau to the northeast and by the wall that is Yr Wyddfa to the southwest, the castle was painted by Turner in 1798. Hilary Paynter later captured it in one of a series of 14 wood engravings that she made for J. Beverley Smith’s book ‘Princes and Castles’. A romantic spot, but a castle in the end: Owain ap Gruffudd was held there for some 20 years by his brother Llewelyn the Last, and was described then by the poet Hywel Foel ap Griffri, as ‘Gwr ysydd yn nhwr yn hir westi’ (a man in a tower, long a guest). The castle might well be called The House of the Long Stay.

I’ve been over to Llanberis on a few occasions recently in search of a subject. Busy though it is, there are some lovely spots from which to sketch: reed beds at the northern end of Llyn Padarn; rocks that jut out into lake and that are peppered with Scots Pine; the castle itself and the nearby woods. The best spot, perhaps though, is the lake itself. I’ve rowed it when the sea has been too rough to put out, and remember one occasion when, looking as dusk fell at the V of the valley beyond the castle, bruised clouds rolled in and you could watch the very minutes you had before they hit. And they hit in hail. A starkly beautiful moment: the still flat of the water taught as a drum-skin, the hail skipping upon it in elfin delight. I was covered in ice, my hands and face stung, but the magic of the place stuck with me. I hope I’ve captured some of it, albeit in a different way, in a new engraving which for the moment (and borrowing from Caradog Prichard’s novel of the same name) goes under the title of ‘Un nos ola leuad’ (‘one moonlit night’).

In the gallery below are shots of some of the steps involved in making the print. The first photo shows a couple of the quick sketches that I made in the area. The second is of the naked block chosen for the engraving; a small piece of end-grain box wood measuring approximately 6 x 4.5 cm. I darkened the block with a very light coat of Winsor and Newton Black Indian ink; doing so helps me to see more clearly the marks I make whilst engraving. On the darkened block, I sketched the bare bones of a scene using a white Caran D’ache pencil. I ended up sketching it quite a few times, rubbing it out and starting again until I felt happy with the general idea. To engrave the wood, I used three tools. Top to bottom in the photo they are: a medium tint tool (used to cut fine lines); a spitsticker (to dot the surface of the wood and to add highlights); a square scorper (to clear areas that I wanted to print white). To press the image, I inked the block very lightly with an oil-based ink, and then laid a sheet of 250 gsm Somerset Satin paper upon it and burnished the back of the paper with a silver spoon.

The finished print is in terms of its composition pretty much as I’d envisaged it in my skeleton sketch, but the mood is different. At the outset I had imagined a daytime scene with a hot sun and a very white sky, and in the end it turned into night. It is that change of tack that a skeleton sketch allows when compared to a fully developed plan that attracts me to the process. To know in advance quite clearly what you want to achieve and how you will do so makes of engraving a rather mechanical process and something that I would find boring. I approached the block with a vague idea and, as usual, plenty of doubt. I wasn’t sure how I would work the trees, nor how much light to bring in, and it wasn’t until I began the process that slowly, tree by tree, dark by dark, a mood emerged and the block showed me the way.

References:

• J. Beverley Smith (2010) ‘Princes and Castles: The legacy of thirteenth century Wales’, Gregynog Press.

• Frances Lynch (1995) ‘A Guide to Ancient and Historic Wales’, HMSO.