Caught blue handed

Four goodgymers helped Urban Green in Hodgkin Park, which was a new park for us. Hodgkin Park (also known as Benwell Dene) was donated to the people of Newcastle in 1899 by Thomas Hodgkin, a prominent banker. The park is split into two part upper and lower which caused a bit of confusion in finding where we were. Me and Michael managed a double community mission Sunday by coming straight from helping out at junior park run.

We were painting two of the gates at the edge of the upper park. I was working with Mike and Maddie form Urban Green on 'paradise gate' which had a picture of Hodgkin himself singing, an apple orchard and a view of fields, factories blowing smoke and the river Tyne. Michael, Debbie and Tanya were working on 'daffodil gate', which as expected has a number of daffodils.

All the paints had interesting names so we had a bit of a guessing game working out what colour 'angelfish' or 'glacier mist', there was no doubt about 'gobstopper red'. Mike from Urban Green wanted to keep the colours as close the original artists work as possible.

We had a quick stop for tea, coffee and biscuits but quickly started to rain and we hurried back to work wanting to get finished before the rain.

We continued working with only a little painting in the rain and managed to finish most of the bit we had paint for or planned to do. By the end of it my hand was blue because I forgot to but gloves on and I was trying to catch drips. There is some neatening up to by Maddie and Mike and some forest green needed on daffodil gates and black on paradise gate, but it looks much better already.

Look out for our next Urban Green mission in three weeks time of you want to get involved.