Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I enjoy drawing bits of buildings, often the side that the architect didn’t intend us to see. This window showroom at the top end of Cluntergate, Horbury, was drawn with a fine Faber-Castell Pitt artist pen as we sat in the Caffe Capri opposite.
The watercolour was added later using a photograph I took on my Olympus Tough as reference.
I tried out my new Leki monopod/walking pole on Sunday, attaching my Olympus Tough to it to film Janet’s Foss, near Malham. Even with this small camera mounted on it, the pole was useful when stepping over damp limestone boulders to get nearer to the waterfall.
Although a lot steadier than handheld, I found that it swayed slightly as I clung to it, so I used the camera shake adjustment in iMovie to reduce this effect.
The image quality of the Tough isn’t as sparkly as my regular camera (plus I still had it on the macro setting, which can’t have helped) so I tried using iMovie’s ‘romantic’ filter to soften the pixelated effect. This filter adds a soft vignette to the frame. The gradual zoom-in was also added in iMovie, using the ‘Ken Burns’ effect in the cropping tools section.
Waiting in audiology gives me a few moments to make snapshot sketches of the medical staff and patients, trying to take in as much detail as I can as they pass then sketching from memory.
The man with broad shoulders in the black leather jacket was such a distinctive character but it wasn’t until he reappeared that I noted that he was wearing baggy black trousers, not matching leather trousers as I’d assumed. You can see my initial sketch was of close-fitting trousers.
The bowl of sugar lumps is from yesterday’s coffee break at the Brasserie in the Courtyard near Settle.
The poplar leaves by the lock on the Leeds Liverpool canal at Gargrave have all but turned to leaf mould, leaving fragmentary leaf skeletons.
On a south-facing bank by the road I see my first celandines of the year bursting into flower, pushing up amongst their dark green heart-shaped leaves and the dried stems of last year’s growth.
At the foot of this gritstone wall I pick up a couple of garden snail shells to draw. Inside a third shell I find another species of snail sheltering. Compared to the garden snail this one has a more flattened spiral, rather like an ammonite.
Town End Farm Shop, Airton, Malhamdale, 12 noon; Looking north north-west, over pastures, drystone walls, an ash wood and a field barn.
A flock of fifty to a hundred gulls sits on a low-lying pasture by a bend in the headwaters of the River Aire. A few crows head off up the valley with more purpose than the drifting gulls.
Link; Town End Farm Shop
From the window that I’m looking through I get to see people pass by just for an instant but each individual seems so distinctive that I think ‘this time I’ve got it’ but then I start thinking was his hat blue or was that his sweat shirt? What was the grey lady wearing on her feet? Was the strider with the haversack wearing some kind of waistcoat or body warmer?
As I said the other day, the more I practice doing this, the better my memory should become not just for the telling details but also for overall shape and character of each figure.
Perhaps I should find a cafe table overlooking a precinct and have a coffee morning drawing the crowds.
I’m fascinated to go through the colour slides that I’ve gathered together from my mum’s. This photograph of my brother, my dad and Vache the springer spaniel was at the tail-end of an Agfacolour film, partly exposed to the light. I’ve had to do a bit of work in Photoshop to improve the exposure.
It reminds me so much of the knitting patterns of the period so I spoofed this up and e-mailed it to my sister. She writes;
‘Amazing picture!
I knitted those jumpers myself. Bill’s yellow polo neck was one I made to wear for riding lessons with Mr Dunn at Warmfield when I was 8. (Mum and Dad wouldn’t let me have a riding hat because it was too expensive and Health and Safety hadn’t been invented.)
The grey school jumper was from the same pattern but the V-neck version. In those days the yarn was pure wool without the advantage of added synthetic fibres and it looks as if both jumpers have felted and shrunk in the wash.
I think I still have the pattern.’
Even at that age my sister had a quirky sense of humour and I’m guessing that she must have taken this photograph and that she’d directed us to assume to poses of ‘knitting pattern boys’. Bill, who has always had theatrical leanings, is playing the part perfectly while I have been distracted, as I always am, by the nearest animal. My dad is probably wondering if Linda is operating his Akarette 35mm camera as she should.
At first sight the gable end of a house might not seem the most inspiring of subjects but it’s surprising how absorbing such a common sight can be if you keep looking at it for half and hour or more.
Walking down into Horbury to buy sandwiches I get the chance to draw more gable ends as I sit in the Caffe Capri waiting for my order. I make a mental note of the colours. Later, as I add the watercolour, I make an informed guess about where the shadows were falling.
It’s a change for me to use a bit of imagination in reconstructing a scene after the even. I think about Cezanne’s studies of the huddle of red roofs of the village of Gardanne which seem like a starting point for Cubism.
I rejoin Barbara at her sister’s and get a slightly different view of the house beyond the boundary wall.
The paper in my Moleskine sketchbook is buff which isn’t ideal for scanning but I’m enjoying the mellow tone it gives my drawings. This my out and about sketchbook, so why not indulge myself with its gentle warmth.
Charles Waterton always regretted his decision to evict the badgers from Walton Park when setting up his nature reserve in 1826. He feared that they might undermine the ‘poacher proof’ wall that he’d built at a cost of £10,000.
I’m using a quotation from a letter he wrote to Alfred Ellis in May 1864 as the basis for a comic strip. My aims are;
Comparing the initial pen and ink ideas and the blue graphics pad roughs which I produced in Manga Studio, you can see that pen and ink works best for me but I want to follow the process through. Manga Studio is versatile enough for me to incorporate scanned drawings if that’s what I prefer to do. For now I’m working through the quick start guide chapter of Doug Hills’ Manga Studio for Dummies. I’ve been through it before years ago but never got back to the program since.
Here’s my first attempt at the first frame of Waterton in penitent reflection. It’s been drawn using the graphics tablet with the default pen tool, the ‘G’ nib. For the hands I used the PhotoBooth program on my iMac and photographed myself in the pose. I might have been overacting a bit!
A week ago when we bought this pot of Tête-à-Tête narcissi, they looked like stunted miniatures. They’ve soon grown and opened their flower buds on the kitchen windowsill and I’ve only just caught them before they go to seed.
When they’re over we’ll plant the bulbs in the border near the hedge.