Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
The birds on our feeders are having a hard time with the sparrowhawk swooping in regularly and this character, a neighbour’s cat with a bushy tail, lurking in the flower bed. Even the pheasants keep their distance when the cat is around, although they don’t seem too concerned about the sparrowhawk.
On our walk around Newmillerdam Lake this morning, it’s good to see the sun breaking through after so many gloomy, misty November days, especially as we get a brief glimpse of two kingfishers flying along the edge of the lake, apparently engaged in a bit of a dogfight, one swooping at the other. One (or possibly both of them, it all happens so quickly) heads out across the lake to the far side, where the drain enters the lake. We’re told that the drain is the place that you’re most likely to see them.
I see the sapphire blue on one of the bird’s backs and Barbara also spots the orange of its breast as it flies by.
A month from today – Boxing Day – the days will be getting longer. Drake mallards are already cruising around in noisy groups, displaying to females but they won’t start nesting until March.
One of the coots on the lake was cruising along calling – a sound which reminds me of a hooter on a child’s pedal car.
From our table in the cafe at Blacker Hall Farm, I can see the cattle grazing, a powerful-looking bull standing calmly amongst them.
I’ve switched from hiking boots to these Clarks GoreTex trainers recently and I’ve noticed the difference; you flex your feet more in trainers. You might think that would put more pressure on the toes but its the calf muscles on the back of my legs that have been doing the extra work and which feel taut. On one occasion in the middle of the night I got a touch of cramp, so I’m making sure that I keep doing a bit of stretching.
I’ve drawn these in Procreate on the iPad and this time I’ve left the initial pencil drawing showing, which makes it more like a regular still life drawing as you get a hint of the process that went into it.
To make it less self-consciously an iPad drawing, I did consider doing the drawing all on one layer but I thought that the pen might run into the paint as I added it, which wasn’t the effect that I wanted, so it was drawn as normal, in three layers, as above, plus a background layer of white ‘paper’.
There were plenty of mallards, gadwall and nine shovelers (three drakes, six females/juveniles) on the Lower Lake at Nostell this morning, but it was this little duck, which didn’t look much bigger than a dabchick, that had us puzzled. It’s a teal, and the conspicuous triangular pattern on its back suggests that this is a female in breeding plumage. Juveniles have dark feathers on the back, with just narrow, lighter margins.
The note I’ve written on my sketch, that the female should always show a speculum, is something we read (or perhaps misread) on the Internet, but it’s incorrect according to Noel Cusa’s illustration in The Birds of the Western Palearctic, which shows the female with speculum completely covered by the surrounding breast and back feathers. I’ll go with that as you can’t get any more authoritative than The Birds of the Western Palearctic.
The female was on her own but when we returned forty minutes later there was no sign of her. Although this duck looked so petite compared with the nearby mallards and gadwall, the teal is in fact about 25% bigger than a dabchick.
We saw just one goosander this morning, a drake on the Upper Lake.
People on the precinct in Ossett were hurrying by in the cold, gloomy, afternoon rain, so I was grateful to be sketching them from the shelter of Bistro 42 after sampling a selection of tapas.
Passers-by were crossing my field of view so quickly that the only way to draw them was a to focus on an individual, take a mental photograph and then try to get the impression down on paper.
It makes a change for me to draw people. With natural history subjects, I’m keen to record enough visual information to identify a species of plant or animal but we’re all so familiar with humans as a species that the emphasis can instead be on trying to suggest character.
I drew in pen with no watercolour in my sketchbook but then redrew the figures on my new iPad Pro using a program suggested my comic artist friend John Welding. Procreate is more closely adapted to the possibilities of the iPad than Clip Studio Paint, the program that I’ve been using a lot recently, but I’ll keep coming back to Clip Studio because I like the page design tools that are incorporated into it.
I don’t normally draw in pencil because with the rough handling my sketchbooks get, pencil lines soon get smudged but I like the pencil tool in Procreate as a quick way for starting a drawing. There’s a tool for smudging it too, if you really want that.
Procreate gives the option to make a thirty-second movie of your drawing.
A mapping pen, as the name suggests, is designed to produce regular lines and the Clip Studio Paint version does a good job of emulating that, but without the danger of twisting and splaying its long, flexible nib, something I had to be careful to avoid when I used the real thing in my student days. I soon discovered that a dip pen with a Gillot 303 or 1950 nib was a better option for me.
The Clip Studio mapping pen tool gives a more consistent line than the G-pen which I’ve mainly used so far. The G-pen is designed to give the kind of varied, expressive line that is such of feature of comic strip art.
For once, as a change from drawing my hand, the subject I often revert to when I’m sitting in a waiting room, I drew my feet instead, resting on the arm of the sofa.
I wouldn’t try that in the waiting room.
And having sorted out a pen that I like, here’s a final sketch in colour.
I tried all the watercolour brushes available in Clip Studio Paint and decided that ‘Transparent’ was the nearest to the watercolour washes I use in my sketchbooks.
We were at Meadowhall today, so I couldn’t resist calling in the Apple Store to try drawing on the new iPad Pro with the new Apple Pencil (the old Apple Pencil isn’t compatible with the new iPad).
It feels as if there’s no delay between the movement of the pencil and the line appearing: apparently they’ve got it down to just a few milliseconds. And they’ve also added a little bit of resistance, presumably to the tip of the pencil, to try to reduce the feeling that you’re drawing on glass.
In the very basic drawing program in Apple Notes, the colour I selected felt like using a large chisel-ended marker pen, but I think the sketches of passing shoppers that I made with the program’s virtual felt-tip pen produced results that would be difficult to distinguish from my efforts the real version of the pen.
Look forward to trying it out with Clip Studio Paint.
I always go for the table by the French windows when we call for coffee, and in my case a date scone, at Blacker Hall Farm Shop cafe. The original of this sketch is 2.5 inches, 6 cm, across.
A few weeks ago we were commenting on how few goosanders we were seeing at Newmillerdam, but today there are twenty or thirty in loose groups scattered across the open water and the reedy narrow section.
George Wood joined up at the same time as my father at the start of World War II.
“They both came around to see us in their uniforms,” my cousin Margaret recalled at a family get-together in Sheffield yesterday, “George was a gunner in the RAF but just a few weeks later he was killed.”
As it’s Remembrance Day, one hundred years since the Armistice that ended World War I, I’m doing a little research into a friend of my father’s who I never got to meet.
It’s now twenty years since I started writing this online version of my nature diaries and sketchbooks and I remember my first ever post on my Wild West Yorkshire website included a sketch of wasp visiting the flowers of the ivy.
Today wasps and flies were busy visiting the flowers on next door’s ivy. The clusters of male and female flowers might not be showy but there are plenty of them. The decadent fusty-ness of ivy is a scent that sums up autumn for me, as much as flowering privet does for late summer.
It seems like one last party for the assembled wasps and flies before the onset of winter.
Insects on ivy from my first blog post (although the word blog hadn’t been invented then) for Sunday 8 October 1998.
The drawings were scanned from my A5 page-a-day diary and coloured in Photoshop, probably, at that time, using a mouse rather than a graphics pad.
I quickly moved on to drawing in an A4 sketchbook, which saved having to erase the ruled lines in the diary. I didn’t start using watercolour until three months later, which was far less fiddly than adding colour with a mouse.