Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I used the iPad version of Clip Studio Paint for this comic strip. In reality, the Shetland Pony has now dispensed with its pony blanket, although another pony in the field has taken to wearing a pink pony blanket and an insect shield hood over its face and ears. There’s probably another comic strip in that pink pony blanket.
Today’s Adobe Live ‘From the Sofa’ session is with branding designer and former musician Radim Malinic. For my sketch, I decided to go back to pen – Lamy Safari – and ink – Noodler’s Black.
Someone asks where Radim gets his inspiration. Perhaps from galleries and museums? No, he answers, he doesn’t create art, that’s something different, so he observes how people behave in shops and cafes. How they buy things, how they carry bags. To me it sounds very similar to the way many artists gather material and inspiration, observing the everyday world rather than being preoccupied with reacting to art history and commenting on it, which you can’t get away from really, even if you do decide not to visit galleries.
He describes how he used the process of writing and designing his first book as a way of coming down to earth, becoming more mindful, after an intensive period of work. His three books, bursting with striking artwork, describe his personal design process.
Radim Malinic’s Brand Nu website
Seeing us watching a heron fly down the valley over the Go Outdoors camping store, a man stops to tell us of the buzzards that nested a couple of years ago in the row of trees down below Hostingley Lane. He says that one pair of skylarks nests each year on the open fields here but he wonders how they manage as the crop soon grows too long for them. It’s not like the cliff top grasslands on the Yorkshire Coast.
He’s tried inserting square plastic plant pots into the hedge banks for robins to nest in. This year robins have nested not in but on one of them. He gently felt in the well-concealed nest and they’ve already hatched their chicks.
But his most surprising success was with yellowhammers, ‘a million to one chance’ as he put it. He heard a yellowhammer singing and, using his hand, made a little scrape in a grassy hedgebank. To his amazement they did nest in the scrape and successfully raise chicks.
Another page from my Skokholm Island sketchbook, drawn on Thursday, 10th April, 1980, watching razorbills, wheatear, and grey seals. My drawing of the rocks didn’t get finished because:
“The puffins were enjoying the evening sun, standing in pairs outside their burrows, when I came back from a tea-break so I decided to leave them in peace”
Probably a first even for me, blaming the puffins for an unfinished sketch!
My ‘pen & ink, bamboo pen, watercolour, a bit of gouache and a gull dropping’ drawing of Mad Bay, Skokholm Island, Pembrokeshire, dates from a week’s visit (extended by a day or two because of bad weather) in April 1980, but my first Skokholm adventure, ten years earlier, started, rather like a Sherlock Holmes story, with an urgent telegram:
I think that even today it would be difficult to arrive at Haverfordwest Railway Station at 6.15 a.m. and it proved impossible then. As it happened, the weekly boat to the island didn’t sail that day because of the weather.
Here’s my sketchbook from that stay on the island. I picked up the rope on the shore and attached it to the spiral binding so that as I walked around the island stalking seals and puffins, I could scramble over the rocks with both hands free but be ready to take out my pen and bottle of ink to start work.
While I was up in the attic looking for this sketchbook, I came across my diary for 1970, which I probably haven’t dipped into since then. I’ve forgotten why I was writing my diary in a Spicer’s triplicate book. I remember my time on the island vividly, but it’s interesting to put it in the context of my everyday life as a student.
On a boat trip to the neighbouring island of Skomer six years earlier, we’d called in at Skokholm on the return trip to pick up a small party of birdwatchers.
That day trip to Skomer gave me some of the material for my entry in the Daily Mail I-Spy Birds competition, which coincided with the launch of the RSPB’s Young Ornithologists’ Club. I was a joint first prize winner and received not only a welcome postal order but also a red feather and a personal letter from Big Chief I-Spy himself.
During the corona virus lockdown, I’m missing out on drawing in coffee shops – which sometimes seems to be the main theme in my sketchbooks, so I tried drawing the hosts today’s Adobe Live session with Katy Cowan of creativeboom.com
Behance: Adobe Live
I’ve enjoyed trying out the ‘Rough Wash’ brush in Clip Studio Paint’s ‘Realistic Watercolour’ section but, as Barbara commented, this is looking like something that you might see on a birthday card so, good-looking as these two guys are, this frame doesn’t express a gesture. There’s nothing to prompt readers to think ‘What happens next?’
Much as I like the ponies we see on our regular walks, I need to develop their characters to tell a story. I don’t need the full cast, and, in order for them to interact, characters that are, in reality, in fields quarter of mile away from each other are going to have to be together. So sorry pinto pony, you’re going to be cut: it’s going to be the elegant chestnut and the dark brown Shetland in the grubby mac.
Here’s my rough for a more cartoony approach:
While some of the ponies on Middlestown Hill are still wearing their winter coats, there are three nearer the village that are now roaming about unencumbered. They’re enjoying the freedom of being able to groom each other and to roll on the ground to hit that hard-to-reach itchy spot on their backs.
But yesterday morning the wind was from the north and all three of them had gathered in the lowest corner of the field, sheltering close to the hedges.
Yesterday at 9.30, we could see the cold front moving in from the north across the Calder Valley. Ten minutes later it had reached us and we had a very light shower of rain. Cool breeze.
Fifteen minutes later, this faint rainbow appeared over Thornhill Edge.
Sandstone for drystone walls and local buildings was available in blocks and small flagstones from the same small quarry near the small hamlet of Smithy Brook between Middlestown and Thornhill.
At first sight this chevron pattern in the rockface looks as if it might be the result of the layers being folded sharply over, like a half-closed book. The Smithy Brook valley follows a fault-line but the earth movements associated with that wouldn’t have folded the rocks over like that.
What I think happened is something like this:
