Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
No, these aren’t the moccasins that Leonardo DiCaprio wore when he trekked a thousand miles back out of the boreal forest, but they have clocked up some mileage and they’ve just been replaced, but the old ones are more interesting to draw than the pristine, fluffed up new ones.
My slippers are more Wallace & Gromit than Revenant.
In a total contrast to yesterday, Storm Francis has arrived this morning and is lashing fairly gently on the studio window, so I’m settling down to some homemade birthday cards. This, as usual, will be in in pen and watercolour but I like the pencil as it is. I wouldn’t normally start with a pencil rough but it probably saves time in the long run and gives me an opportunity to have second thoughts: for instance, I decided that I’d drawn the fox too large, so I’ve rubbed him out and he’s more in scale with the other characters.
My original plan was to go for woodland invertebrates but I felt that the hedgehog should be central (she was originally going to be the teacher in a school photograph) so I stuck with woodland mammals plus a sleepy tawny owl lurking on the back row. By the way, it really is sleeping, not casually looking down at that well-fed dormouse and thinking ‘that’s lunch sorted’.
I like drawing sunflowers because of their obvious structure. Despite the repetition, each petal and sepal is slightly different so in drawing them you get into a rhythm, rather like practicing letterforms in calligraphy.
Near the bird feeder in the border we found one sunflower growing from a spilt seed. A few weeks ago it produced a single large flower-head, which has now gone to seed. Meanwhile five or six smaller flowers have appeared.
Sunflowers thrive in the rich soil of our border. Last year we tried daisy-like cosmos flowers here, which we’d grown from seed from a Gardeners’ World magazine. They grew tall and leafy but by mid-autumn they’d put out just a handful of flowers. I feel that we would have had more success in getting them to flower if our soil hadn’t been so rich.
As Storm Ellen swept across Britain on Friday, one of the sunflower heads snapped off and another looked as if it would be next to go. We brought three heads in as cut flowers.
Because they do so well in rich soil, we’ve decided to try growing sunflowers on our revamped meadow area next year. We’ll grow plenty of them from bird seed and hopefully there will be enough flowers for me to draw but plenty left of the plants for the insects and birds.
I’ve got half a dozen computer programs that can generate and edit 3D drawings but I’m enjoying getting back to my real life drawing board with its parallel motion and drafting head to draw this one-point perspective of a reimagined version of ‘My Room’ for Mattias Adolfsson’s The Art of Sketching course.
This animation was a way of getting more familiar with onion skinning and using the Light Box in Clip Studio paint so it’s turned out to be a bit of lame duck because, having drawn the 12 frames needed for one half of its waddle, I didn’t feel that I needed to continue to complete the second half of the step. If I was starting again, I’d pay as much attention to the sway of its body, which is such a feature of ducks waddling along.
My illustrated compilation of William Stott Banks’ Wakefield Words, ‘A List of Provincial Words in use at Wakefield in Yorkshire 1865’, is featured in my Wild Yorkshire nature diary in the October edition of The Dalesman magazine.
You can order it through your local bookseller or direct from me, price £3.99, post free in the U.K.
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By the way, Yorkshire Rock, featured in the September Dalesman is still available:
The regular superheroes were all busy, but . . .
A partly animated version of a homemade birthday card.
Just taking a break from the imaginative effort required in cartooning to do some simple drawings from life; as simple as possible: I’m also taking a break from adding colour. These are all drawn with my Lamy Vista which is filled with De Atramentis Document Ink Black.
I’ve learnt from the cartooning though: I’m convinced that the focus on character and storytelling is also relevant when drawing from life. Even this Buff has an individual character and hints of having had some history.
A few months ago, I’d always have this Olympus Tough TG-4 in my bag or pocket but five months ago, just before lockdown, I bought my first iPhone, so I’ve been trying that out. The main place where the Tough beats it is for macro shots.
Over the past couple of weeks it has felt almost like getting back to normal being able to have the occasional coffee out. It’s good to be able to sit at a cafe table and draw again.
But really I’d like to draw a freer more organic shape so our sun hats, which have seen a lot of wear this spring and summer provide me with my next subject.
We planted mixed but so far only white have appeared. This is our first picking of them and we’ll keep on with that to encourage them to keep flowering.
My shoes are getting thin and worn on the sole, so before a hole appears, it’s time to order some more. You can’t get this kind of cushioned Comfort Vibram sole repaired at the cobblers, I’ve asked. So what sort were they? I can’t find them on the Merrell website and the name on the label has worn away; luckily my blog comes to the rescue, as I drew them years ago when they were new: they’re Merrell Jungle Beluga AC+. How could I not remember that?!
Just before the lockdown, I got chance for one last cream scone and latté at Blacker Hall Farm. The restaurant isn’t quite fully open again but you can buy a takeaway coffee and scone at the deli counter in the shop and use their grassy picnic area. I sat on the grass under the shade of a large oak tree to draw some of the plants in the close-cropped turf, including greater plantain, on the right, also known as broad-leaved plantain. It grows low so it has largely escaped the mower and it’s tough so that it can stand a certain amount of trampling. It’s a true plantain, so it isn’t related to bananas and what are sometimes referred to as ‘cooking plantains’, but I always imagine that little seed-head as resembling the bunches on banana plants.
Tomatoes are red, bananas are yellow, but despite temptations, I’m still having a break from watercolour.
These are Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Majestic vine ripened Tomatoes but hopefully in a few weeks time we’re going to have lots of our own tomatoes. We planted seeds of beef and little plum tomatoes that a neighbour gave us and ended up with so many plants that the greenhouse now has a jungly look. Plenty of tomatoes appearing but so far they’re all green.
We’re looking forward to visiting the Dales again next month, but a Covid outbreak at the Wensleydale Creamery at Hawes means that even our postponed break could potentially be in question.
This homemade card is for Sue, who regularly joins us at Nethergill with her husband Roger. Sue celebrated a ‘big’ birthday last year but remembering us getting together for a spot of un-social distanced country dancing in their local village hall seems like something from a different world.
At last, I’ve got to the end of my Cartooning Animate Tutorials by working out how to get a couple of pteranodons gliding through my scene. Not quite in the way described in the tutorial but at this stage I’m just pleased to have got it to work. Having established the principles, I should be able to do something more creative.