Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I’m used to sheep looking sheepishly at me when I try to photograph them before hurrying off to join the rest of the flock but this ram held his ground and looked right back at me.
Hens are so expressive and this one had a fed-up demeanour about her that suited the wet afternoon. Perfect weather for geese though. I’m guessing this is the gander, puffing himself up indignantly as we stop to take a look at the little flock.
There are still clusters of flowers on birdsfoot trefoil which scrambles amongst the grasses and rushes at the edge of the track.
Sneezewort grows in buggier places, amongst rushes and sedges, on acid soils.
Eyebright is a semi-parasitic member of the figwort family, growing in grassy places.
Harebell, found on heaths and in dry grassy places is a member of the bellflower family, so not a relative of the bluebell, which is a lily.
This afternoon we’ve had a succession of showers with odd bursts of sun between, so the lighting on these shelter belt sycamores has been changing as I painted. Again, there was no initial drawing for this, not even a pencil outline.
My usual approach would be to start with the structure and draw the trees first but I’ve gone for a more traditional watercolour technique, painting in the background in light washes, as if the trees weren’t there at all.
Next came splodges of green, the top ones darker against the sky, and then, after allowing that to dry, I painted in the trunks and branches in a dull, dark brown.
The rooks appeared as I was starting to go back over the whole thing, trying to bring it all together.
These beef tomatoes went well in our pasta. We usually grow salad tomatoes such as Gardener’s Delight or Moneymaker but as a neighbour had given us the seeds we had a change this year. As we’re always more likely to use tomatoes in pasta or in soup rather than salads, the beef are more useful to us, so we’ll go for them again next year.
They’ve ripened still further since I drew them two days ago. I decided that I should draw the best of the bunch because the majority of them look like this.
But this mis-shape appealed to me. It looks like something from another planet.
This snoozing hen soon realised that she was being watched.
It was raining yesterday afternoon, so I sheltered in the greenhouse to draw, positioning myself to avoid most of the drips.
Our beef and plum tomatoes are slow to ripen but the last three months of the meteorological summer have been well below average for hours of sunshine, so that’s not surprising. Rather than grow them in buckets of potting compost as we normally do, we’ve got them growing directly in the soil of the raised bed in the greenhouse, which I refreshed by swopping bucketfuls of soil from our veg beds and adding plenty of our garden compost.
It’s like a jungle in there. The plants are much lusher than they would have been in pots, but we need to strip off some of the leaves now to allow the light and air in to ripen the fruits.
Crackenedge from the terrace at The Union restaurant, at the Redbrick Mill, Batley. Pigeons fly up from the roof but we don’t see what caused the commotion. A wasp briefly takes an interest in our strawberry jam.
Crackenedge, according to the Ordnance Survey app on my phone, rises to 138m, which is 250 feet above where we’re sitting. That’s about the height of Wakefield Cathedral’s spire, the tallest in Yorkshire at 247 feet, so Crackenedge is quite a landscape feature.
I’ve carried a compass/thermometer key fob attached to my art bag for years. According to that it’s now 20C, 68F, which sounds about right, however the compass is now completely inaccurate, wavering around unconvincingly, but I discover that I’ve got an app for that on my phone too, which not only gives me true north but also latitude and longitude. How did I manage without it?
This camping chair from Aldi folds up ingeniously into a handy tote bag but as I’m 6ft 4 and almost 180 pounds, I’m pushing it a bit beyond its limits. As I sat down in it, one of the back legs pushed its way into the lawn and I lurched backwards. I had to dig out the rubber cap that got stuck six inches deep in the turf.
It’s not going to be stable enough for the rough ground where I’m likely to want to sit and draw.