Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Kayoon Anderson painted journalist Clive Myrie on today’s live session of Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Week.
Kayoon reused a canvas, the first portrait that she’d ever painted from life.
The presenting team included Kate Bryan and Tai-Shan Schierenberg.
We’ve yet to meet the latest arrival in the family, but she hasn’t had such a bad year. And after all those new experiences, this card features a pop-up of the birthday girl taking a relaxing bath . . . in a kitchen sink during a holiday in the highlands.
A card for a beachcombing marine biology enthusiast (he lives not far from The Deep, which I’ve yet to visit).
There isn’t room to walk into our shed without moving the stack of plastic trugs that stand in the doorway. On the left, hanging on the wall or leaning against it, are spades, forks and rakes, some of which belonged to my father and some to my father-in-law, Bill Ellis. I’m particularly glad to have a long-handled cultivator – a four-pronged cross between a fork and a rake – because I think that might have come from my grandad, Robert Bell, who had an allotment just across the road from his cottage in Sutton-cum-Lound near Retford.
The large black pond net, which I use to scoop up duckweed, would probably be safer stored in the garage as it’s had several holes nibbled in it by the mice that occasionally adopt the shed as their winter quarters.
Yes, I think we all know the feeling. Although this homemade card has a post-Christmas theme, it’s actually for my niece Hannah’s birthday, earlier this week. Based on a real life incident, when Hannah and Sam’s blow-up Santa in the front garden got switched off when an electrician was working on their kitchen. The penguin was unaffected.
By then these Christmas characters had become a feature of life on the avenue and a little boy was quite alarmed to see Santa lying there, but his mother was suitably reassuring.
The utilitarian stationery cupboard is consigned to the corner but, as it’s on castors – and therefore not a stationary cupboard – it occasionally gets wheeled out. Card and paper gets converted into booklets when it goes through the Xerox laser printer before I collate, fold and trim on the worktop at the lighter end of the studio, near the large Velux roof-light window.
In contrast to this sleek operation, an old Ikea office chair, which sits next to the printer, looks worn and rather threadbare.
Equally forlorn, a four-octave USB keyboard hasn’t been used since I attempted to add a minute’s atmospheric background music to a short film that I’d made of our back garden on a frosty morning. It proved far more difficult than I’d imagined to come up with anything more than an aimless plinkity-plonk.
A much more successful purchase was the exercise step that sits on the floor next to it: I use that briefly almost every day in a five- or ten-minute exercise routine.
Nicola Coughlan, who describes herself as a ‘Small Irish Acting Person’, was today’s subject on the Portrait Artist of the Year live session on Sky Arts. There’s an option of using a still as reference or of joining in the full four-hour session, but I went just for the final hour and drew her as I might draw someone at a party, in a cafe or in the pub. Hopefully it won’t be too long before I can sit in a cafe again and sketch the world going by.
Today’s artist was Alastair Faulkner, who, when he’s not painting, works as a trauma and orthopaedic surgeon. He pointed out there were similarities in the two strands of his career but he can never step away from an operation that’s presenting challenges as he can from a painting.
I took the opportunity to draw presenters Kathleen Soriano, Kate Bryan and Tai-Shan Schierenberg.
As always, struggled with Joan Bakewell (top left).
We left it too late to buy our Maris Peer second early potatoes last year, so we took no chances this year and got these on the back bedroom windowsill chitting two weeks ago.
I found the Telephone Pen nib that I used scratchy and blotty, but that’s fine as I wanted an inky effect. Controlling my usual urge to add cross-hatching, I used a Chinese writing set to add the ink wash. The brush is made of goat’s tail hair.
It’s been a bad day for the local goats: they’re serving goat curry at the takeaway at the end of the road. It smelt delicious, but we haven’t been brave enough to try it yet.
'They come as a boon and a blessing to men, The Pickwick, the Owl & the Waverley Pen'
I’ve been reading Joanna Carey’s survey of the work of Quentin Blake and when she mentioned that his favourite nib was the Waverley Pen, I remembered that I had a box squirrelled away in the attic.
Sure enough there was the Waverley Pen box, in grandad’s Victorian writing box but there were no nibs in it, just a couple of fossils and a few small spiral shells. We once recreated a Victorian naturalist’s study for a Wakefield Naturalists’ Society display at the Wakefield Flower Show, so I’d used the box as a period detail.
I guess that I removed the Waverley nibs at that time, so the only one that I can lay my hands on now is the one in the quill-like pen holder that we used in the exhibition.
Somewhere in an old film canister or matchbox, I guess that I still have a supply of Waverley’s. As you can see from my sketch, using a Waverley Pen doesn’t mean that you’re going to be able to draw like Sir Quentin, but it’s a pleasant pen to use and it produces a varied line.
Colour version of the troublesome trio of Dewsbury lads, Henry Smith, William Crowther and Alfred Grace caught ferreting in the Boathouse Plantation at Newmillerdam in October 1870 by Chevet Estate gamekeepers, George Stephenson and William Mellor.
For the moment, I’m leaving the gamekeepers out of the final colour version. Wakefield Archives hold photographs of Chevet Estate including at least one portrait of a gamekeeper, so I would be interested to see those.