Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
The oolitic limestone of the North York Moors was laid down in a warm tropical sea about 160 million years ago in the Jurassic Period. In close-up, oolite resembles tiny round white fish eggs, hence the name.
The spiral shells are, as you might suspect, molluscs, but the thick mussel-shaped shells are brachiopods, also known as lamp shells because of their resemblance to Roman oil lamps.
I spotted them in the walls of Beech Farm Cottages, Wrelton.
It’s our British summer and people are wrapped up against the wind and the rain in Ossett. I used a man in blue from my sketches as the walking character in my Clip Studio Paint animation, drawn on my iPad Pro.
It’s a very basic animation and I can see plenty of bits that I need to improve on but it’s a way to get familiar with the process so that I can go on to something a bit more expressive.
As the lockdown eased at the beginning of February, I couldn’t resist buying a packet of Spencer Mixed sweet pea seeds to sow indoors on my desk in the studio. I set them off in toilet roll tubes but as I was using garden soil from the greenhouse they had a bit of competition from seedlings of chickweed and sowthistle growing up amongst them.
The sweet peas were drawn with an Apple Pencil on my iPad in Clip Studio Paint, using the ‘Wet Blotting Ink’ brush for adding the colour. The brothers above (one morphing in a Pokemon character) were drawn in the iPhone version of Fresco, using a Bamboo stylus, as, so far, you can’t used the Apple Pencil on an iPhone screen.
The house across the road is another iPhone Fresco drawing, this time using Fresco’s appropriately named ‘Grungy Inker’ pen. I wonder if a matt-surfaced screen protector would make drawing with a stylus on an iPhone more controllable.
The title of this self-explanatory experiment is a tribute to Miles Kington’s Nature Made Ridculously Simple, which might be due for a reprint.
The ripening berries of the cuckoo pint look like bunches of party balloons. These were growing in a small group by the roadside but in the wood, where it grew with tropical luxuriance in the spring, we don’t see any berries.
For English school children, it’s just the beginning of the long summer vacation but there’s an end-of-summer feeling as we negotiate an overgrown footpath between the seedheads of shoulder-high false oat grass, stooping to avoid overhanging stems of bramble.
This meadow brown, enjoying the honey-scented flowers of creeping thistle alongside the footpath, looks a bit the worse for wear. One theory is that the eye-spots save the butterfly from serious injury because a bird would peck at them but it looks as if whatever attacked this butterfly went for the hindwings.
I’m reading James A. Michener’s The Hokusai Sketchbooks, so this morning at Newmillerdam, as a change from pen and watercolour, I’ve gone for Chinese brush and Noodler’s Black Ink.
Lying in the lakeside mud beside me, was a freshwater mussel shell, so I used that as a suitably oriental-looking palette to mix my grey ink wash. I dipped my cup in the water and, as I started to paint, realised that I’d caught two small water creatures – water beetles perhaps – which I released unharmed at the end of my session.
I wonder if the granular quality of the wash is a characteristic of Noodler’s, or whether it was debris in the water.
In England, our school holidays have now started and the lakeside path was a bit busier than usual however, in this willowy backwater, I had this corner of floating world to myself. Just me and a few passing mallards and a coot that came ashore within a few feet of me, apparently oblivious of me until I moved.
It’s there in the bottom right-hand corner of my drawing.
A test for my new iPad Pro: a pencil rough of a cartoon walk drawn in Clip Studio Paint. Now that I’ve familiarised myself with the way it works again, I’ll go on to try something more ambitious.
Just one thing to work out is how to export the finished animation – it’s disappearing into a black hole at the moment instead of saving to a file – which is why I’ve had to show it in a movie taken with my iPhone.
I picked up this pod razor shell, Ensis siliqua, on the strandline at Bridlington last month. The valves, still hinged to each other, are so brittle that they broke as I carried it, yet they’re are tough enough for this clam to burrow deeply into sand, extending a muscular foot to excavate its burrow. It extends a siphon to the surface for filter feeding and respiration.
I’ve identified it as the pod razor shell because it seems to be broader a straighter than the other species of razor shell found on British beaches.
This is my first drawing on my new iPad Pro, using the vintage pen in Adobe Fresco and the natural brush 1. It doesn’t feel as natural as real pen and watercolour but the updated iPad is about as good as it gets for digital drawing.
They brought us:
In the veg beds they’ve flattened our seedling Musselburgh leeks, broken into the netting over our dwarf French beans and dug a series of small neat holes.
The fun and games didn’t stop with stolen tennis balls: they also dug up several of our ball-sized Sturton onions and stashed most of them at the bottom of the hedge but one was taken over to the middle of the path by the shed at the other side of the garden.
A single broad bean pod was neatly nipped off and left in the middle of the now flattened leek bed.
The shell of this common mussel is encrusted with the calcareous tubes of keelworms, which have a prominent ridge, so that they’re triangular in cross section.
The carapace of this shore crab is encrusted with barnacles, these are the barnacle Semibalanus balanoides, which have a diamond-shaped aperture. Between the barnacles at the front of the crab’s shell there’s a flat, pockmarked whitish crust, which looks like sea mat, a marine bryozoan, a colonial animal, filter-feeding from tiny individual cells, like coral.
Like this small frond of bladderwrack seaweed, I picked these up on the beach near the harbour at Bridlington when we spent the day there last month.