Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
A Kafkaesque take on Gary Larson’s domestic scenes of insect life in my latest homemade birthday card.
I often do quick roughs of these cards, not usually as elaborate as this one. I was going include a suggestion of the interior with a Gary Larson-style curtain and an open door, but decided to keep things as simple as possible in the final version.
For Remembrance Day I’ve looked out this slide of my dad, Robert Douglas Bell, meeting Mario, a policeman on duty at the entrance to the Vatican Museum in August 1963.
They got talking a discovered that they’d been on opposing sides at the Siege of Tobruk in 1941. The siege lasted 241 days, from 10 April to 27 November and was the longest in the history of the British Army.
Mario remembered the big guns pounding away and I believe that he was taken prisoner. My dad never talked about his experience there but my cousins in Sheffield say that he was trapped behind enemy lines when he attempted to rescue a wounded comrade. The local Bedouin tribesmen helped him escape.
At the time he was in the Royal Engineers, along with his old friend Alf Deacon manning a Bofors anti-aircraft gun.
“I thought you were writing us a cheque,” quipped the nurse at the Covid Vaccination Centre.
“We’re not allowed to take photographs – but it said nothing about sketching!”
As with my first two Covid vaccinations, I’ve had no bad reaction. Except that I’ve decided not to have a glass of red wine at the weekend for a couple of weeks. Tough.
And I remembered not to go for a glass of Sicilian Nero d’Avola at Pizza Express at lunch time. This is going to be a long two weeks.
Auckland’s the opticians on Horbury High Street this morning, shoes and a section of Blue John, a purple-banded fluorite mineral from an inlaid table top at the Rose Cottage Tea Rooms, Castleton, on Sunday. Blue John was, and still is, mined just a mile further up the Hope Valley, from the caverns around Mam Tor.
We missed out on Newmillerdam last week as it was raining heavily but today it’s looking good with plenty of autumn colour, however I’m still experimenting with pen and ink so I’ve focussed on these Victorian chimney pots and a stone wall by a horse chestnut tree.
Beginner’s class for Border Collies, Low Hill, Hope Valley, Peak District. Two farmers are releasing the sheep in groups of four.
“How do you make sure that each group of sheep are consistent?”
“You don’t – that’s the point of it.”
“These four look well behaved?”
“Just wait until they get out there! They’ve come down from across the border: Scottish Blackface.”
My first homemade birthday card with a greeting in Manx.
The new Netfish drama Squid Game proves a hit with the Cuttlefish family.
In 1967, aged 16, I’d just finished my O-levels and was looking forward to starting a foundation course at Batley School of Art. I used homemade scraperboard (wax crayon covered with india ink, which I then scratched into. You could buy a special nib) for the historical characters, which were inspired by a day trip to York but I soon turned to a dip pen with the finest nib I could find.
At the V&A and at Oxford, I was on the look out for illustrations to Dante’s Inferno, which I’d decided to illustrate as a comic strip. Looking back, it’s a shame I didn’t try illustrating it with the scraperboard technique. It would have been more expressive but more difficult to control.
Our purple iris in the pond is top heavy, as we haven’t transplanted it from the small pond plant basket it came in.
We cut down an old plastic plant pot and drilled extra holes on its sides. We put a few pebbles in it for ballast before adding ordinary garden soil and planting the iris.
We used an off cut from an old tea towel, spread around the iris to hold the soil in place and added a few more pebbles to hold that in place.