Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Prominent moths have tufts emerging from between the wings and there’s also a tail tuft, just visible in my drawing. This moth, caught in the moth trap a couple of nights ago (and released the next day) didn’t have feathery antennae so it’s most likely to be a female.
So far I haven’t narrowed it down to a particular species. To me it’s closest to the iron prominent.
It’s about 1.5 cm long.
I happen to like fjords, I think they give a lovely baroque feel to a continent.
Slartibartfast, a venerable Magrathean planetary designer in Douglas Adams’ ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, 1978
I feel the same way as Slartibartfast about the crinkled leaf edges and the swashbuckling flamboyance of unfurling leaf-buds of curled dock. They give this common weed an air of baroque bravado.
I’ve been following the progress of this hogweed from the emerging bud two weeks ago to the first umbels last week.
Three weeks ago, on the 9th of May I could step across the herbage at the edge of the car park to draw the unfurling bracken and garlic mustard. They’ve now been overtaken by dock, nettle and hogweed, what you might call rank vegetation except that today, after a short shower of rain (during which I continued drawing under the shelter of a large umbrella) there was deliciously fresh smell of spring vegetation.
Barbara’s mum, Betty Ellis, would have been 100 years old today. Here she is in 2010 remembering the birth of he son John at Manygates Maternity Hospital during an air raid in 1941.
In some ways Europe hasn’t progressed much since then.
Just after he was born the Air Raid Siren went, I asked where my baby was, they said he had been taken to the shelter, but I said could I go too, but they said no, as I had to stay in bed.
The [bomb] that dropped down Thornes when I was in Manygates Mum told me after, that it lifted her from her chair to the other side of the room.
We had a few bombs drop, one doodlebug dropped in Aunt Annie’s spare bedroom it did a bit of damage but not much, I used to go and clean for her and I didn’t like going in that room after.
Another dropped in Ossett, Mum and I had gone up to see Aunt Sarah Elizabeth and Uncle Wilson, Mum was in the kitchen with Aunt Sarah and I went into the garden with Uncle Wilson, we heard the Plane then we heard the Bomb coming down, I ran into the house, it knocked Uncle Wilson off his feet into the side of his shed, but he wasn’t hurt but we were all shaken up.
It made you realise what People in London and places [were going through] where they were getting that all the time.
Betty Ellis (1922-2012)
Barbara walked around Newmillerdam this morning with John, watching a tern, the first they’ve seen this year, hovering about near the outlet. I stayed by the car park and drew hogweed and curled dock.
Bee orchid, date palm and the laburnum arch at Brodsworth Hall this morning.
Thanks to the English Heritage garden staff for pointing out the bee orchid which were growing on a south-facing grassy bank, left un-mown, alongside the formal beds and lawns.
The date palm grows in the shelter of the sunken gardens, at the sunnier end.
Happy birthday (yesterday) to Damian, who once constructed a greenhouse using recycled plastic water bottles.
Of course in real life he never messes up on dimensions.
In this year’s ‘Every Flower Counts’ survey at the end of ‘No Mow May’ I’ve got double the amount of germander speedwell flowers that I counted last year.
During the time it took to count the 167 speedwell flowers, I saw one pollinator, a common summer migrant hoverfly, Eupeodes corollae. This is looks like the male.
Plant Life informs me:
Your nectar sugar could support…
14 honeybee workers for a day
Plant Life
4 hour-long foraging flight for an adult bumblebee
1 adult bumblebees to fly for a day
Middlestown, 10.20 am:Forty or more starlings wheel about overhead and a female blackbird with food in her beak calls in alarm. Possible dangers for her chicks include a black cat which has just walked into the hedgerow and a crow keeping watch from the roof of the health centre.
The shoppers and the mating sparrows were drawn at Birstall.
Watching Prehistoric Planet, launched on Apple TV this week, reminded me of the first book that I illustrated in colour, John Man’s The Day of the Dinosaur, published by Bison Books in 1978.
I can see the influence of a favourite book from my childhood, Prehistoric World, written and illustrated by Carroll Lane Fenton, in my drawing of Diplodocus but my use of colour was based on a method used by Frank Bellamy in his Eagle comic strips Fraser of Africa and Heros the Spartan.
As the book was printed using the standard CMYK four-colour process, I used just three bottles of ink – red, blue and yellow – mixing them to get my greens, browns and – as Bellamy called them – ‘phoney greys’. But instead of the regular black for the line work, I used sepia brown ink.
I can see that I went a bit too much towards the brown with this title page. This shot of a smaller dinosaur scampering nervously beneath one of the larger species is used to good effect in Apple TV’s Prehistoric Planet and the designer of the book told me that the rough that he’d drawn for this spread helped them sell the project to a publisher.
My reference for the background for the title page came from my sketchbooks from one of the glasshouses at Kew and from my stints as a volunteer warden at the RSPB Loch Garten osprey reserve.
Looking at my first attempt at this Tyrannosaurus Rex attacking Corythosaurus, the designer said, ‘I want the kind of tension you get you try to take a bone from a dog.’
This was the best I could do.
Prehistoric Planet features at T. Rex that has just made a Triceratops kill and I have to admit they’ve caught that ‘dog with a bone’ tension in their CGI, with muscle and sinew convincingly present beneath the skin, but they do have a team of experts to help them. I had to make do with my brother Bill (off work on sick leave at the time) making up and painting every dinosaur plastic model it that I could lay my hands on.
I held the T. Rex model close to my eye to try and get the effect of it looming above the camera and I remember constructing a rough perspective grid to box in its proportions. I rotated my model of Triceratops to build up the herd.
In Prehistoric Planet there’s a sequence of the pterodactyl Quetzalcoatalus, nesting in a luxuriant tropical forest. It had been recently discovered when I illustrated the book and I imagined it in an arid savannah type setting, feasting on a brontosaurus carcass as vultures might gather at a kill today. I couldn’t work out how Quetzalcoatalus, the largest flying animal that ever existed, could then have taken off again, after it had filled up on food.
Prehistoric Planet makes its initial hop and glide look aerodynamically convincing.
As this was my first set of book illustrations in colour, it was a bit of landmark for me as I started on my freelance career and, to borrow them for an exhibition, I approached the publishers, Bison Books, then operating from a basement in Cromwell Place, just opposite the Natural History Museum. Could they look them out and take them round to the RCA Illustration Department just across the road, where the then head of illustration, Quentin Blake was organising the show.
No luck. I remember that managing director looking at me as if I was making an outrageous request.
So if you’re the current editor of Bison Books, and you happen to be reading this could I remind you that it’s about time that you handed back the originals please?
Recent excavations at Creswell Crags shed new light on the domestication of dogs and cats . . .
Happy birthday to Sofia.
Nettle drawn at Newmillerdam yesterday. The rolled leaf reminded me of the Naturalists’ Handbook, Insects on Nettles. I might take a closer look.
