Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
It must be decades since I last opened this old Quality Street tin, stowed away in the attic.
No box lid and I don’t remember the subject – a joust perhaps – so we’re going to have to reconstruct this piece by piece . . . starting with the edges.
Why the punched hole in the centre of the tin lid? Did we keep string in the tin?
Writing Christmas cards is now often the only time of year when I settle into an extended session of writing with a fountain pen. Normally I alternate between pen and keyboard for blog posts or articles.
It takes a while until I settle into a rhythm. My shaky hands and the rather worn joints in my right thumb don’t help me feel at ease but, if I happen to get into the flow, for a while it can feel natural and comfortable.
The trouble is that I’m never sure how I managed to get myself into this flowing and relaxed mode of writing. That’s partly because, once I’ve got going, I’ve moved on from attempting to consciously control it. I’ve switched to a kind of muscle memory.
I stop worrying about wobbles and shakes and badly formed letters. I can even get to the stage where a capital ‘S’ doesn’t feel like too much of a challenge!
My training in graphic design has left me fascinated by fonts. I’m keen to observe every nuance of an individual letterform but that’s not going to help me get in the flow if I’m constantly changing gear to draw each letter as a separate entity.
For the past four or five months, Barbara and I have been regulars at a weekly Tai Chi session and we’ve both found that the relaxed attention that’s needed to follow the flowing moves has been helpful.
I see parallels between the practice of Tai Chi and the process of handwriting. Our teacher Pat is keen that we should get the moves right from the start, rather than fudging through and getting in the flow but potentially developing bad habits which might be difficult to correct later.
10.50 a.m., Carr Lodge Park, Horbury
“Is that a red kite?” I ask Barbara, because it doesn’t sound quite right to me.
“No, it’s a buzzard,” she suggests.
I scan around but I can’t see one circling.
We’re both wrong: a dozen starlings are gathering in the tree tops at the edge of the park. Amongst the usual soft starling chatter, one of the birds is, every now and then, giving a passable impression of the peevish mewing of a buzzard.
The low sun can’t cast shadows this morning as it shines through a veil of cloud. There’s no halo, caused by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere, so I’m guessing that these are alto stratus – mid-range stratus clouds. They’re at the leading edge of a warm front which this morning is sweeping in from the Atlantic across Ireland.
As I write this up later, just after sunset, the front has arrived and rain is lashing on my studio window.
Met Office as well as predicted forecasts, the Met Office website enables you to go back through the previous 24 hours to see maps of actual observations of rainfall, temperature, windspeed, cloud cover and lightning strikes.
Yorkshire colour swatches for a Dalesman article that I’m working on. Unfortunately it hasn’t been so colourful today.
The hill-top ruin is Sandal Castle where Richard of York gave battle in vain, resulting in the mnemonic for remembering the traditional colours of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
There’s some discussion about whether indigo should really be in there. It’s a useful colour in my larger watercolour box but I’m not sure whether I can really see it in a rainbow.
A bit of drama for a forthcoming Dalesman article.
Novelist Stan Barstow at Lumb Bank, leading an Arvon Foundation creative writing course, 1975. Drawn from a photograph, photographer not credited, in his 2001 autobiography, In My Own Good Time.
This is the first drawing I’ve made using Procreate on my iPad Pro for quite a while. I used one of the new brushes from the latest version of the program: the Bellerive brush from the Pens folder. It approximates my Lamy fountain pen drawings.
In her studio in Wakefield’s Art House, down in the southern corner of Yorkshire’s Rhubarb Triangle, textile artist Kirstie Williams is checking out the possibilities of rhubarb root as a natural dye.
She creates swatches using traditional dyestuffs, such as oak bark, madder root and marigold heads, but recently she’s also experimented with avocado.
Rhubarb root gives a buff orange dye, a colour described by Scottish painter Patrick Syme in his 1821 version of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours as resembling the ‘Streak from the Eye of the King Fisher.’
Kirstie found that adding an iron mordant resulted in a deeper brown, described by Syme as a Reddish Orange, resembling the ‘Lower Wings of the Tyger Moth.’
A mordant combines with the dye and helps it adhere to material.
On the Farrow & Ball colour chart, I’d go for Fowler Pink and Red Earth as nearest matches to the rhubarb root dye, without and with the iron mordant.
In the Winsor & Newton range of watercolours the nearest to Syme’s Buff Orange is Naples Yellow Deep and his Reddish Orange is equivalent to their Brown Ochre.
I wouldn’t want too many earthy colours in my watercolour box, it can get confusing. I’ve tried to mix something similar from yellow ochre and sepia, but the colour hasn’t caught the character of Kirstie’s experiments.
Kirstie’s Soda Ash modified rhubarb dye is something close to Farrow & Ball’s Calamine.
I wondered what my studio might look like if I went for one of these rhubarb-themed colours:
Thanks to Farrow & Ball’s AI-generated ability to try it on a photograph of your own room, I can try out the effect without committing myself. For a studio I’ll stick to white, but I’d quite like Red Earth for an old-fashioned study or library.
Kirstie Williams textile artist & printmaker
Nature’s Palette, A Colour Reference System from the Natural World, Thames & Hudson, Patrick Baty, 2021
As I walk up Coxley Valley on a misty morning, I’m surrounded autumn leaves so, thinking about a new logo for Willow Island Editions, I decide that leaves might have more graphic impact than the tree-on-an-island logo that I currently use.
I pick up four crack willow leaves from alongside where the beck splits, creating the willow island that I used as a name for my self-publishing imprint.
A windswept version might have a lively look but the logo also needs a solid hint of authority as I want readers to feel that they can trust the instructions in my walks booklets.
“In nature you’re surrounded simple but stunning copyright-free design”
As I sat with a latte and flapjack by the The Little Acorn, the coffee cabin at the top end of the wood, I felt that their pun of a logo shows that simpler can be better.
A woodcut-style ink drawing of the willow-leaf ‘W’ would be more punchy than using the soft autumn colours of the leaves themselves. It would also hint at my hand-drawn approach.
The reason that I’m rethinking the look of Willow Island Editions is because I’m transferring my 27-year old website, www.willowisland.co.uk, from regular HTML to WordPress.
I find that a quiet walk in the woods in the perfect way to clear my mind a bit and focus on design. In nature you’re surrounded simple but stunning copyright-free design.
On a recent rainy walk along the shores of Lake Windermere, my seven year old haversack was the worse for wear, the rubberised lining disintegrating, so I chose this Osprey Daylite Plus for our latest walk on the Thames path a couple of weeks ago.
I drew in bamboo pen in Noodler’s black ink and, as the blotty bits are going to take a long time to dry, I photographed the drawing, rather than putting it on the scanner.
If you’re enthusiastic bordering on obsessive about typography like me, you might feel that the way Affinity prints type isn’t quite punchy enough.
“I don’t think anyone else would notice,” says Barbara, but after all the effort I’ve put into designing the page, I’d like to see it just as I imagined it, not two shades paler.
Google AI summarises the problem:
The primary reason text printed from Affinity may appear paler than from InDesign is the way black is defined and handled in the color space settings . . .
InDesign is designed for professional print workflows and often automatically handles black text as 100% black (K100), which typically results in solid, crisp, sharp edges when printed.”
A suggested workaround of setting the text to 100% black doesn’t work for me. I’d be interested to hear if there’s a simple way of getting ‘solid, crisp, sharp’ edged text Perhaps there’s a setting that I’ve missed?
I like Affinity’s innovation in combining photo editing, vector design and layout but if it’s not going handle printing text as I’d like it, I’ll have to stick with Adobe InDesign.