Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
A carving that I made in the woodwork class at grammar school has come in useful for stopping my current reading collapsing over onto the modem on my bookshelf.
A windy day disrupted the railways when we went into Leeds yesterday. On the return journey I drew bare trackside trees, a birch hanging on to the last of its ochre leaves and a gull weaving its way into the headwind.
This looks like a real life booklet but it’s actually a 3D mock-up generated in BookViewer, a feature included in the comic book program Manga Studio EX5 (but not available in the standard version of the program, Manga Studio 5). That’s going to be so useful to me. You can scroll through your virtual publication and tilt it to almost any angle.
I’ve made the most of a rainy weekend to explore the booklet producing capabilities of the program. As far as I can tell, you can’t easily print a booklet using Manga Studio, so I’m also reading up on the booklet design and printing capabilities of Adobe InDesign, which is specifically designed to paginate and print booklets, plus a whole lot more, of course. I’ll export the individual pages of the booklet as Photoshop image files from Manga Studio then paste them individually onto the page templates in InDesign.
I can get so far with the manuals, online help and video tutorials but to understand what the finished booklet would look like I’ve gone back to pencil, paper and ruler.
I’m printing at home on A4 paper but, like most printers, my Oki colour HD printer and my everyday HP Laserjet don’t print right to the edges of the paper, so I need to allow a 5 millimetre margin all around.
I want to allow the artwork to bleed off the edges of the page so I’m allowing for a 3 millimetre bleed along the outside edges. Even so, I don’t want the text or anything else vital to the design of the booklet to go right to the edge of the page, so I’m keeping my main design area 10 millimetres in from the edges of the page and from the gutter.
Link; YouTube video Fanzine Export, Manga Studio Guide Episode 14 by Doug Hills.
The lower (right) valve of the queen scallop, Aequipecten opercularis, is flatter than the upper valve.
The ‘front’ or anterior ear of the hinge is always longer than the rear (posterior) ear, which in this specimen appears to have been chipped away still further. This scallop starts its life attached to the sand or gravel of the sea bed but it’s capable of swimming by flapping its shells.
Amongst the tubes of the keel worm, Pomatoceros triqueter, there are several barnacle shells. The keel worm is an annelid worm, which catches its food by waving its tentacles. It can withdraw into its calcareous tube and protect itself by closing a trapdoor, the operculum, across the entrance.
Down between the ribs, centre left on this high res scan of the shell, is a small colony of sea mat, a bryozoan, which, like the keel worm, is a filter feeder.
Thinking of spring, we’re planting bulbs. The crocus bulbs are already putting out shoots, the Eranthis, better known as winter aconite aren’t showing signs of life but they should flower before the crocuses.
The winter aconite ‘bulbs’ are actually corms, swellings of the base of the stem of the plant. A bulb is a short stem surrounded by fleshy leaves or leaf bases.
The crocus is a member of the iris family, winter aconite, as you’d guess from its large, glossy yellow flowers, is a member of the buttercup family.
As I’m drawing this old gatepost by the ruins of the farm called North America on the moor above Langsett Reservoir, three small flocks of birds fly across; first jackdaws, next redwings and finally a small flock of meadow pipits.
It’s a mild day and, following the rain, there’s plenty of fungus in the plantation; shaggy inkcap, fly agaric and a smoky dove grey fungus which we guess might be blewit.
I’m trying to learn lessons from my work on the Waterton comic strips in my quick sketch of the old gatepost by drawing in a livelier way. Twelve pages of comic strip took me three months to complete. It’s time to speed up a bit.
Like a ripple on a pond or a blot on a page ironstone concretions spread out across the layers of sandstone in Coxley Quarry so I guess that they must have formed after the sandbanks were laid down, perhaps during the process of solidification.
There’s a sausage-shaped patch of pure white sand a couple of feet across which is encased in a rusty crust. It looks as if the iron has been leached out by a mineral-rich solution and I guess that this then bubbled upwards through the sand because above the lens of white there’s a knobbly network of weathered-out rusty chambers.
There are also rolled pebbles of ironstone. What seems to have happened here is that a rubbery crust of iron-rich gunge has formed on the bed of the prehistoric river then a strong current has dislodged it and trundled it into an ironstone Swiss roll. Iron is deposited when river water, rich in iron salts, meets brackish water.
Yorkshire was on the equator at the time this rock was laid down 300 million years ago, in a low lying area of lagoons, river deltas and the tropical forests which would form coal.
The surface of the Earth would be lacking in colour if it wasn’t for iron-rich minerals which range through ochre yellows, rusty reds and mineral greens to the fool’s gold of iron pyrites.
Two hours is a long time to spend in a waiting room but on the other hand . . . this is the most time that I’ve had for a sketching session for months. That is, sketching as opposed to sitting at my desk working on a comic strip. I have done plenty of that.
My habit of drawing my hand when there’s nothing more inspiring to draw (or when it seems socially unacceptable to gawp at people, as in this waiting room) paid off when I was drawing my comic strip. It wasn’t easy to draw all those hands but at least alarm bells would ring if I drew something that didn’t look quite right, for instance the time when I was so wrapped up in my drawing that I drew a hand with one thumb and five fingers!
I did manage to get out for a brunch break and headed for the Cafe Casbah where I had time, after demolishing the eggs Benedict, to draw the cast iron capital of one of the pillars in the Redbrick Mill.
Link: Cafe Casbah, Redbrick Mill, Batley
I’ve redrawn the scene for my poster and added watercolour. By keeping the background figures rather muted I’ve been able to make Sabine Baring Gould stand out from the crowd.
Horbury Bridge’s hard-drinking tough guy, ‘Old Nut’, is leaning nonchalantly against the wall of the Horse and Jockey viewing the proceedings with mocking disdain. It’s difficult to get someone to look as if they’re leaning nonchalantly! He looks rather awkward but he’ll do as an onlooker for the purposes of the poster.
This illustration is a one-off but I’m looking forward to exploring the possibilities of comic strips a bit more, perhaps returning to the exercises in Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, the ‘definitive course from concept to comic in 15 lessons’ by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden.
We’ve got a recital coming up of hymns written by Sabine Baring Gould, including Onward Christian Soldiers, which he wrote during his time as a curate at Horbury Bridge. For the poster I’m showing him handing out copies of the hymn at the start of the Whit Walk from the mission at Horbury Bridge to the mother church, St Peter’s, in Horbury.
I drew the figures separately, scanned them into Photoshop then rearranged them on separate layers to get a coherent crowd scene. To break up the rhythm of figures, I added a dog, tail wagging, one ear cocked, listening to the band striking up.
I considered putting the focus on Baring Gould by having him running towards camera, doffing his hat to greet us and clutching a wad of sheets of his newly printed hymn beneath his arm but I think that it’s more appropriate to emphasise the community involvement which was the whole point of him writing his ‘hymn for children marching with banners’ in the first place.
Stoneycliffe Wood YWT nature reserve, 3.50 p.m., 52°F, 12ºC
We’re getting misty mornings and still sunny afternoons as we’re under high pressure. With no breeze and no birdsong the woods are surprisingly quiet as I walk up Coxley Valley for a short sketching session.
There’s a clatter of wood pigeon’s wings in the oaks above me. Mallards are quacking on the upper dam. Brief calls from jackdaws and a thin desultory song which I take to be a robin.
There are plenty of fungi about following the recent rain and this settled spell of fine weather including this boletus.