Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Happy birthday to Van Gogh enthusiast Ivy. I’ve never been as keen on Gauguin, but Googling his self portraits I love the character he creates for himself. But definitely not a guy that I’d like to share the Yellow House at Arles with during the mistral season.
In the spring of 1996 I’d just finished my book Yorkshire Rock which for several years had involved drawing lots of small illustrations, mainly from reference, so I felt the need to get out to draw from life again.
I took a portable easel and a set of acrylics into Coxley Valley and painted entirely on location, making a point of never finishing anything off when I got back home. I’d had enough of being stuck at my desk, now every brushstroke had to be painted directly from the natural world.
This silver birch grew on the slope directly beneath pylon cables. My theory is that while still a sapling it had been flattened by falling ice or snow but it continued to grow, framing the view beyond.
To keep things simple I took only the three primaries with me, plus white. I used an enamel jug or billy can which I dipped in the beck for my water. I used the billy can itself for cleaning brushes and the smaller enamel mug which served as a lid was for clean water for mixing colours.
Maris Bard are first earlies, so in six weeks time, by the beginning of June, we should have a crop ready to use.
We bought the potatoes back in January or February but we’ve been waiting until now, when there’s less risk of a heavy frost.
The shocking moment when Franklin Clinton gets banned from the Games Oscars for punching Mario.
Happy birthday Ben.
I’m reading Shawn Martinbrough’s How to Draw Noir Comics so I’m on the look out for seedy characters and bleak urban settings on the mean streets of Methley and Birstall.
He suggests that you should take photographs of characters, cars and ‘still lives’ – plants, tables and chairs. Set the camera to black and white because that gets you looking for compositions in dark and light.
There were several diners in Pizza Express who would have made suitable characters but I didn’t have the nerve to ask them if they’d mind being photographed and opted for a discrete sketch instead.
Happy birthday to Paul. Who isn’t actually a pizza chef, but if he wanted a change from his day job he’d look the part in the uniform I’ve designed for his cartoon alter ego.
I used the ‘Image Trace’ function in Adobe Illustrator on my iMac to convert my pen and ink drawing of a sofa into a vectorised image. On a layer below I used the pen tool and – my new favourite – the blob brush to add a few areas of solid colour.
You can then re-colour the image either by changing colours individually or selecting the whole image and going for an alternative scheme from a colour theme library. Here I’ve used ‘Pop Art’, ‘Prehistoric’ and ‘Ice Cream’ (the one in chocolate and pistachio).
I converted this sketch of our shed in the snow in Illustrator for iPad. Instead of ‘Image Trace’ there’s a very similar vectorise function, which can convert it into something nearer to a woodcut or lino-cut.
I’ve just read Marcos Mateu-Mestre’s tale of medieval mercenaries, ‘Trail of Steel’, so I’ve tried to put a bit of his swashbuckling mayhem into my drawings of a sofa, a cruet and various piles of books and CDs.
I’ve been doing so many birthday cards recently that I’ve run out of De Atramentis black so I’ve moved on to the brown.
I drew this trackside junction box from a photograph in Adobe Illustrator. There’s a lot more planning involved in the process and mapping out shapes with the pen tool seems more like cutting shapes for a collage than drawing.
So far manipulating anchor points on the outlines of shapes seems rather random to me. I find it easy to inadvertently delete an anchor point and lose a section of the shape. Converting between an anchor that results in a straight line and one that results in a curve seems equally obscure.
The only way that I’ll learn is to keep practising.
Just those bare necessities. Happy birthday to Daniel who last autumn located a log cabin with attached Boc Beag real ale beer pump at the head of a Scottish sea loch.