Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
TRYING TO think of a birthday gift that combined my brother’s creative side in the kitchen with a reference to his accident-prone Springer Spaniel Frank (who survived snowdrifts and thin ice in France last week), I spotted these two bottles in the supermarket; Marston’s Pedigree Classic English Pale Ale and Frank’s Original Red Hot Cayenne Pepper Sauce.
All they needed to personalise them was a little logo of the Original Pedigree Welsh Springer Spaniel Frank himself. Perfect!
AS IT’S HALF TERM, there were children, grandparents and assorted dogs at Newmillerdam this morning. One woman was gyrating in a slow motion ballroom twirl, holding one arm up and passing it over the other as two little Yorkshire Terriers kept circling around her, sometimes in opposing directions, as if she was a maypole.
Later it was a little Jack Russell on a long lead that made a complete circuit of an unsuspecting black Labrador. Perhaps there was some rivalry as to who would be the first off the mark if their owner, wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Ask the Boss’, should produce a doggy treat.
It’s good to see the lake full of liquid water again and Mallard, Canada Goose and Tufted Ducks going about their normal business instead of waddling over the ice.
I drew the Yorkies with my pen tablet using Corel Painter Sketch Pad, which I think feels a bit more natural to use than Autodesk SketchBook Express but these trees in Sainsbury’s car park were drawn in my usual pen and wash.
IT’S RARE to see Biscuit down at our end of the meadow, as she’s fed by her shelter at the top end. She’s kept on her own without a companion but, from what I’ve heard, she’s a pony with attitude, so that’s probably just as well.
Just after I’ve drawn her, I catch sight of a commotion; something disappears down to the woodland side of the field while an agitated female Pheasant goes hurtling up, heading for cover at the woodland edge.
It’s a curly-tailed, stockily built, Jack Russell, which appears again running down the field shortly after, probably being told off by its owner on the woodland path.
“HAVE YOU noticed that whenever Frank’s around, we disappear?” says my brother Bill, as I focus on drawing Frank, the springer spaniel, who he’s holding on his lap.
Bill has already bowed to the inevitable and replaced his own photo with Frank’s on his Facebook page.
“At first I had a picture of Frank and me there but as all the comments were about him, I realised that people weren’t really bothered about me.”
I didn’t have time to draw Frank when I first met him before Christmas but I couldn’t resist taking quick photograph – cropping out my brother, of course!
At that time Frank has the rounded proportions of a younger puppy but three or four weeks later he’s grown considerably and changed in his proportions. He’s still got big feet – he is a spaniel after all – but his body has lengthened so that his head is no longer in the proportion to his body. At that time his proportions were closer to those of a cut cartoon dog character.
By the way, as my little before and after sketch suggests, Frank can do a quick change act; from one side, he’s liver and white, like a typical springer, from the other he’s plain white.
AFTER SPENDING several hours drawing the Nondescript in Wakefield Museum today, I feel that I’ve got more questions about it – or him – than I had before I started.
The naturalist Charles Waterton (1782-1865), who created this missing link to demonstrate his innovative method of taxidermy, wrote that the Nondescript or Itouli ‘has a placidity of countenance which shows that things went well for him in life’ but I feel that the creature is wistful rather than self-satisfied. There’s a suggestion that this zoological hoax may have been intended as a satirical portrait of the customs officer who had the temerity to charge import duty on a collection of tropical bird skins that Waterton was bringing into the country to display in his museum at Walton Hall near Wakefield. For me it goes a bit deeper than Spitting Image style satire; there’s a Sphinx-like enigma about him.
You might assume that as an ape-man, the Nondescript is Waterton’s riposte to Darwin’s theories on our origins but it dates from 1824/25, 35 years before the publication of The Origin of Species.
Waterton’s starting point for this creation was the skin of a Red Howler monkey which he collected on the last of his four Wanderings in South America in 1824.
The Nondescript is often seen as a joke that went wrong but I see him as a forerunner of characters (and hoaxes) such as King Kong, Piltdown Man and the Psammead in E Nesbit’s Five Children and It.
The Nondescript and the rest of the Waterton collection are currently not on public display because the Museum is in the process of moving to new premises in Wakefield One.
SOME DAY we’ll climb Cat Bells, one of the most popular fells for walkers in the Lake District. It sits enticingly on the western shore of Derwentwater as you look out towards it from the lakeside at Keswick. Cat Bells is 451 metres, 1480 feet high, and a three mile walk from the town but the boat house in the foreground of my drawing is on Derwent Isle, only two or three hundred yards from the shore.
4.25 pm; A Red Squirrel runs along the pavement by a roundabout near the Lakeside car Park. We’re so astonished to see it that, retracing our route back out of town, I turn the car on to the road we came on – which is one-way! Luckily I realise my mistake before we encounter any oncoming vehicles!
We’ve often come to the Lake District for several days and not seen a Red Squirrel, so this one came as a surprise.
We’ve driven here from home along the Leeds ring-road so many times that we were ready for a change; we headed up the road from home, in what seems like the wrong direction, to Grange Moor, then cut across via Brighouse and Keighley on smaller roads towards Skipton, avoiding West Yorkshire’s larger towns and cities.
Because of a road closure, we found another alternative route for part of our journey along a narrow lane across the moors and fells from Airton to Settle. A large 
flock of Fieldfares, the most we’ve seen so far, had descended on roadside hawthorns.
In Settle I drew the pillar in the Market Place as we stopped for lunch at Ye Olde Naked Man cafe. Limestone crags rise from woodland on the slopes to the east of town.
IT SEEMS STRANGE to sling my art bag over my shoulder and set out as I’ve been completely out of the habit of doing that recently; I’ve had to put in about three weeks – weekday and weekend alike – in order to get my latest book off to the printers on time. As it is, I’m setting off to the local bookshop to meet the photographer from the Wakefield Express but, as he’s late, I get a chance to draw Tilly, the resident Welsh border collie at Rickaro’s.
I’ve gone for a really simple cover this time. It’s actually in full colour but I decided to limit the text, illustration and border to just one colour. The background is a piece of scanned textured brown card with the colour balance changed in Photoshop to make it look like parchment.
I think the simple cover works because this is a simple subject (but with a lot of resonance) and I’m happy that it effectively communicates the period that its set in and indicates that the material is treated in a clear but reasonably light-hearted way, rather than being an academic study.
I’m looking forward to starting on the sequel, the working title being, rather unimaginatively, More Wakefield Words. But I’m not going to be caught out by a deadline this time!
I’M DRAWING a motley crew of folk; ‘an assemblage of odds and ends of people, a rabble’. This rabble has yet to be roused but they’re a sufficiently motley assortment.
I used ArtPen on layout paper, filling in with a Cotman watercolour brush and Calli ink, making up the characters as I went. With no sketched pencil line to follow and no rough to trace I felt as if I had more freedom. The result looks perfectly idiotic, so I quite like it.
The actual size that I’d be printing this would be only an inch or two across, so you’re seeing the widescreen version here.
11 a.m.: A neighbour’s ginger cat is paying close attention to one particular spot on the lawn, sniffing it with intense interest.
What is it up to?
It turns around and sticks its paw into a hole –
a vole hole – reaching right down, like someone trying to retrieve keys from the back of a sofa.
It reminds me of a friend of my mum & dad’s, Denny from Dovercourt, who once saw a man lying by the side of the road with a look of agony on his face;
“Are you all right? Shall I send for an ambulance?”
“No . . . ugh . . . I’m fine . . . ugh . . . I’m just . . . trying . . . to turn off this stopcock.”
Like the ginger cat, he had his arm down a hole.
WHEREVER YOU are there’s something to draw but whenever I’ve got the chance I’ll go for a plant, animal or landscape so, in the bookshop, it has to be Tilly the Welsh collie if she isn’t hiding under the desk.
And at my biomechanics appointment although I had the usual waiting room subject matter of chairs and fire-extinguishers to draw I decided on the foliage of ash and sycamore, visible through a high window.
My biomechanical fault is that I have one leg about a centimetre longer than the other, so I wear insoles to even that out a bit but my annual check in with the podiatrist gave me a chance to get some expert advice on walking. On my 14 mile walk to Denby Dale a few weeks ago I’d developed small black bruises under my little-toe nails. This isn’t a biomechanical problem, he explained, it’s just the toe rubbing repeatedly against the side of the boot. A small tubular bandage that goes over the toe might be worth trying.
I asked about the backache that I get on a long walk. I tried a bum-bag instead of a rucksack this time but after a few hours I developed exactly the same ache in my mid to lower back. ‘We’ll load you up like a mule next time!’, he suggested, but the way around this would be for me to work out at what stage on the walk the ache starts and take a break just before that starts to happen. The muscles in your back that control posture are actually quite small, they’re not like the large muscle masses that you use swinging your legs and arms in the process of walking itself, so they tire easily.
I should think a fifteen or twenty minute break to do a drawing every 90 minutes would do the trick for me and I look forward to trying that out.
‘There’s life in the old dog yet!’ the podiatrist insisted, so I’ll take that as a professional opinion.
The bucket is a sketch for my new book while the donkey and geese were drawn at Charlotte’s ice cream parlour where we took my mum for a coffee for the third week running this morning, after her regular shopping and appointments outing. This is out in the countryside that I walked through for the first time on my long walk and, as we drive back by various attractive routes along country lanes, I keep spotting public footpath signs tempting me to come back and explore.
SOMEWHERE DEEP in the vaults of the new Hepworth Gallery by the river in Wakefield, in the reserve collections, there’s one of my paintings; a 6ft 6 x 4ft acrylic on canvas of Waterton’s World, along with a sketchbook of the working drawings that I made for it. These were of South American birds collected by the naturalist Charles Waterton between 1812 and 1824. The sketchbook is handmade; a large-format section-sewn hardback filled with Saunders hot-pressed paper. It proved too cumbersome for everyday use and I only ever filled a quarter of the pages. I must pop in to the Hepworth and draw something special in it some day!
My painting has yet to make it into the public galleries but this cuddly bear and the bear tile, the work of our talented neighbour Alice, aged 6, have been exhibited at the Hepworth as part of a show of work by local children. An artist came into her school to work with them.
Alice tells us that her favourite modelling clay creation is this cheerful hedghog (right) but she explains that as it was made more recently it wasn’t included in the show.
Finding a battered butterfly in the garden, she used her watercolours for this large painting which she kindly presented to us.