Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
1 p.m.; A weasel scampers along beyond the cattle grid as we take the track from Oughtershaw back to Nethergill.
3.15 p.m.; This mole appeared on the grass verge just feet from me by some surface excavations, crossed three of four feet of short grass then vanished, melting away in front of ours eyes, into what must have been a tunnel entrance at the end of a rough patch.
A grey squirrel approaches the bird feeders but I rattle open the patio doors and send him away. The problem is that our bird feeders aren’t squirrel-proof and we’ve had the plastic perches and seed-hoppers nibbled away in the past. Time to grease the pole, I’m afraid. I don’t like doing it but I’ve yet to come up with a better solution.
The leaping squirrel is another rough from my children’s picture book Deep in the Wood. I was trying to see the world from a squirrel’s point of view. What would it be like to be up there leaping with the squirrel?
You can see where I’ve had to adjust the head, sticking on a new version. The darker lines on both these drawings show where they were traced down onto watercolour paper for the final artwork. The squirrel with the nut was an early version of the cover. We didn’t use it because it looked as if the book was just about squirrels. A new version of the cover featured all the animals that appear in the book.
I drew this fox as a rough for my children’s picture book Deep in the Wood in 1987. I prefer this pencil on layout paper version to the pen and watercolour of the finished illustration. Construction lines always add some animation to a drawing. There’s an extra-heavy outline where I traced out the image onto the watercolour paper that I used for my final artwork. I rubbed pencil over the back of the layout paper.
Deep in the Wood is about animal senses and this fox appears towards the end of the story to illustrate the sense of smell. It’s pausing to take in the scents of shrew, humans and blackberries that are wafting through the wood in the evening.
Charles Waterton always regretted his decision to evict the badgers from Walton Park when setting up his nature reserve in 1826. He feared that they might undermine the ‘poacher proof’ wall that he’d built at a cost of £10,000.
I’m using a quotation from a letter he wrote to Alfred Ellis in May 1864 as the basis for a comic strip. My aims are;
Comparing the initial pen and ink ideas and the blue graphics pad roughs which I produced in Manga Studio, you can see that pen and ink works best for me but I want to follow the process through. Manga Studio is versatile enough for me to incorporate scanned drawings if that’s what I prefer to do. For now I’m working through the quick start guide chapter of Doug Hills’ Manga Studio for Dummies. I’ve been through it before years ago but never got back to the program since.
Here’s my first attempt at the first frame of Waterton in penitent reflection. It’s been drawn using the graphics tablet with the default pen tool, the ‘G’ nib. For the hands I used the PhotoBooth program on my iMac and photographed myself in the pose. I might have been overacting a bit!
I get more time than usual to draw the goldfish in the dentist’s waiting room and they’re not as fidgety as usual. No feeding frenzy.
Goldfish can see in ultraviolet in addition to the regular colours that we see. The small openings – called nares – that look like nostrils just in front of the eyes direct water over scent receptors. They’re not connected to the gills, so they play no part in respiration.
Small pits dotted along the lateral line are sensitive to pressure.
The man who brought this dog onto the District Line tube appeared to be prepared to sleep rough tonight (in sub-zero temperatures) as he’d brought an old candlewick bedspread with him. He dumped it by the doors, settling down on the seat opposite us with this terrier who reminds me of Bill Sykes’ Bulls-eye in Oliver Twist.
A stocky, smooth-haired terrier strikes me as the ideal companion if you’re sleeping rough, combining personal protection with a personal hot water bottle. A calm, reassuring but alert presence.
He (the man) rolled a slim cigarette which he lit as we prepared to leave at Putney Bridge. It’s the first time that I’ve seen anyone smoking on the tube for decades. A deadly fire on the escalator at Kings Cross put an end to the old world I remember of littered corners and tab ends.
At a party at a friend’s house near the Thames I sketch this coal scuttle, once an everyday object, the kind of thing you’d buy at an old fashioned ironmongers, but it’s been a long time since I’ve spotted one. Like the London Underground, the coke in it is smoke-free.
There seems to be an extra burst of activity amongst the goldfish this afternoon, centred on the face of the octagonal pillar of a tank nearest the centre of the room. The tail end of a feeding frenzy perhaps after their daily dose of fish food.
You’d think that they’d recognise me by now; this is the third temporary filling that I’ve had in the space of a week!
It was just the pair of fins on the belly that I couldn’t name of when I drew this goldfish at the dentist’s last month. They’re the pelvic or ventral fins. It’s probably the fact that there are two names that I find it difficult to remember.
Members of the salmon family have an extra fin; the adipose, a small upward pointing fin between the dorsal and caudal.
This drawing is an amalgam of several fish that were in constant motion in the tank in the waiting room. They varied widely in fin length and colour patterns so I tried to keep coming back to the individuals that were closest to the standard goldfish.
Simba is a restless dog to draw but she did eventually settle. The trick is to draw her without letting her notice that you’re looking at her, otherwise she’ll start getting excited again and coming over to find out what is going on. 
In contrast little Benji is a Shitzu who likes to stay in the background.
While his owner browsed in the bookshop he kept her eyes on him and I had to move around to see him face-on. However as he’s such a small dog that, even kneeling on the floor, all I could see most of the time was her top-knot. Drawn in pen and watercolour crayon.
I HAVEN’T USED my smallest sketchbook, the little Moleskin, for almost two months but as I tie up one loose end after another I’m getting into drawing mood again.
I had my first OCT scan at the opticians this morning. The infra-red scan mapped out a small area at the back of my eye and rendered it in 3D, reminding me of the 3D modelling I’ve experimented with in programs like Bryce and Vue.
A shallow crater is where the cone cells for daylight vision are concentrated. These are particularly sensitive to movement but they’re useless in the dark so as the iris opens to let in more light a wider spread of rod cells takes over, with the crater of cone cells becoming a bit of a blind spot.
This explains why when observing a faint object in the night sky, such at the Andromeda Galaxy you have to do that trick of looking slightly to one side of it. It’s too faint to register on your array of cone cells.
My true blind spot, the spot where blood vessels and nerves enter the eye, looks less like a crater and more like a corrie surrounded by glaciated peaks.