Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
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.
AFTER A day writing an article I get a brief chance to draw and to try, as I’ve done on numerous occasions (for example in March), to catch Tilly the bookshop border collie in sheepish mood.
I’ve drawn this with a Rotring Tikki Graphic pen, a disposable technical pen which has waterproof pigmented ink. But when I added the colour I realised that I’d missed a small but expressive feature of Tilly’s; she has two light brown spots above her eyes which help to give her a certain innocently worried look.
When I scanned the drawing I accidentally left the scanner on the high res setting that I’d been using for a book illustration I’d been working on. Computer resolution has come along so much in the past decade but, as this high res detail shows, you’re still not getting the full texture of a drawing when you see it same size on screen.
My fiddly pen work becomes freer and calligraphic on this scale. The watercolour is from my new Bijou box, which has naturally become my favourite.
If anything Tilly looks even more worried.
My sketchbook pages for the past couple of days include sketches of my brother’s Welsh springer spaniel.
WE JOINED my sister and her family (including her latest grandchild, Ivy, left) at their holiday cottage, a barn conversion, at Applethwaite near Keswick. The barn is built into the hillside so Amelia, one of two sows that live in the adjoining field, can poke her snout into the sitting room window, at ground level on her side, windowsill level on ours.
Seeing her from this angle, I immediately guessed that she was a Pot-bellied pig, which she isn’t, then seeing her lying down in the field Gloucester Old Spot came to mind but looking at a book on pig breeds which the owners of the cottage have helpfully left for the use of guests I realised that wasn’t likely to be her breed either. And she could be a cross-breed.
It might have helped if I could have drawn Amelia’s porcine companion, Wilma. Don’t tell Amelia that I said this but Wilma is actually better looking, however she’s also less sociable. She won’t come over for a chat and instead she sat herself down out of view behind a water-tank in the field.
SOMEONE had found this mammal skull and left it on one of the display boards at Ash Landing National Trust reserve, providing an impromptu quiz. What was it?
Even though the long canines at the front are missing, it’s obvious that this isn’t a rabbit or hare, it’s too large and long anyway, and to me it isn’t as broad and powerful as I’d expect for a badger so I’m going to guess at Red Fox.
And the answer is . . .
Yes, according to Mammals of Britain, Their Tracks, Trails and Signs (Lawrence and Brown, 1967), that’s what it is.
I’ve added their labels to my photograph. Alveoli are small cavities or pits, and here in an anatomical sense, that means the bony sockets for the root of a tooth. These three holes supported one tooth, as you can see from the opposite side of the jaw.
Oh, in case it’s not clear, the two lines are intended to indicate the cranium between the two eye sockets.
This Mallard duck, followed by a companion drake, wandered over to the bench as we waited for the return ferry. As we had no bread to share we thought that she’d lose interest but she looked around then settled on the ground at Barbara’s feet, the drake standing close by. When the ferry arrived and the ramp rattled into place she stood up again and decided that now was the time to move – holding up the disembarking traffic as she waddled back unhurriedly to the waterside with her partner.