Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Latest trail cam shots from our back garden: pheasants, blackbird, a pair of robins and – what are you doing there?! – Butch (yes, he really is called Butch), next door’s Labrador but my favourite shot is the wood pigeon at dawn, looking hopefully up at the feeders.
Recycled material in farm sheds, Dudfleet Lane, Horbury.
I spent an hour clearing algae, moss, grass and duckweed from our pond yesterday. The pheasants seem to appreciate my efforts.
The aim was to clear the pond before frogs started arriving but on my first sweep with the net I caught a large frog amongst the pondweed. It played dead but with a little gentle encouragement it hopped back into the water.
That was the only frog and I didn’t come across any newts, which I invariably catch in the net when I’m clearing duckweed in the summer.
The pheasants and a blackbird rummaged and pecked about in the debris that I’d left in piles around the pond to give any creatures that had got caught up in it a chance to escape.
Yesterday I completed the last spread of a year’s worth of my nature diaries for the Dalesman. I’ve been writing for the magazine for 12 years now, once a month or bimonthly, so it now runs to 132 articles, more than 250 pages.
This is the first time that I’ve managed to get so far ahead. The icy weather at the start of the year gave me the opportunity to put in a good session and I completed six articles, which just made me all the more determined to get on with the remaining six so that I’d be a full year ahead.
My deadline is always 6 or 7 weeks before the month that I’m writing about so in that way I’ve always been thinking ahead but at the same time I’ve always looking back, looking through my wildyorkshire.blog posts for ideas from nine months ago.
At last I’ll be able to write and draw my articles in real time, in the present! But I’ll have to wait a year to see them in print.
Back to work on my Thomas Gissing ‘Ferns of Wakefield’ article for a forthcoming ‘Dalesman’.
The ferns, horsetail and clubmoss on the right-hand page are by botanical illustrator John Edward Sowerby (1825-1870). With exception of the clubmosses and the rare parsley fern, all the illustrations in the book were drawn from specimens that Gissing had collected within 12 miles of Wakefield.
The rain’s lashing against my studio window and it isn’t looking promising for New Year’s Day but I’ve finished my old A6 sketchbook and I’m ready to start a new A5 landscape Pink Pig sketchbook tomorrow. Whatever the weather throws at us.
No, my brother Bill didn’t actually appear in this year’s production of ‘A Christmas Carol’ at the Old Vic, but he did play Scrooge in our ambitious multi-media version in 1966. I played Marley’s ghost.
It’s been so long since I tried anything in acrylics but after watching Wendy Barratt’s Sky Artist of the Year masterclass on painting a portrait with a limited palette, I thought that I’d try it. This is Thomas Gissing, pharmacist and botanist, who makes an appearance in one of my forthcoming Dalesman articles.
It’s so different to my regular pen and watercolours approach and I realise that I need to be better organised to bring it together but I will give it another try, perhaps with a simpler subject, such as the box and sphere still life that Tai Shan Shierenberg painted earlier in the series.
We’re on to planning our animation project on my Procreate Dreams animation course.
For the purposes of this project we need to keep the character design as simple as possible. It may be just 10 to 15 seconds of animation but at 24 frames per second that will potentially involve hundreds, even thousands of drawings.
My favourite gardening gloves are worn through at the fingers, so a good subject for another textures drawing for my Procreate Dreams course.
The various texture brushes will have their uses but I like to be in control so my favourite way of creating a texture is to hand draw it, in this case with Procreate’s Dry Ink brush.