Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
It must be decades since I last opened this old Quality Street tin, stowed away in the attic.
No box lid and I don’t remember the subject – a joust perhaps – so we’re going to have to reconstruct this piece by piece . . . starting with the edges.
Why the punched hole in the centre of the tin lid? Did we keep string in the tin?
Writing Christmas cards is now often the only time of year when I settle into an extended session of writing with a fountain pen. Normally I alternate between pen and keyboard for blog posts or articles.
It takes a while until I settle into a rhythm. My shaky hands and the rather worn joints in my right thumb don’t help me feel at ease but, if I happen to get into the flow, for a while it can feel natural and comfortable.
The trouble is that I’m never sure how I managed to get myself into this flowing and relaxed mode of writing. That’s partly because, once I’ve got going, I’ve moved on from attempting to consciously control it. I’ve switched to a kind of muscle memory.
I stop worrying about wobbles and shakes and badly formed letters. I can even get to the stage where a capital ‘S’ doesn’t feel like too much of a challenge!
My training in graphic design has left me fascinated by fonts. I’m keen to observe every nuance of an individual letterform but that’s not going to help me get in the flow if I’m constantly changing gear to draw each letter as a separate entity.
For the past four or five months, Barbara and I have been regulars at a weekly Tai Chi session and we’ve both found that the relaxed attention that’s needed to follow the flowing moves has been helpful.
I see parallels between the practice of Tai Chi and the process of handwriting. Our teacher Pat is keen that we should get the moves right from the start, rather than fudging through and getting in the flow but potentially developing bad habits which might be difficult to correct later.
10.50 a.m., Carr Lodge Park, Horbury
“Is that a red kite?” I ask Barbara, because it doesn’t sound quite right to me.
“No, it’s a buzzard,” she suggests.
I scan around but I can’t see one circling.
We’re both wrong: a dozen starlings are gathering in the tree tops at the edge of the park. Amongst the usual soft starling chatter, one of the birds is, every now and then, giving a passable impression of the peevish mewing of a buzzard.
The low sun can’t cast shadows this morning as it shines through a veil of cloud. There’s no halo, caused by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere, so I’m guessing that these are alto stratus – mid-range stratus clouds. They’re at the leading edge of a warm front which this morning is sweeping in from the Atlantic across Ireland.
As I write this up later, just after sunset, the front has arrived and rain is lashing on my studio window.
Met Office as well as predicted forecasts, the Met Office website enables you to go back through the previous 24 hours to see maps of actual observations of rainfall, temperature, windspeed, cloud cover and lightning strikes.
Yorkshire colour swatches for a Dalesman article that I’m working on. Unfortunately it hasn’t been so colourful today.
The hill-top ruin is Sandal Castle where Richard of York gave battle in vain, resulting in the mnemonic for remembering the traditional colours of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
There’s some discussion about whether indigo should really be in there. It’s a useful colour in my larger watercolour box but I’m not sure whether I can really see it in a rainbow.
A bit of drama for a forthcoming Dalesman article.
Novelist Stan Barstow at Lumb Bank, leading an Arvon Foundation creative writing course, 1975. Drawn from a photograph, photographer not credited, in his 2001 autobiography, In My Own Good Time.
This is the first drawing I’ve made using Procreate on my iPad Pro for quite a while. I used one of the new brushes from the latest version of the program: the Bellerive brush from the Pens folder. It approximates my Lamy fountain pen drawings.
In her studio in Wakefield’s Art House, down in the southern corner of Yorkshire’s Rhubarb Triangle, textile artist Kirstie Williams is checking out the possibilities of rhubarb root as a natural dye.
She creates swatches using traditional dyestuffs, such as oak bark, madder root and marigold heads, but recently she’s also experimented with avocado.
Rhubarb root gives a buff orange dye, a colour described by Scottish painter Patrick Syme in his 1821 version of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours as resembling the ‘Streak from the Eye of the King Fisher.’
Kirstie found that adding an iron mordant resulted in a deeper brown, described by Syme as a Reddish Orange, resembling the ‘Lower Wings of the Tyger Moth.’
A mordant combines with the dye and helps it adhere to material.
On the Farrow & Ball colour chart, I’d go for Fowler Pink and Red Earth as nearest matches to the rhubarb root dye, without and with the iron mordant.
In the Winsor & Newton range of watercolours the nearest to Syme’s Buff Orange is Naples Yellow Deep and his Reddish Orange is equivalent to their Brown Ochre.
I wouldn’t want too many earthy colours in my watercolour box, it can get confusing. I’ve tried to mix something similar from yellow ochre and sepia, but the colour hasn’t caught the character of Kirstie’s experiments.
Kirstie’s Soda Ash modified rhubarb dye is something close to Farrow & Ball’s Calamine.
I wondered what my studio might look like if I went for one of these rhubarb-themed colours:
Thanks to Farrow & Ball’s AI-generated ability to try it on a photograph of your own room, I can try out the effect without committing myself. For a studio I’ll stick to white, but I’d quite like Red Earth for an old-fashioned study or library.
Kirstie Williams textile artist & printmaker
Nature’s Palette, A Colour Reference System from the Natural World, Thames & Hudson, Patrick Baty, 2021
On a recent rainy walk along the shores of Lake Windermere, my seven year old haversack was the worse for wear, the rubberised lining disintegrating, so I chose this Osprey Daylite Plus for our latest walk on the Thames path a couple of weeks ago.
I drew in bamboo pen in Noodler’s black ink and, as the blotty bits are going to take a long time to dry, I photographed the drawing, rather than putting it on the scanner.
My thanks to Florence for this portrait, drawn at Isabel and Declan’s wedding celebration in Mexborough last month. Colour added by me in Adobe Illustrator. That’s how I’d like to look (I requested a bit more hair on top) so I’ll update my social media.
Setting out for the celebrations, I packed everything that I needed for sketching – fountain pens, water-brush, A6 sketchbook – then forgot to pack the bag itself, so for the weekend it was back to basics, borrowing Barbara’s Uniball signo gel pen, which is great for drawing, and her notebook, which luckily is unlined.
Five minutes walk down the road from our hotel, the Pastures Grange at Mexborough, Denaby Ings Yorkshire Wildlife Trust nature reserve lies alongside the river on the Doncaster and Worksop extension of the Trans-Pennine Trail. Gadwall and heron joined mallards, coot and moorhen on a small reed-fringed lagoon.
As soon as the music started I had to give up any attempt at chatting and switched to drawing.
Florence joined me and we took turns with the one-and-only sketchbook.
I was impressed by the way she caught the action of the dancers, including the bride performing a forward roll.
A watercolour workshop led by Neil Pittaway at the Rich & Fancy Cafe in Horbury on Sunday was an opportunity for me to try some alternative techniques to my regular tried-and-tested approach.
I remember one piece of advice that I’d heard years ago which was that you should never paint with watercolour straight from the tube (or, in my case, the tray). Always mix the colour you need.
In the first exercise (top) we ignored that advice and painted swatches of the traditional primary colours – cadmium yellow, ultramarine and cadmium red – directly on the watercolour paper. When they’d dried off for a while we mixed secondary colours by painting another primary colour over each of them, so blue over the yellow gave us green and so on.
Further washes resulted in brownish or greyish tertiary colours.
We experimented with masking tape – Neil isn’t a great fan of masking fluid – then wet-on-wet washes and graduated washes.
For a final piece, predictably for an illustrator like me, I decided against the more spontaneous techniques – which included running the tap over your work! – and instead I went for a fairly controlled set of overlapping swatches, inspired by some Paul Klee abstract and semi-abstract watercolours we’d been looking at.
Neil Pittaway painting, drawing and printmaking.