Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
If you’d been standing on Flamborough Head 8,000 years ago, as early man began to move back into Britain, you’d be looking out over Doggerland, a landscape of woodland, marsh, rivers and lakes.
In the nature diary that I’m writing for September’s The Dalesman, I’m delving into prehistory but thought that I’d pop in one of my cartoons to lighten the mix a bit. But so as not to leave you in suspense, you’ll be pleased to hear that 8,000 years later we’ve found that missing hammerstone.
Another ‘start with a shape’ drawing: this time it was a star. It suggests that after 100 days of lockdown I’m missing browsing, drinking lattes and visiting historic towns. Wakefield had its own Shambles and a cluster of half-timbered buildings which survived wartime bombing but which were swept away in the 1960s to provides space for new modern concrete and brick shops.
Apologies that there’s too much zooming in and out in this little iMovie clip. I thought that the best thing to do was to dive in and do something but having re-familiarised myself with the set-up, I can now try something more calm and considered.
Another homemade birthday card, this time in honour of our nephew Andrew’s profession – no he’s not a professional gangster, but he trained as an engineer so in the distant pre-CAD days he must have experienced the perils of preparing a technical drawing.
It’s been a busy week in the homemade card factory. Here’s one for my brother-in-law and aviation enthusiast Dave’s birthday today. It’s as near as I’m ever going to get to hard-hitting satire. I’ll have to resign myself to never making it into Private Eye.
Fill a page with ‘drawings without any plan or image in your head, just start drawing’. Our latest assignment on Mattias Adolfsson’s The Art of Sketching course is a challenge for me as I’m usually either drawing from life in my sketchbook or getting together reference for an illustration. To be sure that I wasn’t starting with a plan in mind I started with a shape for each of these: square, circle and triangle. A theme soon emerged of buildings on rocks.
For the first I was thinking of Greek islands and while drawing the second I found myself thinking about Scarborough’s Rotunda Museum. The third would be at home deep in a German or Austrian forest.
During his time at the Mission at Horbury Bridge, from 1864 to 1867, the newly-ordained Sabine Baring-Gould wrote the hymn Onward! Christian Soldiers, met and fell in love with mill girl Grace Taylor and wrote The Book of Werewolves (1865), which Bram Stoker considered the definitive account of lycanthropy (Bram Stoker had heard rumours that there was to be a sequel on vampires, but sadly that didn’t happen).
There is no evidence that Sabine had to fight any werewolves during his time as a curate, working alongside Canon Sharp, but how could I resist him as a subject for the latest challenge from Swedish cartoonist Mattias Adolfsson in my Art of Sketching online course. We were asked to show aspects of a character’s biography through tattoos.
My thanks to Suzy Scavenger and to her hen Garstang, the chicken with the twisted beak. This is the latest assignment in my Mattias Adolfsson online course, The Art of Sketching. We were asked to draw a comic featuring the self-portrait comic character we’d created.
The dialogue is taken from directly from an exchange of tweets between Suzy and I about the removal of slave trader Edward Colston’s statue from his plinth overlooking the harbour in Bristol. What could have been a serious discussion of whether it’s acceptable to destroy works of art has been somewhat undermined by Garstang, who has overacted in every frame she appears in.
“Marvellous!” said Suzy, when I explained what I had in mind for the comic strip, “Garstang deserves some recognition.”
As you can see for my Clip Studio iPad cartoon (left), all this celebrity could easily go to Garstang’s head. In my cartoon, she’s standing on a copy of the popular Victorian magazine Tit-Bits (which I remember still being in print in the late 1950s). A copy dating from 1895 was discovered hidden in Colston’s plinth.
In today’s ‘From the Sofa’ live stream, Tony Harmer gave us a masterclass in how to draw cats, using Adobe Fresco and Adobe Capture. Okay, mine didn’t turn out looking quite like Tony’s . . . but I learnt about masks and generating textures and I particularly enjoyed drawing with the Fresco ‘Cross Hatching’ brush.
Barbara says the one drinking tea looks most like me, but I guess that’s the default position that she sees me in. My favourite is the first where I’m drawing. I like the out-of-control pen work! Gives him some life.
This is the latest in my Mattias Adolfsson The Art of Sketching: Transform Your Doodles into Art course. The idea is to simplify the character as far as possible. It doesn’t have to be a portrait as such. The next stage is to feature the character in a cartoon and I think that will be helpful because when I work out what I want him to do, that should give me a few clues about how to develop the character. If he just has to look blank and slightly worried, I’m there already!
Mattias Adolfsson describes his alter ego cartoon character, as ‘always clueless’ and in this emojis exercise from his Art of Sketching course, that was the expression that appealed to me. The idea is to evoke an expression with the minimum of marks, so, apart from ‘anger’, top right, I’ve dispensed with eyebrows.
Could I evoke a familiar face using the same minimal format? My favourite amongst them is Boris. Probably one of the few times the words ‘Boris’ and ‘favourite’ have appeared in the same sentence recently!