Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
The Kentia Palm, Howea fosteriana, also known as the palm court palm or thatch palm is, as you might expect, a member of the Palm Family, Arecaceae, native to the Lord Howe Islands, which lie 500 miles to the north east of Sydney, Australia.
My thanks to Antonin from Evian (the town, not the bottled water company) for the French translations of items in the cruet at the Holmfield Arms.
At a Yorkshire Owl Experience at Horbury Library we were introduced to Amba, as scops owl from Central Africa, and Caspa, an Indian eagle owl who was in the process of moulting but I drew three of our native owls: barn, tawny and little owl (Jack, Dusty and Charlie).
Delivered today, my summer sketchbooks, and I’ve gone for five A5 landscape Pink Pigs. I’ve been working in 8-inch square and A5 portrait sketchbooks but I for me a landscape format works better for natural history, as you’re always in a landscape of some sort. My A6 landscape travel sketchbook can seem a bit cramped and A4 landscape can seem a bit too much to fill in one session but A5 landscape is right there in the ‘Goldilocks Zone’. Not too intimidating to aim at one page of natural history a day.
Recent sketches from my pocket sketchbook, colour mostly added later. Sometimes I’ll take a photograph for colour reference but with these I’ve added the colour as I remember it.
A drake mallard stood resting by the duck pond in Thornes Park this morning. This was the only bird that didn’t move much during the whole time that I was there but I still found it difficult to draw get the correct proportion of head to body. With each drawing I started with the head but by the time I’d drawn the body I’d find myself coming back to redraw the head.
I couldn’t resist adding colour, which immediately made my sketches more mallard-like.
I drew birds in our back garden in the afternoon and, as with the mallard, added colour to each one as I went along.
The stock dove was an unusual visitor, smaller than the wood pigeon but quite capable of chasing it off, reaching out as if threatening to peck it. By the time they’d got down to the edge of the pond the wood pigeon gave up and flew away, leaving the stock dove to return to foraging beneath the bird feeders.
I drew the buildings from the Seed Room at Overton recently but added the colour later. I thought about taking a photograph as colour reference but decided it would be a better exercise for my memory and imagination to recreate my impression of the colour.
I added the colour later to the sycamore from Ossett (left) but had a few minutes to add a quick wash when I drew the sycamores bursting into leaf at Newmillerdam last week (below).
I’m reading Marcos Mateu-Mestre’s Framed Drawing Techniques and trying his suggestions for using tone. This cloth hat lying on my desk was drawn with an Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro in areas of tone only – no initial line drawing – using the Lasso Fill tool in Clip Studio Paint.
Previously, as in this drawing of chitted potatoes, I’ve gone for a linocut or silkscreen printing effect using areas of solid tone, set to 100% opacity.
But following Mateu-Mestre’s method in his chapter on The Gray Scale, these tone swatches are actually all based on pure black.
Tone number one really is black but it was applied with a Clip Studio brush set to 70% opacity. The resulting grey was then sampled with the eyedropper tool and painted as swatch 2 but again at 70% opacity, making it that bit lighter and so on, grading the tones almost to pure white.
Meteorologist Tomasz Schafernaker apologised for using the phrase ‘easterly breeze’ repeatedly through his forecast yesterday but that’s what’s dominated the weather today. My barometer is showing 29.6 in Hg, 1002 mB, so it’s fine but the breeze from across the North Sea is keeping it cool and keeping the cloud moving.
This opium (not Himalayan) poppy had seeded itself on one of the veg beds, so I’ve transferred it to my plants for pollinators bed and it seems to be settling in.
This foxglove rosette will be relocated too, when we put in the runner beans and dwarf French.
