Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Himesh Patel plays Jeevan Chaudhary in the TV mini-series Station Eleven, adapted from Emily St John Mandel’s novel about a band of travelling players in a post-pandemic Great Lakes landscape.
Once again this is drawn in Clip Studio Paint on the iPad, using a standard drawing figure for the pose but this time instead of relying on my memory and imagination I took the details of the character and costume from a photograph in last week’s Radio Times.
When I travelled around the country drawing and writing my Richard Bell’s Britain natural history sketchbook, I found that pages including manmade objects in a natural landscape – such as an abandoned forestry lorry on a track through a pine plantation – often worked best.
The Persil factory had made an impression on me as I passed through Warrington on the train.
It appeared as a thumbnail sketch on one of the maps in Britain and when my editor Robert MacDonald suggested a sequel, focussing on industrial Britain, I returned to draw it.
I did more drawings closer to home, one series documenting the last coal barges to operate between British Oak, near Crigglestone, and Thornhill Power Station.
The Persil Factory made it onto the cover of the dummy of the proposed book, but the project never got off the ground, however I did sell the original pen and watercolour at one of my one-man shows a few years later. I was quite honoured that my French teacher from Grammar School days, Miss Deacon bought it.
This mock-up of the cover is a hand-coloured photocopy, as this was long before the days when I would have a scanner in my studio.
More figures and these first three are ready-made poses that you can use on the virtual 3D drawing figures in Clip Studio Paint. They were chosen at random and happened to line up like this on my row in this order entirely by chance, but looking at them, I find it impossible not to imagine that there’s some story going on.
The man on the right is actually one of a pair, he’s seizing someone by the shoulders and the other figure, not shown here, is being pulled back.
The man on the right is loosely based on a bad guy in a movie we saw recently. For the figure on the left I decided that I’ve drawn enough jackets and that it was time to draw someone wearing a jumper, so I thought that I might as well add rolled down wellies and make him into a fisherman.
By now I was running out of ideas for costumes, so these two are based on a couple of the students from my art foundation, way back in the late 1960s.
More man-in-the street pen and tone figures, drawn in Clip Studio Paint on the iPad.
I’m practising using the 3D drawing figure in Clip Studio Paint – a kind of virtual lay figure – keeping to the standard body shape but developing the character through its actions and costume. I’m going for a limited range of tones because it’s the form of the character that I’m interested in, but I look forward to adding colour, which I can do later on another layer, over the tonal layer but beneath the line drawing.
Still grappling with primitive geometric shapes in Clip Studio Paint.
Between the wars, for a period of 12 years, you could have boarded a Bradford-bound train at St Pancras (not Euston, as I’d previously written in this post) and travelled through this railway cutting at Newmillerdam. The Midland Railway opened this line in 1905 and it closed in 1968.
I’m walking the full circuit of Newmillerdam Country Park, keeping to the paths nearest to the edges of the woods.
Snaking ironwork is a local feature, which I’ve seen on the footbridge to the island at Walton Hall and on a balustrade on the side staircase at the Bingley Arms at Horbury Bridge. If the wavy spikes on this gate at Newmillerdam were supposed to warn off poachers from raiding the Chevet Estate, it didn’t work.
In Clip Studio Paint, you can, as I have here, construct 3D objects from ‘primitives’ such as cubes, spheres and polygonal shapes or you can import ready-made objects such as the figure and the cart. I’ve followed these closely as reference, drawing in my normal pen and tone method on the iPad.
The advantage of constructing a setting like this is that I could then have the figure walk around to the other side of the scene for the next frame in a comic, or even show a bird’s-eye view.
A confused Great Dane attempts to take a drink from the pond below Joiners Wood. On the Lower Lake mallards and a single mute swan have gathered in the one corner that is still ice free. A shoveler drake and two females rest at the edge on the ice.
By midday the sun has got out and the expanse of white parkland in front of the house has turned green, with just a few frosty patches remaining in the shade of trees.
The low winter sunlight was perfect for macro photography, so I took my Olympus E-M10II fitted with a macro lens to Newmillerdam this morning.
