Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
It’s our British summer and people are wrapped up against the wind and the rain in Ossett. I used a man in blue from my sketches as the walking character in my Clip Studio Paint animation, drawn on my iPad Pro.
It’s a very basic animation and I can see plenty of bits that I need to improve on but it’s a way to get familiar with the process so that I can go on to something a bit more expressive.
As the lockdown eased at the beginning of February, I couldn’t resist buying a packet of Spencer Mixed sweet pea seeds to sow indoors on my desk in the studio. I set them off in toilet roll tubes but as I was using garden soil from the greenhouse they had a bit of competition from seedlings of chickweed and sowthistle growing up amongst them.
The sweet peas were drawn with an Apple Pencil on my iPad in Clip Studio Paint, using the ‘Wet Blotting Ink’ brush for adding the colour. The brothers above (one morphing in a Pokemon character) were drawn in the iPhone version of Fresco, using a Bamboo stylus, as, so far, you can’t used the Apple Pencil on an iPhone screen.
The house across the road is another iPhone Fresco drawing, this time using Fresco’s appropriately named ‘Grungy Inker’ pen. I wonder if a matt-surfaced screen protector would make drawing with a stylus on an iPhone more controllable.
The title of this self-explanatory experiment is a tribute to Miles Kington’s Nature Made Ridculously Simple, which might be due for a reprint.
The ripening berries of the cuckoo pint look like bunches of party balloons. These were growing in a small group by the roadside but in the wood, where it grew with tropical luxuriance in the spring, we don’t see any berries.
For English school children, it’s just the beginning of the long summer vacation but there’s an end-of-summer feeling as we negotiate an overgrown footpath between the seedheads of shoulder-high false oat grass, stooping to avoid overhanging stems of bramble.
This meadow brown, enjoying the honey-scented flowers of creeping thistle alongside the footpath, looks a bit the worse for wear. One theory is that the eye-spots save the butterfly from serious injury because a bird would peck at them but it looks as if whatever attacked this butterfly went for the hindwings.
I’m reading James A. Michener’s The Hokusai Sketchbooks, so this morning at Newmillerdam, as a change from pen and watercolour, I’ve gone for Chinese brush and Noodler’s Black Ink.
Lying in the lakeside mud beside me, was a freshwater mussel shell, so I used that as a suitably oriental-looking palette to mix my grey ink wash. I dipped my cup in the water and, as I started to paint, realised that I’d caught two small water creatures – water beetles perhaps – which I released unharmed at the end of my session.
I wonder if the granular quality of the wash is a characteristic of Noodler’s, or whether it was debris in the water.
In England, our school holidays have now started and the lakeside path was a bit busier than usual however, in this willowy backwater, I had this corner of floating world to myself. Just me and a few passing mallards and a coot that came ashore within a few feet of me, apparently oblivious of me until I moved.
It’s there in the bottom right-hand corner of my drawing.
As for once I hadn’t taken my sketchbook with me, I literally drew with a digit yesterday, using a finger on my iPhone screen in Tayasui Sketches Pro (left) as we sat with a mint and lime drink in the shaded courtyard of Horbury’s Flamingo Teapot Cafe but after all the large-scale pen and watercolour work that I’ve done for my Redbox Gallery show, I felt that it was about time I tried drawing with my Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro again.
The man in the hat and the sumac were drawn in Adobe Fresco, using its virtual ‘Blake’ pen for the drawing.
Would I find it easier if I used a matt screen protector, like Paperlike, on my iPad, to give it a more natural feel? Or a rubberised tip for the Apple Pencil, to give it a hint of resistance as it moves over the glass screen?
Drawing on the iPad is never going to be as familiar to me as pen on paper but I’m keen to have the best possible image so I’d have to avoid any matt screen protector because it adds a very slight amount of colour fringing to the image.
It may seem obtuse to turn my artwork upside down as I enlarge my characters from A3 to A1 with the aid of a grid, but with such a large sheet of foamboard, it’s easier to reach the top this way. When it came to the faces, I drew a tighter grid to help me get the details in proportion.
Besides, as Betty Edwards points out in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, upside-down drawing helps you make the shift to ‘R-mode’, so that the logical left side of the brain isn’t continually saying ‘Ah, I know what this is . . .’ (a nose, for example) ‘so don’t need to look so carefully now’. When you switch over to your right side, she suggests, you draw the shapes as they are, without preconceptions.
Even so, when I came to the eyes of these characters, I could feel myself thinking, no, that’s not right, that doesn’t feel as if I’m drawing an eye.
Look forward to turning the board right side up.
I’ve started on the main characters for my Redbox Gallery, with a cloth-capped Patrick Stewart as Joby’s father and Joby himself, played by Richard Tolan.
I’ve gridded up my A3 drawing, ready to transfer to A1-size foamboard.
My little rough yesterday was sketchy enough to suggest the figures but now I’ve started defining them more, I’m going to have to tidy things up a bit, hopefully without losing the liveliness of the rough.
And what’s this, down at our garden pond? These foamboard cut-out storks might seem too big for a phone box-sized gallery but I’ve checked that out with my little scale-model mock-up and they should fit in nicely. Being white, they should show up well in what can be a rather dimly-lit space.
This morning we took a look at a gardening display in the old telephone box at Horbury Bridge, which included a small selection of items – a tomato plant, a pair of gardening gloves and a trowel – to tell its story. It made me realise that the simpler and bolder my display for the Redbox Gallery, the better.
My main characters were always going to be Joby and his dad from Stan Barstow’s novel and I realise that including historical characters, such as railway and canal engineers, will overload the display.
Watching the closing scene of Yorkshire Television’s 1975 production of Joby on YouTube, I’ve found a perfect exchange of dialogue which will work as the keynote for my show. I’d been thinking of phrases to sum up Addingford such as ‘just ten minutes walk from this phone box’ and ‘Horbury’s unofficial nature park’, which would be fine but I don’t want too many text boxes. People often skip reading labels but dialogue is more compelling.
As we’re trying to get people to stop briefly and peer into the box, we need something eye-catching – like the pocket cartoon amongst the articles in a newspaper – to hook passers by.
I’ve added a light watercolour wash to my sketch map and to the Addingford Steps A1-size pen and ink artwork, keeping it light so that it shows up when viewed through the windows of the Redbox Gallery.
These two panels are the backdrop and the cut-out figures that are the main event.
I’ve printed small scale versions to try for size in my mock-up phone box.
I feel that the Redbox is more like a shop window than a regular gallery. Five minutes wouldn’t be long to spend wander around a small show in a regular gallery, but five minutes peering into a phone box would be a lot to ask.