Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Drawing the dogs and trying the s’mores kronut, a cross between a croissant and a donut, at the ØL cafe in Horbury this morning.
The dogs took so much interest in their surroundings that they soon wound their leads around table legs and chair legs.
I’ve done so much black and white work recently that I thought it was time to return to base and go back to brown Lamy pen and my Bijou watercolours to draw this rowan leaf from the front garden. Unfortunately my Pentel Water Brush is all but clogged up now, so the watercolour wash is a bit limited.
Mustard pot, yogurt container and treacle tins on my shelf in the studio.
When you look closely at this fungus growing on a stump by the lake at Newmillerdam you can see that the cap is dotted with scales and the stem looks rather shaggy.
The nearest that I can get to it in the field guide is honey fungus, but I hadn’t realised that the stems could be so shaggy.
On a felled log, water had gathered in a hole in the bark, creating a temporary habitat.
On our errands this afternoon, I drew one of the carved heads on one of the former banks in Ossett and the door in the Carnegie Free Library in Horbury.
The Falcon Houseware enamel mug that I use when I’m painting watercolours or ink washes in the studio. The pieces of timber are offcuts from when we constructed the compost bins in the spring.
Drawn with a dip pen and Rohrer’s indian ink, coloured in Photoshop using a limited range of greys, mainly 25%, 50% and 75%, with a few darker shadows and highlights.
“I thought you were writing us a cheque,” quipped the nurse at the Covid Vaccination Centre.
“We’re not allowed to take photographs – but it said nothing about sketching!”
As with my first two Covid vaccinations, I’ve had no bad reaction. Except that I’ve decided not to have a glass of red wine at the weekend for a couple of weeks. Tough.
And I remembered not to go for a glass of Sicilian Nero d’Avola at Pizza Express at lunch time. This is going to be a long two weeks.
Auckland’s the opticians on Horbury High Street this morning, shoes and a section of Blue John, a purple-banded fluorite mineral from an inlaid table top at the Rose Cottage Tea Rooms, Castleton, on Sunday. Blue John was, and still is, mined just a mile further up the Hope Valley, from the caverns around Mam Tor.
We missed out on Newmillerdam last week as it was raining heavily but today it’s looking good with plenty of autumn colour, however I’m still experimenting with pen and ink so I’ve focussed on these Victorian chimney pots and a stone wall by a horse chestnut tree.
In 1967, aged 16, I’d just finished my O-levels and was looking forward to starting a foundation course at Batley School of Art. I used homemade scraperboard (wax crayon covered with india ink, which I then scratched into. You could buy a special nib) for the historical characters, which were inspired by a day trip to York but I soon turned to a dip pen with the finest nib I could find.
At the V&A and at Oxford, I was on the look out for illustrations to Dante’s Inferno, which I’d decided to illustrate as a comic strip. Looking back, it’s a shame I didn’t try illustrating it with the scraperboard technique. It would have been more expressive but more difficult to control.
Our purple iris in the pond is top heavy, as we haven’t transplanted it from the small pond plant basket it came in.
We cut down an old plastic plant pot and drilled extra holes on its sides. We put a few pebbles in it for ballast before adding ordinary garden soil and planting the iris.
We used an off cut from an old tea towel, spread around the iris to hold the soil in place and added a few more pebbles to hold that in place.