Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
“Tonight in The Den: Will a pen-pushing portraitist punter draw a Dragon and persuade ‘his nibs’ Peter Jones to close a deal? Or will he blot his copybook with Deborah Meaden? Will Tej Lalvani ask to see the paperwork or will Touker testily talk about a touch of Tippex? And will TV-marketing guru Sara Davies have an inkling that the portraits would look much better on the radio?”
Katherine Parkinson’s character Mary sits for her portrait in Lights Up: Sitting on BBC4 this evening. Writing the play and acting the single character who appears – we never glimpse the artist – she’s caught the awkwardness of most life class poses in the photograph in this week’s Radio Times.
After six or seven years I gave up on the weekly life class at Wakefield College because, looking back on my drawings, I preferred some of the early ones to my later efforts. The five-minute poses that the tutor used to start off the class livened things up a bit but for a pose that the model had to hold for an hour the possibilities were somewhat limited.
These days I prefer draw people on location, preferably while I’m sitting outside a coffee shop, which could be a possibility starting next week.
With animation, it’s so important to understand the motivation and emotional state of your character. Obviously an aerial predator is swooping low over the coop and the little red hen is raising the alarm.
Either that or it’s trying to lay an extra large egg.
Animation drawn in Clip Studio Paint using an Apple Pencil on an iPad Pro.
I enjoyed John Malkovich’s older Hercule Poirot solving The ABC Murders a few years ago, introducing a rather darker version of the detective and convincingly evoking what I imagine a 1930s atmosphere should be. I loved that he had an apartment in the mansions near the Royal Albert Hall, as that was such a familiar spot in my student days as I walked to and from the Kensington Gore building of the Royal College of Art.
I’m studying Quentin Blake’s approach to illustration at the moment which is why I’ve tried to free up my drawing here. Blake’s hands are rarely observed with anatomical precision but they’re so confidently drawn and so expressive of the individual character that they look completely convincing.
But I feel uncomfortable deliberately drawing hands so rapidly, without attempting to observe every individual joint. Folds in material I’m happier with, as they’re fluid and semi-abstract anyway.
Yes, he has turned out looking rather like Ralph Vaughan Williams in my drawing but this is rumpled Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby, Neil Dudgeon’s lead character in ITV’s Midsomer Murders.
Hopefully the good inspector won’t have any trouble from these characters, Riz Ahmed’s Omar and Kayvan Novak’s Waj, the hapless northerners in Four Lions who attempt to train crows as bombers. I love the expression on the crow’s face.
And I’m sure that no crows were harmed during location filming in the hills around Sheffield.
These were all drawn from photographs in last week’s Radio Times, as was Sunny, played by Sajeev Bhaskar, another character from Unforgotten. Professor John Wright is a clinician and epidemiologist at the Bradford Royal Infirmary.
Step 2 in my attempts at Dermot O’ Connor’s LinkedIn animation tutorial.
There are 32 frames in this 24 frames per second animation. I like the way the rabbit’s expression changes with just a few changes to the lines. The blue and green shapes in frames 1 and 4 are a feature called onion-skinning. Blue represents the previous frame – as if seen through tracing paper – and green the next frame. By drawing an ‘in-between’, halfway between the two, it should be possible to get a smooth movement. The difficulty is keeping details consistent.
O’Connor suggests starting off a simple animation with a beginning and an end quick sketch of the action and one at the halfway stage.
Once you’ve drawn those key frames you get an idea of where the action is going and you plot arcs, so that things move smoothly.
I plotted an arc for the rabbits right ear but thought that I wouldn’t need one for the left. As a result it flops about aimlessly!
In a photograph in this week’s Radio Times, Maria Schrader’s character Lenora has the detached, intense look of one of a woman in a Stanley Spencer painting. Deutschland 89, a German-American spy drama, is currently showing on More4.
Emil Hostina is a Securitate agent, hunkered down with her in a safe house in Timisoara, Romania, at the time of the fall of the Ceausescu regime.
I love the theatricality of the production. I wouldn’t want to stay with these two if they opened and bed & breakfast in Scarborough, but they’re wonderful characters to draw. Perhaps Deutschland will be looking for an artist in residence for their next series?
Fiona Grayson, Liz White’s character in Chris Lang’s crime drama Unforgotten looks very much like the bobble-hatted people we’ve been meeting right through the winter on our regular lockdown walks. In the photograph in last week’s Radio Times that I’ve drawn her from she’s on location in the Peak District. Some of the scenes were filmed at Winnat’s Pass. We’re hoping that, before too long, as restrictions slowly ease, we’ll be able to walk there again.
Fiona is described by RT’s Alison Graham a character who ‘has been trapped by her guilt for most of her life and knows time is running out.’
Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon.
Linton Kwesi Johnson
That makes it sound as if his work could be a bit tough, but he’s just as likely to get audiences laughing and applauding as he is to get them fired up with indignation or empathic and thoughtful.
Linton Kwesi Johnson, poet and best-selling reggae artist, is only the second living poet and the only black British poet to have his work published as a Penguin Classic.
Mary Creagh was Wakefield’s first woman MP, elected in 2005, so she’s one of my local Women in History. She’s invariably more upbeat than in my drawing but this is from a still from a Channel 4 interview, live from the Palace of Westminster, in December 2019, a week after she lost her seat to Imran Nasir Ahmad Khan, our current MP, who was literally parachuted in – yes, really, landing on a school playing field – to stand for the Conservative Party.
In the interview she reflected that the then Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn had been guilty of ‘preening narcissism’, so here she reminds me of a distraught character in a Samuel Beckett play or as Cordelia, banished by the folly of her father, in King Lear.
Mary Creagh has always taken a keen interest in environmental issues and during her time at Westminster she was chair of the Environmental Audit Select Committee. She’s now chief executive of the national walking charity Living Streets.
Living Streets the UK charity for everyday walking