Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Gothic architectural features of Newmillerdam Boathouse, which dates from the 1820s. I’d planned this as a small black and white diagram, but it works better larger and in colour. I’m still struggling with joined-up handwriting, some of these were ‘best out of three’, but I think that it’s worth the effort, as it gives a bit more animation to the captions.
“I’ll bring my lumping hammer!” was a typical response from Barbara’s dad, Bill, when I was explaining some garden DIY job that I had in mind.
Lump in Middle English is a ‘shapeless piece’. In Swedish it could mean a ‘block’ or ‘log’. Lumping stuff about in Yorkshire dialect refers to carrying heavy loads from place to place.
The other hammer was my dad’s and I think this is the one referred to as the ‘coal hammer’. As he worked for the National Coal Board he was entitled to concessionary coal deliveries. Our Victorian house had two coal houses and, if I remember correctly, the far coal house was the one with the larger lumps of coal which occasionally needed breaking up with the hammer.
I’ve been working in brown ink for a month, so I was ready for some black inkiness again. My gardening gloves made a suitable subject. Drawn with my Lamy Al-Star with the F nib and a Pentel Brush Pen.
Eighty years ago this month, at about 7.30 pm on 12 December 1940, my mum, Gladys Swift as she was then, my Grandad Maurice and Grandma Ann, rushed for this air raid shelter in the back garden of their house at 77 Nether Edge Road, as the alarm sounded at the start of the Sheffield Blitz. They hadn’t finished their tea (the term for early evening meal at the time) and my mum grabbed the pan of stew from the stove, so that grandad wouldn’t miss out.
An incendiary landed within yards of the shelter, causing irreparable damage to my grandad’s house and to the joined-on semi-detached house of his mother, Sarah Ann Swift, next door. Another bomb that landed nearby wiped out a whole family with direct hit on their house, so I feel lucky to be here really (I would be born 10 years later).
As I’ve mentioned before, I used to listen to my mum’s stories about her experience and try to picture the interior of the shelter but I never dreamed that I’d get to see it, so my thanks to Andy and Neil who on the day of the 80th anniversary invited my brother, sister and I to a Zoom meeting live from the shelter (or rather from the coach house next to it as the wi-fi couldn’t penetrate those built-to-withstand-a-bomb concrete walls).
On the the guided-tour phone footage that they showed us, I was impressed by the original concrete door, still in place on rusty hinges on one of the entrances.
This door led to a flight of stairs (now blocked with rubble) which was intended as an entrance for my great grandma Sarah Ann, who, as I’ve said, lived next door. On that evening though, she took shelter in her cellar along with her pet bird and her Pomeranian, Queenie. The rescuers brought her out of the wrecked house through the coal chute, along with the bird and the dog.
I imagined there were rudimentary bunks in the shelter but there isn’t as much room in there as I expected. Probably they sat it out, as I remember my mum saying that she once fell asleep down there in a deckchair and had the most extreme form of pins and needles imaginable when she woke because the cross-bar had been digging in behind her knees.
Sheffield Blitz my comic strip version of the air raid, drawn when I was 14 years old.
Ernest Bowler, Castleton: a painting belonging to my grandad, which survived the raid.
Nether Edge in the Second World War compiled by the Nether Edge History Group, Second World War Research team, ISBN 09514003-2, paperback. You can order a copy, £10 plus postage, from the group via this e-mail: nenghistory@gmail.com
Testing out my new Lamy nexx M fountain pen with the De Atramentis Brown ink, I drew the Habitat mug on the coffee table in front of me, then rounded up the available fruit: this time a lemon and two Royal Gala apples. The apples are British and in these days of tense Brexit negotiations, I’m pleased to say that they are flying the Union Jack the right way up on the label, I’ve just checked.
You can see that there’s no problem with the ink running when I add the watercolour wash. Compared with my first drawing of my feet yesterday, the pen is settling in and producing finer lines, which is what I want.
Bananas don’t survive long in this house but here are some that I drew at the beginning of the month, resisting the urge to add colour in this case. These were drawn with a Lamy Safari loaded with De Atramentis Document Black ink.
You might be wondering how my attempts to improve my handwriting are going. Not too impressive so far, but showing slow improvement. These long and short downstrokes improved as I got down the page. In the next exercise, I get to practice real letterforms, ‘hb’ and ‘hp’, as the authors of Improve Your Handwriting point out, these are ‘closely related letters that share the same lines and arches’.
It was writing my Christmas cards that made me realise that my handwriting needed some attention, so I’ve been reading Teach Yourself Improve Your Handwriting by Rosemary Sassoon and Gunnlaugur SE Briem, and I’ve taken their advice to try another pen.
The Lamy nexx M94 is a bit larger than the regular Lamy Safari that I’m used to, with a rubber grip, which makes it particularly suitable for someone like me with large hands. I’ve gone for an F, fine, nib because I felt a larger size would make my writing a bit larger than I’m aiming for. The F nib will also be more suitable for drawing details in my sketchbook.
While I was ordering the pen and its filler from The Writing Desk, I went for a bottle of De Atramentis Document Ink in Brown. I’ve been using De Atramentis Black ink in all my pens recently, so going back to brown is intended to be a way of getting back into the habit of drawing from nature. The woodland subjects that I have in mind should work well drawn in brown.
There’s no better time than the present to get started, so on our new regular walk around the Woodland Trail at Earnshaw’s Timber Yard at the top end of Coxley Valley, I got Barbara to buy the takeaway lattes and tiffins while I drew the view from the picnic table in one of the garden shelters in the displays there. As you can see, the De Atramentis Ink soon dries enough to allow me to add a quick watercolour wash.
I didn’t have time to add the watercolour wash to the sketch of the sycamore in the Cluntergate car park in Horbury, so I photographed the tree with my iPhone an added the colour later.
This morning as we entered the Woodland Trail, a sleek-looking grey squirrel dashed across the path in front of us, no doubt well-fed on the bumper crop of acorns we had this year. At the diagonally opposite corner at the top end of the wood, a jay flew to the top of the tallest oak, acorn in its beak, before flying off deeper into the wood.
Amongst the hollies which form the most conspicuous part of the shrub layer, great tits were checking out the branches, while blue tits, in the same mixed flock, worked the bare branches of the oaks above. Three brown birds shot out from the lower branches of the next group of hollies which we think were redwings, although we didn’t get enough of a look of them to be sure. I miss a lot of bird calls but Barbara heard a rattly ‘chack-chack-chack-chack’ call, like, as she described it, ‘like running a pencil along the corrugations of a wash-board’, so they might have been fieldfares.
The Writing Desk fountain pen specialists
Gunnlaugur SE Briem design, handwriting, lettering.
Free Books by Gunnlaugur SE Briem on Operina
I often end up drawing modular chairs when I’m in a waiting room but today I’m in luck, the decorators are here and they’ve left a folded dust sheet and a little still life of carpet tiles and cardboard cartons stacked in a bin. I can get absorbed in the deep folds of the sheet just as I might if I was up in the Dales drawing a rock face. Why should a dust sheet make a more fascinating subject than a modular chair? Writing in a different context, author Lia Leendertz suggests a reason in her article Our garden, our refuge in this month’s The Garden:
‘When I felt calm and happy there, it may have been because my garden contains plenty of ‘fascination’ – a not-very-scientific-sounding, but entirely scientific concept which suggests that or brains are calmed by certain shapes, such as unfurling fern fronds and the centres of aeoniums.’
Lia Leendertz, The Garden, December 2020
Lia Leendertz, garden writer and author living in Bristol
RHS, the Royal Horticultural Society publish The Garden magazine
Dannii Minogue was our model for Sky Arts’ last one-hour live session of Portrait Artist of the Week. I wanted to go back to my regular sketchbook style, the quick sketches that I’d do if we were watching people go by from a cafe, rather than building up a single drawing, as I did in previous weeks.
I struggled with Dannii but presenter and portrait painter Tai-Shan Schierenberg worked better as a quick drawing. I’ll miss the weekly sessions but I feel that I’m getting geared up to travelling around with a sketchbook and hope that before too long in the new year we’ll have more freedom to travel.
This week’s sitter on Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Week was Lesley Garrett, painted by Tom Croft. I’ve painted this straight off in watercolour, with no initial drawing.
It’s back to the drawing board with the online course that I started last summer, Mattias Adolfsson’s The Art of Sketching: Transform Your Doodles into Art. This was the technical challenge, to draw a re-imagined version of your room in one-point perspective. Mattias suggested that once we’d established the framework, we should add a few hand-drawn touches but I decided that I’d like to stick with the drafting head on my parallel motion drawing board for all the right angles, adding the perspective lines with a ruler.