Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
My usual approach would be to start with the structure and draw the trees first but I’ve gone for a more traditional watercolour technique, painting in the background in light washes, as if the trees weren’t there at all.
Next came splodges of green, the top ones darker against the sky, and then, after allowing that to dry, I painted in the trunks and branches in a dull, dark brown.
The rooks appeared as I was starting to go back over the whole thing, trying to bring it all together.
These beef tomatoes went well in our pasta. We usually grow salad tomatoes such as Gardener’s Delight or Moneymaker but as a neighbour had given us the seeds we had a change this year. As we’re always more likely to use tomatoes in pasta or in soup rather than salads, the beef are more useful to us, so we’ll go for them again next year.
They’ve ripened still further since I drew them two days ago. I decided that I should draw the best of the bunch because the majority of them look like this.
But this mis-shape appealed to me. It looks like something from another planet.
This snoozing hen soon realised that she was being watched.
Crackenedge from the terrace at The Union restaurant, at the Redbrick Mill, Batley. Pigeons fly up from the roof but we don’t see what caused the commotion. A wasp briefly takes an interest in our strawberry jam.
Crackenedge, according to the Ordnance Survey app on my phone, rises to 138m, which is 250 feet above where we’re sitting. That’s about the height of Wakefield Cathedral’s spire, the tallest in Yorkshire at 247 feet, so Crackenedge is quite a landscape feature.
I’ve carried a compass/thermometer key fob attached to my art bag for years. According to that it’s now 20C, 68F, which sounds about right, however the compass is now completely inaccurate, wavering around unconvincingly, but I discover that I’ve got an app for that on my phone too, which not only gives me true north but also latitude and longitude. How did I manage without it?
This camping chair from Aldi folds up ingeniously into a handy tote bag but as I’m 6ft 4 and almost 180 pounds, I’m pushing it a bit beyond its limits. As I sat down in it, one of the back legs pushed its way into the lawn and I lurched backwards. I had to dig out the rubber cap that got stuck six inches deep in the turf.
It’s not going to be stable enough for the rough ground where I’m likely to want to sit and draw.
No, these aren’t the moccasins that Leonardo DiCaprio wore when he trekked a thousand miles back out of the boreal forest, but they have clocked up some mileage and they’ve just been replaced, but the old ones are more interesting to draw than the pristine, fluffed up new ones.
My slippers are more Wallace & Gromit than Revenant.
I like drawing sunflowers because of their obvious structure. Despite the repetition, each petal and sepal is slightly different so in drawing them you get into a rhythm, rather like practicing letterforms in calligraphy.
Near the bird feeder in the border we found one sunflower growing from a spilt seed. A few weeks ago it produced a single large flower-head, which has now gone to seed. Meanwhile five or six smaller flowers have appeared.
Sunflowers thrive in the rich soil of our border. Last year we tried daisy-like cosmos flowers here, which we’d grown from seed from a Gardeners’ World magazine. They grew tall and leafy but by mid-autumn they’d put out just a handful of flowers. I feel that we would have had more success in getting them to flower if our soil hadn’t been so rich.
As Storm Ellen swept across Britain on Friday, one of the sunflower heads snapped off and another looked as if it would be next to go. We brought three heads in as cut flowers.
Because they do so well in rich soil, we’ve decided to try growing sunflowers on our revamped meadow area next year. We’ll grow plenty of them from bird seed and hopefully there will be enough flowers for me to draw but plenty left of the plants for the insects and birds.
I’ve got half a dozen computer programs that can generate and edit 3D drawings but I’m enjoying getting back to my real life drawing board with its parallel motion and drafting head to draw this one-point perspective of a reimagined version of ‘My Room’ for Mattias Adolfsson’s The Art of Sketching course.
Just taking a break from the imaginative effort required in cartooning to do some simple drawings from life; as simple as possible: I’m also taking a break from adding colour. These are all drawn with my Lamy Vista which is filled with De Atramentis Document Ink Black.
I’ve learnt from the cartooning though: I’m convinced that the focus on character and storytelling is also relevant when drawing from life. Even this Buff has an individual character and hints of having had some history.
A few months ago, I’d always have this Olympus Tough TG-4 in my bag or pocket but five months ago, just before lockdown, I bought my first iPhone, so I’ve been trying that out. The main place where the Tough beats it is for macro shots.
Over the past couple of weeks it has felt almost like getting back to normal being able to have the occasional coffee out. It’s good to be able to sit at a cafe table and draw again.
But really I’d like to draw a freer more organic shape so our sun hats, which have seen a lot of wear this spring and summer provide me with my next subject.
We planted mixed but so far only white have appeared. This is our first picking of them and we’ll keep on with that to encourage them to keep flowering.
My shoes are getting thin and worn on the sole, so before a hole appears, it’s time to order some more. You can’t get this kind of cushioned Comfort Vibram sole repaired at the cobblers, I’ve asked. So what sort were they? I can’t find them on the Merrell website and the name on the label has worn away; luckily my blog comes to the rescue, as I drew them years ago when they were new: they’re Merrell Jungle Beluga AC+. How could I not remember that?!
Just before the lockdown, I got chance for one last cream scone and latté at Blacker Hall Farm. The restaurant isn’t quite fully open again but you can buy a takeaway coffee and scone at the deli counter in the shop and use their grassy picnic area. I sat on the grass under the shade of a large oak tree to draw some of the plants in the close-cropped turf, including greater plantain, on the right, also known as broad-leaved plantain. It grows low so it has largely escaped the mower and it’s tough so that it can stand a certain amount of trampling. It’s a true plantain, so it isn’t related to bananas and what are sometimes referred to as ‘cooking plantains’, but I always imagine that little seed-head as resembling the bunches on banana plants.
Tomatoes are red, bananas are yellow, but despite temptations, I’m still having a break from watercolour.
These are Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Majestic vine ripened Tomatoes but hopefully in a few weeks time we’re going to have lots of our own tomatoes. We planted seeds of beef and little plum tomatoes that a neighbour gave us and ended up with so many plants that the greenhouse now has a jungly look. Plenty of tomatoes appearing but so far they’re all green.
You wouldn’t think that The Wicker Man would make a suitable subject for a school play but our headmaster E. C. Axford’s plays were dark dramas with a similar theme.
A People Apart was a tale of everyday village folk who practise pagan sacrifice while in Black Bread the inhabitants of a recently discovered remote island are forced to keep to their medieval lifestyles to please visiting tourists.
My sister Linda had a long speech, standing by the village cross, discussing the philosophical implications of holding back progress but the line that I remember was from one of the island’s disgruntled peasants, played by Clive Simms, who grumbles: “They threw my Morris Minor off the cliff!”
Mr Axford’s literary efforts also included a novel, A Stranger in Allanford, 1960, and a poem that was set to music by the school Madrigal Society.
As a retirement project he wrote about Bodmin Moor for a David & Charles topographical series.
At morning assembly Mr Axford would dip into his notebook of suitable readings. One of them, a tale of charitable deeds, ends with the hero arriving at a musical gathering, probably after giving away his cloak or his shoes. After explaining his late arrival he says to his friends: “And now, let us tune our instruments.”
A great closing line.