Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I enjoy drawing bits of buildings, often the side that the architect didn’t intend us to see. This window showroom at the top end of Cluntergate, Horbury, was drawn with a fine Faber-Castell Pitt artist pen as we sat in the Caffe Capri opposite.
The watercolour was added later using a photograph I took on my Olympus Tough as reference.
Waiting in audiology gives me a few moments to make snapshot sketches of the medical staff and patients, trying to take in as much detail as I can as they pass then sketching from memory.
The man with broad shoulders in the black leather jacket was such a distinctive character but it wasn’t until he reappeared that I noted that he was wearing baggy black trousers, not matching leather trousers as I’d assumed. You can see my initial sketch was of close-fitting trousers.
The bowl of sugar lumps is from yesterday’s coffee break at the Brasserie in the Courtyard near Settle.
From the window that I’m looking through I get to see people pass by just for an instant but each individual seems so distinctive that I think ‘this time I’ve got it’ but then I start thinking was his hat blue or was that his sweat shirt? What was the grey lady wearing on her feet? Was the strider with the haversack wearing some kind of waistcoat or body warmer?
As I said the other day, the more I practice doing this, the better my memory should become not just for the telling details but also for overall shape and character of each figure.
Perhaps I should find a cafe table overlooking a precinct and have a coffee morning drawing the crowds.
At first sight the gable end of a house might not seem the most inspiring of subjects but it’s surprising how absorbing such a common sight can be if you keep looking at it for half and hour or more.
Walking down into Horbury to buy sandwiches I get the chance to draw more gable ends as I sit in the Caffe Capri waiting for my order. I make a mental note of the colours. Later, as I add the watercolour, I make an informed guess about where the shadows were falling.
It’s a change for me to use a bit of imagination in reconstructing a scene after the even. I think about Cezanne’s studies of the huddle of red roofs of the village of Gardanne which seem like a starting point for Cubism.
I rejoin Barbara at her sister’s and get a slightly different view of the house beyond the boundary wall.
The paper in my Moleskine sketchbook is buff which isn’t ideal for scanning but I’m enjoying the mellow tone it gives my drawings. This my out and about sketchbook, so why not indulge myself with its gentle warmth.
‘Your imagination will never come up with anything more exciting than what’s in front of you.’
Lachlan Goudie
At last I’ve got on to my new sketchbook, the one that I’m going to use for trips around town. We’re heading for Leeds on the train so it’s ideal for trying out Una Stubbs’ approach to drawing surreptitiously in public places;
‘If I’m on a station platform and somebody walks past, I’ll try and remember what they look like and then, when I can, I sketch them. I love drawing old people. I’ve always loved old people and how one line can change a face.’
Una Stubbs
Una Stubbs is a presenter on The Big Painting Challenge, currently on BBC 1 on Sundays, and Lachlan Goudie, a painter, is one of the judges. I find the series quite inspiring and although it features non-professionals I find myself thinking why should they have all the fun?
I try memorising the people in the Costa Cafe at Wakefield Westgate. A list of details such as pin-striped grey suit, Hawaiian shirt and two-tone shoes isn’t enough in itself to conjure up the pose, body shape and character but, if I keep practicing, my visual memory for these subtler traits should improve.
This demonstration was about cuts in welfare benefits but my take on ‘Work isn’t working’ would be that if work always feels like a chore you should probably consider finding something else to do. Work takes up so much of your life.
The demonstrators were drawn from life from the vantage point of a department store window with a view up the Briggate pedestrian precinct. It was the first thing that I drew in the new sketchbook and I thought the slogan made a suitable aspiration; to be more relaxed and enjoy every drawing.
There are two kinds of buskers in Leeds; the ones that can belt it out but look rather ordinary . . .
. . . and the ones who look striking but still need a bit of musical training.
On the train back to Wakefield I had a chance to draw a man at the far end of the carriage from life rather memory. 
I realise that drawing from life is what works best for me but I’ll still keep trying to draw from memory.
We got so much done this morning before heading off to my audiology appointment. Unfortunately I’d left my letter pinned on the pinboard and as they run a no-login ‘wait until called’ system it wasn’t until thirty-five minutes later that I realised I’d turned up forty-five minutes late.
Not surprising after a week of meetings. But things at last seem to be settling down.
The wait did give me more than the usual amount of time to do one of my innumerable waiting room drawings. I was particularly pleased to make as start on this page as this is the last spread in my Wainwright sketchbook. Yippee!
I never liked the paper but its shortcomings have forced me to try crayons again because watercolour bleeds through. I’m so looking forward to a fresh sketchbook. It couldn’t have come at a better time with spring and fewer commitments ahead.
I wouldn’t normally draw that cliche of drawing journals, the pepper and salt pots, as we waited for our meal in Frankie & Benny’s but I was keen to bring the Wainwright sketchbook to a conclusion. I started it in the dentist’s waiting room, drawing the goldfish, on 23 May 2013. I feel as if I’ve spent half my life in waiting rooms since then!
I knew that it would be easy to finish off this last spread this evening at the pantomime, bringing the book to a suitably upbeat conclusion.
The scenery worked well, our attempts at perspective created a sense of stylised space and I liked the way the cottage, made from a couple of small canvas-covered panels, extended the scenery into real space, allowing for a slapstick routine using its door and window.
But, if anything, the perspective painted door on the backdrop, with its gleaming rivets and chunky black hinges, looked more realistic than the real door on the cottage.
You can’t believe anything you see in a pantomime.
Blacker Hall Farm Shop Cafe
You ask me why the stony face?
Well, you’d look like that in my place;
I sit at table 23
But no one seems to notice me.
Five hundred years at Blacker Hall
And now I’m stuck here in this wall!
Most gargoyles have a tusk or horn,
No wonder I feel so folorn;
They gave me something else instead,
A bloomin’ ridge-tile on my head!
I hadn’t spotted this small carving in the converted barn at Blacker Hall until we happened to sit at table 23 in the farm shop cafe.
Drawing from the left side I assumed this was a clean-shaven man or a child. It was only when I drew the pencil sketches above from some photographs we’d taken that I realised, especially when seen from the right, that this looks more like 
a woman.
She reminds me of Tenniel’s drawing of the Queen of Hearts in the trial scene in Alice in Wonderland. A Wikipedia article suggests that Tenniel based his drawing on a stained glass window painting of of Elizabeth de Mowbray, Duchess of Norfolk (c. 1442-1507)
which means that roof-shaped headpieces were in fashion towards the end of the Wars of the Roses. I’m sure that Blacker Hall dates back to that time and the weathering on the bedding in the sandstone suggests that the carving has been subject to the elements for hundreds of years.
I’ve been trying to imagine what kind of character ‘Roofus’, or as I now realise ‘Roofina’ would be.
We went to see the Aardman Animation movie Shaun the Sheep today and I thought that I’d try to work up the gargoyle into an Aardman style character. That’s not so easy as they make it look. If you do get to see the movie, it’s worth making the effort to sit out the credits as they’re illustrated with what look like production sketches of the characters.
If I had the time and enough Newplast modelling clay I’d try modelling her.
Developing Roofina as a medieval character didn’t seem to work. I think that it’s important that she remains a gargoyle (although I guess intended to be a fashionably dressed lady of the period, not anything scary).
I imagined the male version of the character, Roofus, grumbling about his film career as a gargoyle extra;
‘I auditioned for The Lion in Winter and, would you believe it, they used French gargoyles for that title sequence! Talk about overacting! And a couple of them hadn’t even called in at make-up to get their cobwebs removed!’
Or the least worst of the bunch. Drawing bananas is one thing but drawing them foreshortened is tricky. I found myself triangulating the black flower scars, as if I was looking for the pattern of a constellation. The repeated curves are more difficult to relate to each other.
I turned them around and tried an easier angle.
The banana is, botanically speaking, a berry, as is the kiwi fruit. The onion is a bulb.
I got a chance to draw an old cherry and a Ficus benjamina (an artificial office plant version) on my travels recently.
There are now only three double-page spreads to go in my old sketchbook, then I can make a fresh start for the spring!
With the village scene finished, this afternoon we swivelled around the eight flats that make up the backdrop and my helpers obliterated Robinson Crusoe’s desert island.
This gave me chance to elaborate on yesterday’s rough of the palace. Taking a piece of cartridge of the same proportions as the backdrop, I divided it up into the eight rectangles of the individual flats then transferred the perspective from the rough, keeping it blocky so that I can scale it up onto the flats themselves.
The timber framework of cross-members of the flats is just visible beneath the canvas, which gives me a handy horizontal grid, which I’ve indicated with pencil lines.
I borrowed a carpenter’s pencil and began mapping out the whole thing on the flats themselves, starting on the right (stage left), the most critical area, and projecting the radiating perspective to the left. This will be a giant-sized paint by numbers for my team next weekend. They’ll soon have it blocked out in with the ‘W’, ‘Y’ and ‘B’ that I’ve indicated; white, yellow and a light pastel blue. If we can establish the structure we can then enjoy working up the details.
As I put it on Facebook this morning; ‘we’re aiming high today; for the Palace think Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, something that’s going to make Versailles look tatty. And we’ve got real gold paint, no, not the spray version, that’s a fire risk so we can’t use it on stage. Wouldn’t it be great to produce a set that when the curtains open the audience is stunned into a hushed ‘wow!’ Never happened yet but who knows, this year . . .’
I like to keep life simple and my sketches are usually line first, then colour. And that’s it. But here I wanted to indicate form too. I’m not good at multitasking so could I simplify the process to three discrete stages; line, form then colour? It didn’t quite work out.
Using the Tower Pen nib in the dip pen and brown Noodlers’ Ink, I drew the orange pepper first then added a tonal wash in paynes grey. Blue sits opposite orange on the colour wheel, so I guessed that a wash of orange over the greenish-blue Paynes grey would add form without throwing the colour off-key. The Paynes grey should theoretically work as an neutral shade. It’s not such a bad solution to the problem but the drawback is that I’ve lost the transparency of the orange. I’d like something more luminous.
For the tomatoes I remembered the advice of botanical illustrator Agathe Ravet-Haevermans; lightest colours first. The tomatoes started as an overall pale golden yellow, omitting only the highlight. The calyxes and stalks started as an ochre yellow. I prefer this approach because what I might lose in sculptural solidity is made up for in more luminosity. The white of the paper is still able to show through. A tonal under-drawing of Paynes grey would be more suitable for an architectural subject.
Bananas have long been problem for me. What colour is dark yellow? Again I started with an all over pale lemon yellow and instead of having neutral shadows I looked carefully to try and see the hints of green and sepia reflected in the yellow.
Just the kiwi-fruits left to draw now!