Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
On Friday I’m looking forward to taking part in Publish 2013;
‘This online conference is for inspiring and equipping both children and adults to discover how writing works in the real world. See how your life experiences, passions, and creativity can become a springboard for becoming a published author or artist!’
My session will be on nature journalling. For more information and to book tickets or to sample the three free preview sessions please follow the link above.
I HAVE A HABIT of editing out the buses, vans and cars as I draw and I realise that for Horbury High Street I’m giving the wrong impression so, as I draw the Beauty Spa (originally a butcher’s shop) on the right, I add whatever figures happen to be passing at the time. The lad standing with his scooter adds a useful spot of contrast with his red T-shirt.
This is the view from Horbury’s newest café, the Caffé Capri, which the only one where you can sit out watching the world go by. It might just be Horbury on our weekly date with my mum’s shopping but in this weather it feels like being on holiday. Especially when accompanied by a small potato tortilla and a glass of chilled pinot grigio.
THIS MUCH-INITIALLED gritstone boulder sits on top of the Cow at the Cow and Calf Rocks above Ilkley. To get this view I had to perch on another boulder, which wasn’t comfortable enough to encourage me to sit and draw it there and then so I took a photograph and today I’ve been working from that.
When I’m working from photographs I tend to get hooked into drawing every detail. In the real world the level of detail is so overwhelming that a natural editing process inevitably kicks in, enabling me to take more liberties with a scene and to be less literal than I am with the photograph.
A simple solution would have been to include exactly the same amount of detail but to draw the background with a finer pen which might have given more of an impression of aerial perspective. To a certain extent I thickened up the lines around the boulder by reworking them but I didn’t want to overdo that.
Hopefully when I add the watercolour there’ll be more depth in the illustration.
LIKE ME, my pen is a bit of a slow starter after a break. I draw a series of loops to get the ink flowing again.
It’s a cool rainy day, not the sort to encourage me to go out on a research or sketching trip, and it’s a pleasure to be sitting at my desk in my airy studio with the prospect of a whole day devoted to drawing. A rare chance to listen to the radio.
The excuse to draw all day is the main thing that attracted me to illustration as a career, so it’s a shame that so much of my time gets taken up with other tasks.
Making marks with a pen is such a pleasure and after getting the ink back in circulation I start writing ‘The quick brown fox . . .’ then go on to drawing circles, dots, rectangles and crosshatching.
This doodle (right) starts by looking like frogspawn and ends up looking like a multi-cored cable. I’ve scanned it here half as big again so that you can see the inky wobbliness. I think that both those qualities, the inkiness and the wobbly line, are important to me, hopefully giving a softer friendlier feel to my drawings rather than technically brilliant panache. I must be succeeding to the extent that no-one has ever described my work as technically brilliant.
These are all drawn with my ArtPen with the F, fine, drawing nib, filled with Noodler’s El Lawrence (brown) ink.
WE’RE A BIT limited as to where we can take my mum for a coffee now that she’s not as mobile but the ice cream parlour at Whitley has a lot going for it. Yes, it might be the same place that we brought her last week and the week before but the panorama, looking up the Calder valley to the tops of the Pennines is different each time we visit. It has greened up a lot since we were last here. But it changes every few minutes as shadows of clouds move across pasture, wood and moor.
It’s so good to have a short burst of the wide open spaces.
I like watercolours where forms are simplified so why do I find it impossible not to make some attempt to blob in every tree when I’m painting this view? The problem is that I’m so fascinated by detail. As I painted this I could see the blades of the wind turbines turning on the horizon, traffic passing on the motorway 6 miles away, crows bursting from the wood beyond the reservoir as a buzzard flew over . . .
It’s so difficult not to get hooked on the detail!
IT’S A LOVELY Easter Day and also the last day of March so it seems the perfect opportunity to trawl back through my sketchbooks for the first quarter of the year to pick out the drawings that I never got around to putting online.
My first sketch was drawn from a photograph that I took on our first and sadly so far only walk around Langsett reservoir back in early January. The two stones are gateposts of an abandoned farm called North America.
Quarter of a mile further on you come to a cleared area of plantation sheltered by a belt of silver birches. The habitat has been opened up to encourage nightjars and other birds to return.
We had most of the house decorated in February so I felt that I couldn’t settle down to work at home and as the weather was impossible for getting out drawing I took the opportunity to escape to the cinema a couple of times. This was drawn as I waited for the matinee showing of Lincoln. I wrote;
A few black-headed gulls and a carrion crow patrol the car park. A few tiny patches of snow linger on the fringes of the rough grassland. Dull bare trees shroud the busiest section of the M62 – currently being widened. The valley is more or less snow free, the higher ground snow-covered It’s easy to spot the cars that have come down from higher ground because of the 3 or 4 inches of snow that they carry on their roofs.
Since I started writing the nature diary for the Dalesman I’ve been reading up on the history and the natural history of the Yorkshire Dales and, despite sleety, snowy weather, we managed a shore break, staying at Carperby in Wensleydale at the Wheatsheaf, the hotel where James Herriot and his wife spent their honeymoon. I’ve got out of the habit of packing for drawing trips so I printed out a check list that I’d made when we were touring eastern England a few years ago. One of the items on the list was a clutch pencil, not something that I normally think to take with me so when we stopped for lunch in Grassington I gave it a try. It’s probably marginally quicker than pen and the lighter tone brings the sketch nearer to watercolour than my normal pen and wash approach.
There’s a walk across the fields from Carperby to Aysgarth falls, where I sketched again in the Mill Race tea rooms. In the craft shop in the old mill there are photographs of Kevin Costner filming Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves at Aysgarth. The production spent four days here filming the encounter between Robin and Little John and, according to the caption next to the photographs, Costner’s wife had admitted that he was terrified when it came to the fourth day and he had to launch himself backwards several times into the foaming waters of the falls (flowing at 100 m.p.h. according the caption!).
We sheltered in the Dales Folk Museum on the Friday, familiarising ourselves with the history of the area and I drew the view from the cafe during our coffee and lunch breaks.
This gave me the chance to return to another medium that I haven’t used much recently; my Pentel Brush Pen. This forces you to work quickly and once dry its waterproof so you can add a watercolour wash.
There wasn’t much opportunity to draw as we made our steady progress around the museum and I found it difficult to choose just one item to sketch before we headed back to Carperby. I wrote;
This Bronze Age cup found at Crayke Farm near Hawes wouldn’t have been of any use to drink from as it is perforated by small holes, as if someone had pricked the clay with a cocktail stick around the base.
9 March; This morning at Wakefield One, the metropolitan council’s new headquarters, you’re greeted by dancing caymans and wandering minstrels. The smell of freshly cooked medieval food wafts from the booths outside while inside there are the squeaks and occasional pops as balloon are made to order.
I’ve been invited to the opening of the new museum galleries as a thank you for helping out with some of the illustrations for the Charles Waterton exhibit. I squeeze in at the back of the crowd that has gathered on the landing by the library. Some students from Leeds camped out from 5 in the morning to be sure of getting a place but they’ve now had to close the doors to the queues outside.
Standing next to me is a six year old boy wearing a cayman suit.
‘Have you been dancing?’
He’s overawed at the spectacle but his mum explains that no, he wasn’t one of the dancers but when he heard what was happening he insisted on wearing the costume. He reminds me of the boy in Maurice Sendack’s Where the Wild Things Are.
Councillor Box, leader of the council introduces ‘a man who needs no introduction’, Sir David Attenborough.
WITH BUS routes over the hills disrupted by the snow, we ended up taking a taxi to the matinee at the Theatre Royal and Opera House in Wakefield this afternoon. John Godber’s adaptation of Stan Barstow’s novel A Kind of Loving was as funny and evocative as the read-through which we attended in Ossett last summer had suggested. One of the hazards of a live performance; John Godber strolled onto the stage at the start of the production and explained that because Christine Cox who plays Vic’s mum had lost her voice he would be reading her part, while she continued in mime only (we did very briefly hear her in one scene). I’d like to see the play again and hear her speak her lines but in most scenes you could have understood her character’s emotions without any dialogue. Every live performance is different and it didn’t detract from the experience, if anything it was another way getting us to use our imaginations to draw us into the story and the lives of the characters.
In those days cigarette smoking was an everyday activity and you couldn’t evoke the late 1950s and early 60s without having the characters smoking in various situations. A silver cigarette case, a 21st birthday gift, features in the plot. But it was strange to catch a whiff of smoke indoors again after years of it being banned. Luckily it didn’t set off the alarms. It reminded me of a time when any cinema, bus (upstairs) or pub that you went in would have to varying degrees a fug of stale smoke which you’d carry it back home on your clothes. But I should explain that this was just the slightest hint of fresh smoke and we were close to the stage on row E in the stalls, so don’t let it put you off attending when the production moves on to Hull and Stoke!
Here’s a subject that most of us get a chance to draw every day, except perhaps the people who live in the old windmill further up the lane; the corner of a room.
Moving a little to the right, this jug on the hearth came from Barbara’s mum’s. I guess that it dates from the fifties but it could be slightly pre-war. It’s hand-painted with orange flowers. Marrying the curvy vase with the geometric pattern of bricks proved beyond me and I was unable to match up the proportions of the vertical and horizontal sections of the fireplace when I came to draw the bottom righthand corner of my drawing. My guess is that I drew the jug slightly larger than the bricks that I’d already drawn by the gas fire on the left.
So for my next drawing I went for something with no geometric grid. This is my A5 size art bag, a grey Mantaray bag which I most often take with me for everyday drawing, such as this afternoon at the theatre.
EVERYONE IS getting fed up about the winter. It might not have been the worst but it seems to have gone on for so long, especially as it stretches back to merge almost imperceptibly with a long wet summer.
But it doesn’t have to stop me drawing. I grab the nearest pen, the Lamy Safari that I like to write with and draw whatever happens to be around me. The only thing that I rearrange is my pair of trainers, taking them out from under the coffee table and setting them at what for a human sitter you’d call three-quarter face.
It’s surprising how fascinating familiar objects can be when you really look at them. Different types of trainers seem to have different expressions. Tongues, eyes and a hint of a smile give them an individual character that you’ve got to draw with as much care as you would a face. They even have a sole.
This is the first drawing that I started this evening. As you can see it took me a while to get into drawing. To me this looks rather stilted and awkward but perhaps that’s because the bowls and the vase are standing around like the guests at a party that hasn’t quite got off the ground yet.
I soon realised that the cartridge was running out so popped upstairs for a refill.
According to a Horizon documentary that I watched last week the optimal way to increase your creativity is to take on a task which is moderately demanding. Sitting there doing nothing doesn’t free up the creative side of your brain as you might think it would do and nor does getting involved in a task that demands all your concentration.
So drawing a bookshelf, with those repetitive but slightly different shapes, must put you in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone for creativity when you’re drawing. Not too demanding but sufficiently engaging to get the creative parts of your brain ticking over.
TWO WEEKS ago one or two small mounds of earth appeared near the bird table. I tried to persuade myself that they might be molehills but I realised that it was more likely that they were the work of brown rats attracted to the quantities of sunflower hearts spilt by the birds that use the feeders.
We’ve stopped feeding which is a shame as it’s been such a pleasure to see the regular goldfinches, greenfinches, blue tits, great tits, house sparrows and siskins, up to 20 of the latter at a time.
Am I making a mountain of a problem out of molehill? A hole has also appeared beneath the compost bin and that must be the work of a rodent. Our neighbours report that the rats have actually nibbled holes to get into their compost bins. They’ve put a couple of baiting boxes down.
I’m going to move our compost bin to a more open position. Hope they’ll get the message and move on.
More bad wildlife gardening news; our neighbours have filled in the pond in the corner by the hedge as their garden has to accomodate a growing number of young children. When our previous neighbours originally put in this pond almost 30 years ago I was convinced that this was too shady a site for a healthy pond. I was wrong because the pond was always more popular with the frogs than ours was, despite all my efforts to create the perfect habitat.
I’m really hoping that all the local frogs weren’t hibernating in the pond when it was removed. It’s the first day of spring today and I’m hoping that any returning frogs will hop along to my pond when they find their favourite spot has been destroyed.
IT’S GOOD to be back at Charlotte’s ice cream parlour where I drew this cockerel and the Soay sheep a couple of weeks ago. The distant moor tops are lost in the mist today but the blue skies and sunshine that the area of high pressure has brought are a welcome change from the uninspiring weather that we’ve been used to during the past month.
My mum celebrated her 95th birthday at the weekend but we’re getting back to normal taking her for her regular appointment and to our current favourite coffee stop to take in the wide open spaces of the view over a broad curve in the Calder Valley.
We watch a buzzard circle to gain height over a sunlit slope then make its leisurely way down the valley. I say leisurely but no marathon runner could cover the ground in anything like the time that the buzzard takes.
I haven’t been drawing as much as I’d have liked recently as we’ve been doing so much on the house, in the garden and with my business and I’ve been writing a couple more instalments of my Wild Yorkshire nature diary for the Dalesman magazine.