Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
These sketches from the hospital and the one of the wood were drawn with one of my regular fountain pens, the TWSBI Eco T.
But I’ve gone back to a fibre tip for these wood pigeons and sparrows in the back garden.
These were drawn with a Mitsubishi uni pin 0.3 fine line, which has water and fade proof pigment ink.
Cat’s-ear, Hypochaeris radicata, flowering and going to seed on the front lawn, which I left untrimmed during ‘No Mow May’ but which is now due for strimming.
I find a quiet bench by St James’ Hospital’s historic workhouse chapel and settle down to draw the cherry tree but get distracted as two town pigeons bustle past me inspecting the turf.
A crow chases a scrawny-tailed squirrel across pedestrian crossing, up a couple of steps and behind a low wall towards birches.
On the artfully boulder-strewn roundabout a blackbird gathers beak-fulls of worms. After a long dry spell, yesterday’s persistent rain must have brought them to the surface again.
The grand Victorian architecture around the hospital attracts me but I prefer to draw something organic. There was a breeze blowing around the cherry tree leaves so, returning after a break, I draw its trunk and the sandstone block next to it.
One of the crows finds an acorn-sized brown object, which immediately interests a second crow which follows it around until the item is either eaten or discarded.
Cat’s ear, self-heal, white clover and daisy grow on the lawn, although the much larger ox-eye daisy, or marguerite, that I drew was in a flower border, alongside berginia.
We have a brief shower in the afternoon, so I head for the church. The multi-coloured round-topped arch looks more byzantine than romanesque to me. There’s another similar arch above it with a balcony overlooking the chancel. As this was a workhouse chapel, I did wonder if anyone with an infectious disease would be put up there but it’s probably more likely that it was originally an organ loft.
The flower border in June: buttercup seed-head, cornflower, lady’s mantle, marigold, lavender, salvia, annual meadow-grass, seed-pod (lupin?), white clover and red clover.
These are taken on my newly-repaired Olympus OM-D E-M10 II using the 60mm macro lens. Good to have it back. I could have taken very similar photographs on my iPhone but the digital SLR camera gives me more control.
I’ve had my Olympus E-M10 for seven years but I think this is the first time it’s been to Europe, unfortunately I didn’t go with it. Thank you to Miguel Teixeira in Portugal for repairing the viewfinder and flip-up display, as well as checking it over, cleaning it and updating the firmware (something that I tried repeatedly to do but which never worked for me).
I’m now making efforts to relearn what all those dials and function buttons are capable of and particularly to improve my macro photography by at last working out how to use the focus-bracketing function.
Whelks gather together for a mass spawning, so each of these egg cases was added by a different individual. Each case can contain 1,000 eggs but the first few to hatch will feed on the remaining eggs.
I photographed this egg mass on the beach at Druridge Bay and used a handy feature of Procreate, a reference image panel, when I drew it using Procreate’s ‘Technical Pen’.
My Letts School-Boys Diary, Monday, 5th April, 1965: ‘Cross country – Stef and Fred running on intermediate. Got photos of them (3 in all).’
Other than rather poor contract prints, I haven’t been able to get any images from my 127 negatives until now, using my scanner. Once again, I’ve coloured them in Photoshop.
Lucky me, I’d got out of running, perhaps because I’d been off with tonsillitis a week earlier or, more likely, because the school houses, Marsden, Pickard, Haig and Bentley were entering more energetic runners, such as my friends ‘Stef’ (above) and ‘Fred’ (below).
With the start of the Easter Holidays, this was a busy week for me, finishing off an astronomical telescope kit and planning our next home movie, a science fiction epic:
Bill and I also had our club magazine to print, featuring an article on a ‘whirlwind’ at Painthorpe, reported by ‘Stef’ and a fire at school:
FIRE AT OSSETT GRAMMAR SCHOOL
Smoke poured out of a workman’s hut at O.G.S.
Workmen fled in terror. 5 yds away stood a tank of petrol. It took 2 fire engines 10 minutes to get the blaze under control. Thanks to Ossett Fire Brigade no one was hurt.
R.A.B., HJNC News, no.4, April, 1965
The big news though was our alien invaders movie going into production:
All sorts of special effects, tricks and camera angles were used. In filming one scene in which a soldier, R. Ryan, was burnt I, the camera man , was engulfed in flames. The most effective scene was one in which a model vehicle moved towards the alien’s rocket.
The best angle short showed soldiers running off the top of the picture.
As yet the film is not complete the second half will be filmed soon.
R.A.B., HJNC News, no. 5
Rather like the young Steven Spielberg character in The Fabelmans, I persuaded my sister to guest star as the ‘Hostile Alien’, complete with papier-mâché head which I shaped around an old bucket that my dad used to force rhubarb. My brother Bill meanwhile drafted in friends to play the ill-fated World Security Patrol, joined, as in most of our films, by my friend John as an action hero.
At that time there were always a few wartime helmets still kicking around. For the final scene involving an ‘Atomic Cannon’, we had to wait until autumn, when fireworks became available.
A song thrush has been catching garden snails in our garden and next door, using our patio and next door’s garden path as an anvil to smash the shell.
Down between the veg beds from a couple of days ago, wood pigeon feathers from a sparrowhawk kill. Three of the larger feathers that I found had a small scar around the quills where the sparrowhawk had twisted out the feather in its beak.
We saw a group of house sparrows gathered around and one flew off with a white downy feather as nesting material.
One evening in 1964 or 65, we drove out to Holme Moss on the watershed of the Pennines, on the border of what was then the West Riding of Yorkshire with Cheshire.
Apart from some disappointing contact prints, I’ve never been able to look at these badly developed photographs so I’m surprised to see that the sign ‘UNFENCED ROAD BEWARE ANIMALS’ is just about readable.
That’s my sister on the West Riding sign.
On another evening outing my dad drove us all to Temple Newsam, Leeds. This time that isn’t me on the plinth.
It’s my brother’s turn to be in the spotlight in today’s dip into my 1964/65 negatives. In this one I’ve cloned him in a double exposure – evidently with a brother like Bill, one of him wasn’t enough. But it hasn’t worked out and the two sides of his persona are threatening each other with knives.
That’s my thumb print, yet another example of my inept film developing skills. My Ilford Sprite 127 plastic camera had no tripod bush so I rested it on a wooden stepladder.
More special effects as Bill hurtles down our driveway.
We called our homemade go-carts trolleys. I remember that this one included the comfort of an old spongy rubber doormat on the running board. The baton by the back wheel might be a makeshift break.