Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
This morning we finished the village scene for this year’s pantomime, Cinderella, and this afternoon we’ve blocked in the forest, on the reverse side of the backdrop. I had no fewer than seven helpers – members of the cast and their mums – filling in the outlines for me.
The flat, rounded shapes remind me of Clarice Cliff designs, but we’ll add a bit of shading and outline tomorrow morning.
Dress rehearsal is tomorrow at two, but I’m sure we’ll be finished by then.
On the lane between Notton and Woolley, a kestrel sits, hunched and huddled, in a roadside tree.
At Woolley Edge, there’s a flash of colour as a jay gets up from a roadside verge. Oak trees grow along the sandstone ridge here, so perhaps it was burying, or retrieving, an acorn.
As we reach the open higher ground at Bretton roundabout, we pass a buzzard sitting on a fence-post at the edge of the road.
As we get nearer to Flockton, we see a second kestrel, hovering over the field by the road.
Looking at our route on the original Ordnance Survey map from the 1800s, I’m surprised to see what a busy landscape this was, with its sandstone quarries, gravel pits and a brick kiln where George Lane meets the Wakefield to Barnsley road.
Just north of the gravel pit there are kennels and, more exotically, three-quarters of a mile to the northeast, there’s a Menagerie, which was part of the Chevet Hall estate.
An osier bed, near the top right corner of my map, would have produced the flexible whips of willow needed for basketmaking.
The armchair, at Barbara’s brother John’s, makes a laid-back still life subject with its generous proportions and its rumpled cushions.
His Sony stereo, with its antenna, eye-like twin knobs and gaping mouth, looks like the head of a robot from an animated movie.
John’s living room even gives me a chance to sketch some botanical details; there’s a Peace Lily, Spathiphyllum, on the table by the window.
The cluster of small conical flowers, arranged spirally around the spadix appear to be all female.
The Peace Lily, also known as the Sail Plant, is a member of the Araceae family, the Arums, members of which are mainly tropical. There are only two British species: Cuckoo-pint and Sweet-flag.
This morning is a big anniversary for me as fifty years ago this summer, as soon as I’d completed my O-levels, I went along to Horbury Pageant Players and asked if I could help with painting the scenery. Even so, as I walked into the hall this morning, I really didn’t expect a big band playing a fanfare.
“You shouldn’t have!” I told Wendie, the producer. She hadn’t: she explained that there’d been a double-booking for the hall this morning.
Band rehearsal over, we set about converting the backdrop of last year’s Sleeping Beauty chateau into Hardship Hall (above, on the extreme left) and the surrounding village, for this year’s production of Cinderella.
As you can see from my sketch, I’ve kept the trees and the castle door from the old backdrop, but I realise that the door, which is now supposed to represent a shuttered window, is too central and imposing for a village scene, so tomorrow, I’ll paint that out too and replace it with a more domestic-looking window.
4 p.m.: This afternoon, the light is much the same as yesterday, so I get a chance to finish my watercolour. Working with a finer brush, a number 6 sable round, I start with the branches in the upper left-hand corner and work my way downwards.
I’m painting in a Pink Pig sketchbook on 270 gsm Ameleie watercolour paper which is smoother than the 300 gsm variety that I was using at the weekend but, as you can see from the close up, it still gives a hint of texture in the washes. It’s smooth enough to take a pen line.
It takes me about 45 minutes to an hour to finish the watercolour.
Link: Pink Pig sketchbooks
This afternoon, instead of starting with a pen drawing, I quickly sketched the outlines in pencil then, working from the sky downwards, I added a wash of the lightest background colour in each area.
It’s the same technique as the ‘half-hour’ demonstrations that I followed at the weekend but I find that working from life gives me a lot more freedom as I’m not trying to follow a series of step-by-step instructions. The dark masses of the bare ashes and willows are varied so as I work I keep adding touches of sap green, French ultramarine or sepia to my background colour, blending them wet-in-wet.
With only twenty minutes available, I don’t get the chance to move onto the next stage which would have been adding details such as twisting branches, patches of ivy and darker patches.
Sitting in the dentist’s waiting room, looking up Queen Street, I’m attempting to draw the spire of St Peter and St Leonard’s Church, Horbury.
The proportions are so subtle; the tower’s structure reminds me of a four-stage Saturn rocket, about to soar skywards but it might so easily, with the addition of an extra foot or so of girth, start to appear crushingly earthbound or, conversely, if too slender, become too spindly and emaciated to inspire confidence.
It’s the same with the individual pillars: there’s such a slim ‘Goldilocks zone’ between undernourished and elephantine. I think that he got it just right.
The architect, John Carr, (1723-1807), started his career working the stone in local quarries. As far as I know, he never had any formal training in architecture, nor did he ever make the Grand Tour, to absorb the classical influence of Italy but as bridge surveyor to the West Riding of Yorkshire, he had an eye for structure.
I walked past the church every day when I attended St Peter’s Junior School, which in those days stood close to where the dentist’s stands today. As I looked up at that wedding cake of a spire, so unlike anything else in Horbury, I’d imagine the kind of character that might be living in there, in the pilastered penthouse apartment above the rusticated clock section. Shutters and a the mini-balcony made me think of Spain or Mexico, so a mantillared señorita or a caballero.
The rotunda of columns could be a home for a minor Greek deity.
“This demonstration is about brush control and technique,” writes Paul Talbot-Greaves in 30 minute Landscapes in Watercolour, “both are essential for describing the waves crashing over rocks.”
The technique of scumbling involves pulling a not-too-wet brush across the paper but this didn’t work out quite as I intended for the sky. This might have been because the colour that I used, Cerulean Blue, tends to dry to a granular texture. I didn’t have the recommended colour, Phthalo Blue, in my watercolour box.
Like the snow scene that I tried yesterday, this watercolour is an example of deciding what to leave out, as the spray is represented by the white of the watercolour paper.
A theme through the four half-hour step-by-steps that I’ve tried this weekend has been keeping the colours that you use in a watercolour to a minimum. There are five colours in this painting and only four were needed for the snow scene. For example, the pale wash on the surf is the same colour mix as the darker patches of the sea – Cerulean Blue and Lemon Yellow – just very much diluted.
My thanks again to Paul Talbot-Greaves for devising these watercolour demonstrations and explaining the process so clearly.
This ‘half-hour’ watercolour demonstration, again following the step-by-steps in Paul Talbot-Greaves’ Collins 30 Minute Landscapes in Watercolour, actually took me almost an hour but, as with any watercolour, part of that was waiting for the paint to dry.
I went wrong with the colour wash for the distant trees, accidentally mixing a darker green intended for the middle-distance trees. In trying to dilute this mid-wash, I ended up with wash-backs. But they do have a dendritic look to them!
I’m getting a bit more confident as I work through the Half-Hour Demos in Paul Talbot-Greaves’ 30 Minute Landscapes in Watercolour.
I would normally follow the contours of a landscape in pen, as if the nib was tracing the routes that a climber might take over the outcrops of rock. Those foreground boulders would have been hatched with strata. Following the suggestions for this exercise, my initial pencil drawing amounts to perhaps a couple of dozen lines: if I’d been out on location, I would probably have got absorbed in the geological detail and I would have lavished that number of pen strokes on one or two of the rocks.
I’m learning to trust the viewer to complete the picture, so I’m realising that the decision of what to leave out of a painting can be as important as deciding what to put in. Less can be more, so I particularly enjoyed suggesting the billowing cloud with the crisp edge of the initial wash of Cobalt Blue for the sky. Following Talbot-Greaves’ example, I didn’t even start with an indication of the shape of the cloud in pencil. It’s such a pleasure to just draw with the brush.
Also new to me was the suggestion of using a quarter inch flat brush for the shadows and the rock formations. Its chisel-shaped marks give an impression of blocky rocks. I’ll definitely use it again, in fact I’ll treat myself to some new flat sable brushes as my old sable flats are now rather splayed (and that number 8, above, has a warped handle!).
Link: Paul Talbot-Greaves