Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
A gorilla pod attached to an old photographic enlarger stand was the best thing that I could devise to make my two YouTube videos of me drawing with vintage pen nibs. I intend to improve on this set up but at least I discovered that it works in principle.
I’d like to make a portable version, with a light framework attached to a drawing board, so that I can film my regular sketches on location, for instance at Old Moor bird reserve or at the farm park.
John Heath’s Telephone Pen, manufactured in Birmingham about a century ago, has a turned up point which gives it a smoother action than the Perry nib that I was using the other day.
As I had filmed myself adding watercolour, this YouTube video ran to a couple of minutes so, as a commentary would have been superfluous and the sounds of the pen scratching and my Winsor & Newton Bijou watercolour box rattling off camera weren’t very inspiring, I searched a music track on YouTube.
The search terms ‘Pen & Paper’ brought up the perfect track; Pen & Paper by Evelution. I like the way the music builds as sketch takes shape and introduces some colourful chords as I start on the watercolour. After the intro it kicks off with a scratchy sound just at the moment when I put pen to paper.
As a simple way to get myself started on some short YouTube videos of my work, I tried filming myself drawing with this vintage pen nib.
These steel nibs were manufactured by Perry & C0. Limited, Old Bailey (Late Holborn Viaduct). I’m not sure what the connection was with the Scotsman on the lid of the box.
It’s revealing to study myself in action. I’ve got such tentative way of starting to make marks – I guess my motto is think twice and draw once, except I seem to go over each line two or three times as well. My shaky hands are much in evidence. In my defence, I found it cumbersome to work around the camera on the gorilla-pod on my desk.
It would be so useful to have someone else handling the camera while I focus on the drawing but at least for now I can explore the basic problems of putting together a little video before I enlist the help of my friend John Welding as my cameraman/director and stylist.
At last I’ve found the best spot to sit and sketch at Kings Cross; one of the tables overlooking the concourse. The balcony has plate glass panels so you get an unrestricted view of the travellers below.
Despite the length of the concourse, I struggle to sketch people walking from one end to the other but soon little groups settle with their cases, giving me more of a chance. I like the way they arrange themselves, echoing each other in their poses, as well as in the way they dress.
We’re so taken with how friendly and helpful people are in London. I’m sure it wasn’t like this in my student days! People go out of their way to help you, for instance the man on the information desk at St Pancras who walked with us the thirty yards to the machine to talk us through how to buy an Oyster card, which saves you 30 or 40 percent on tube travel.
Our friend Chris in Putney suggests that this is partly a result of the Olympics a couple of years ago, when residents got used to directing people around the city, acting as ambassadors.
London came in for a lot of criticism during the debate surrounding Scottish independence but, probably because the place did so much for me in my student days, I have enormous affection for its streets, parks, river and people. It’s good to have so many galleries, museums and historical sites – plus the zoo and Kew Gardens – concentrated into an easily accessed few square miles, rather than have them spread thinly across the country.
The city always gives me a buzz and inspiration, and a glow of nostalgia for my formative years but that’s not to say that it isn’t a relief when we get on the train, sink into our seats, buy a coffee and a packet of shortbread from the trolley and head back to the hills and small towns of Yorkshire!
A couple of days ago our barometer reached 1040 millibars, as high as I ever remember seeing it. Another 25 millibars and it would have gone off the scale. High pressure gives us settled weather, in this case cold days and even colder nights, so the inch of snow we had late on Boxing Day has lingered.
This morning ground frost on a section of pavement that I’d cleared resembled a thin coating of snow.
Before the frost we harvested the last of the Howgate Wonder cookers and used them in apple bakewell tarts and a mini apple pie.
On Christmas Eve, a coffee stop at Create cafe in the Wakefield One building gave me a brief pause to sketch the skyline to the southwest towards the Emley Moor transmitter.
But we did manage one trip further afield before Christmas. On the 17th we made a delivery to our book suppliers before Christmas, zipping down the motorway to Orgreave but coming back via the Peak District.
At the Riverlife cafe at Bamford in the High Peak, siskin and nuthatch were among the birds coming to the feeders with a couple of squirrels fighting it out for control of the squirrel feeder below. While their fight escalated into a chase, a third squirrel sneaked in and fed in peace. C’est la guerre!
There’s more fighting over food as we walk along the lane at Castleton. Two sheep are head-butting each other over the last scraps left in the feed bucket.
The fan palms weren’t looking bedraggled after recent heavy frosts. It wasn’t a promising morning for the crazy golf at Pirate Island, Outlet Village, Castleford, where these temperate climate palms have been planted. The attendants were checking out the course, using one of the log raft bridges across the water hazard to break the ice.
After two or three hours in Middle Earth watching the last instalment of The Hobbit, I did a quick sketch of these owls on display by the climbing wall at Xscape. £3 to hold a bird of prey, £2 for a reptiles.
We’re helping out with a short spell of visiting and I could spend a couple of hours reading or writing or drawing from a photograph but I’d rather not cut myself off entirely from what is going on around me so I do what I usually do; start drawing whatever I can find of interest around me.
As I’ve drawn my hands a couple of times on similar occasions, I go for the only other organic subject that I can find; my feet.
The blurb on the box suggested that these trainers are urbane and understated enough to wear when you’re out for a coffee but with their rugged tread and Goretex lining they’re ready should you suddenly find yourself invited to join an adventurous trek across the moors.
How could I resist! That fits my demographic perfectly.
This walk, which starts and finishes at Wakefield cathedral and passes Pinderfields, the Old Park and the Chantry Chapel. There are a number of Robin Hood connections, including a sculpture of his sparring partner George-a-Green, the Jolly Pinder of Wakefield. On 25 January 1316 the maidservant of Robert Hode, was fined two pence for taking dry wood and green vegetation from the Old Park. This walk must pass very near the scene of the crime!
More about Robert Hode and the early Robin Hood ballads in my Walks in Robin Hood’s Wakefield, available in local bookshops, visitor centres and some farm shops. Also available online, post free in the UK, from Willow Island Editions, price £2.99.
The walk passes the site of St Swithen’s chantry chapel. Walk it while you can because there are plans for a relief road which it is proposed will go through the Old Park, later the site of Parkhill Colliery, linking with the roundabout near Wakefield Hospice at Stanley Hall.
This is when it takes so long to get through the Christmas cards, when I start getting tempted to draw cartoons in the neighbours’ cards.
Biscuit is a pony with attitude problems but I’m not sure who would come out on top if there was a contest to see who was King of the Meadow, Biscuit or that bruiser of the black and white cat. He’s the kind of cat you see trotting down the road with a vole in his mouth and he’s been known to bust through a neighbour’s cat-flap and push the resident cats away from their food to eat it himself.
Writing my ‘Wild Yorkshire’ nature diary for the Yorkshire Dalesman has meant looking back over the past 16 years of my sketchbooks and blog. It’s been a chance to review my work and to think about where I’d like to take it next.
Since my first online post on 4 October 1998 here’s been a gradual evolution, starting with a simple, sketchy format based on a nature journal that I kept in the mid-1990s. This became more ambitious and when I met art journallers Danny Gregory and Dan Price, I felt that I wanted to go a step further and put a lot more effort into my drawing.
Under the influence of the two Dans I went drawing mad and some of my favourite pages date from that period unfortunately they don’t work for my Dalesman unless they also tell a story. However evocative the drawing, a mossy stump on its own isn’t enough for my Wild Yorkshire column; I need a stoat rummaging around in its nooks and crannies to bring the scene to life.
I’m now trying to combine more ambitious drawings with stories that might hook the reader in.
Although I describe myself as a wildlife illustrator, riffling through those old sketchbooks I found that I liked some of the drawings that made me smile were of people in everyday situations, for instance the shoppers queuing up at the cafe in Ikea. I would like to draw more people but as I post everything online I feel that there’s a privacy issue! I can say what I like about the aggressive mistle thrush that this week has been bullying the blackbirds so that it can have the crab apple tree to itself, but you can’t write stories like that about family and friends, fun though that might be!
I’ve been reflecting on my work today as Danny Gregory has been interviewing for a feature that he’s planning to run on the Sketchbook Skool. He wanted to examine the issues that I raised in a post a couple of months ago about dealing with shaky hands, not looking at that particular condition but considering how apparent limitations – such as a physical disability or living in a less than inspiring neighbourhood – can spur creative innovation.
I commented that I’d love to have perfect vision – colour, high definition etc – but we all have to learn to live with the hand we’ve been dealt.
In discussion I concluded that the shaky hands and my partial red/green colour blindness hadn’t done me a lot of harm as I’ve been able to do the kind of work I love doing throughout my career.
Link; Sketchbook Skool
Willow Island Editions, my publishing imprint.
