Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I got so much from working in black and white last weekend but with some winter sun at last as we walked around the woodland and the lagoons at Walton Colliery nature park I couldn’t resist the autumn colour against that clear blue sky.
Jay, buzzard and cormorant flew over.
4.55 pm; Blackbirds are alarming as the gloom of sunset fades out the remaining colour in our back garden. Not that we can see the sun setting; it’s remained cloudy with varying degrees of gloom all day.
In contrast to the twilight mood, the golden hornet crab apple by the pond is bubbling with pale yellow fruits, festooned with golden baubles.
In movement and dance, school children are asked to be a tree. What kind of tree would you be if you decided to be an autumnal golden hornet?
Although it is stretching to the skies in classic tree-mime fashion, those awkwardly bent limbs suggest that it might be attempting to support the firmament – like the Viking cosmic tree – rather than reaching for the sky in hopeful supplication.
A couple of broken paving slabs that I’ve leant against the raised bed give the impression in my sketch that the crab might have used those scraggly limbs to scrabble and scrooge up from an underground lair, like Mole in The Wind in the Willows.
Drawn, or rather dripped, in bamboo pen using Daler-Rowney Calli waterproof ink, the drawing is so blotty that it will take days to dry, so I’m photographing it rather than laying it on the scanner. And thank goodness I didn’t use my regular sketchbook and put that out of action.
As I got inky fingers opening the bottle, I thumbprinted the basic shape of the main stem on the blank page before I started the drawing. I decided that might take away the some of the scariness of the blank white sheet while working against the clock.
I started at at five to four and called it a day after fifteen minutes.
Looking back on the black and white album that I put together for a Facebook challenge, I’m surprised how much I managed to do over a 5 day period, just setting myself the achievable goal of posting five black and white photographs a day.
My thanks to John Welding for suggesting the challenge. It came just at the right time and got Barbara and I out and looking at things in a different way. The weather wasn’t sparkling but the couple of days since have been even more damp and dismal.
‘November seems ideal for black and white.’ says John, ‘Grey, misty. Tonal.’
Yes, I always think of warm autumn colours but colour is so seductive that I neglect the tonal values that could give an image some structure.
I’d like to try a similar thing with short sessions focussed on taking shots of animals or making widescreen movies about a particular place. It’s made me dig out the manual for my FujiFilm FinePix S6800 bridge camera.
But it’s back to pen and ink and watercolours and writing now, including these two hands drawn in waiting rooms yesterday.
‘You’re passing the time by doodling!’ quipped a passing physio.
Doodling? Hmm!
It’s my final day of taking five black and white photographs a day but this time I didn’t get the chance to go further than the back garden. The mossy lawn, overgrown pond and garden shed didn’t look very inspiring but as soon as I saw the honey fungus on the path I began to focus in on the grassroot jungle of the meadow and the moss garden on the sandstone rocks surrounding the raised bed.
At Notton Bridge the Trans Pennine Trail passes the Chevet branch line, itself now a traffic-free cycle route and, in part, a nature reserve.
Photographed this morning on the nature trail at the National Coal Mining Museum for England, Caphouse Colliery, Overton, West Yorkshire.
I dream about drawing, literally; in one dream I was looking through a booklet thinking these drawings look like mine but I don’t remember doing them and is that really my signature?
In another dream I was trying to find a space in a busy workshop to continue work on a rough splodgy oil painting.
It’s my subconscious reminding me – as if I needed reminding – how frustrated I’m feeling because of my current enforced break from creative work.
To make things as simple as possible I wanted a discrete still life kind of object; not my hand which is my usual subject when I’m stuck for anything else to draw and not, for instance, a tree, attractive as the autumn colour is just now, which raises the issue of simplifying the foliage.
I wanted something with a definite outline and simple interlocking shapes. And, heavens to Betsy, what’s this, yep, the A5 art bag that I take everywhere with me.
I was drawing this in subdued light and picked up the purple crayon instead of the black, but I like the high colour key that gives the drawing.
I’m getting on with this new pen, a Uni-ball Signo Gel Grip, which is free flowing but, unlike the liquid ink pens that I normally prefer, it doesn’t bleed through the absorbent paper of my current sketchbook.
Each of the bag drawings took between half an hour to an hour, drawn while Barbara was catching up on episodes The Great British Bake-off Masterclass, which makes reassuringly homely background viewing.
A hour is about right for getting involved in drawing a bag. I didn’t have as long when I drew this green satchel the other day. But that’s not my bag.
Links; a larger version of a Mantaray bag, as sold by Debenhams. I like the idea that for each Mantaray bag sold a donation goes to the British Marine Conservation Society.
Uni-ball Signo Gel Grip by Mitsubishi
A wrecked bike, just the sort of thing I’d expect to come across on a walk through the woods on the edge of a city but this, I have to admit, was drawn from a photograph hanging in a corridor that I was waiting in.
The photographer wasn’t credited.
At least I got the chance to draw these tree-tops from a third floor window the other day.
My glimpses of the natural world might be through photographs or through windows but I shouldn’t complain as I am getting to spend a lot of time in my other favourite habitats recently; cafes and coffee shops.
