Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
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.
‘If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.’
John Cage
Life has been such a series of unfortunate events recently but I’ve so enjoyed a short pause drawing whatever object came to hand.
With no chance of getting out to draw the autumn colours, I settled for the evergreen branch of an artificial ficus 
benjamina in a waiting room.
But I find it a fun to just draw my cup. Even the disposable cups in the hospital cafe have a certain charm when you stop to look at the them for John Cage’s suggested eight or sixteen minutes.
I’m getting better with the nutcrackers. The walnuts are from one of Clive Simms’ trees, from his orchard near Peterborough and they break open more easily than the rock-solid walnuts that I remember attempting before.
Clive, who I remember from school days, is something of an authority on growing fruit and nuts trees and he modelled his Nutshell guides (no longer in print) on my little local booklets and the bestselling Grandma’s Guide to the Internet which my sister and I put together inspired by my mum’s attempts to get online in the late 1990s (no longer in print either).
‘I’m currently having my annual battle with the grey squirrels as to who gets the lion’s share of the walnuts from the tree in our garden.’ Clive tells me, ‘I ‘squirrel proofed’ the tree with old litho plates on the trunk (see Nutshell Guide for details) last week before leaving for a short holiday inYorkshire just as the nuts began to fall. I returned to a scene of carnage with broken shells and husks everywhere… the squirrels were certainly enjoying themselves and had even recruited the local crows to add to the mayhem.
‘Fortunately a neighbour who looks after the place when we’re away collected a lot of the fallen nuts and I’ve collected as many as I can since I returned. The recent stormy weather brings down most of the crop in one huge deluge of nuts and after collection I dry them on newspaper spread over the floor of the house. Having under-floor heating helps a lot!’
‘Fresh ‘wet’ walnuts taste very different to the more mature dried ones, being much lighter in colour and sweeter in taste. However, eating them too early, almost as they fall, isn’t always appreciated by everyone as they can be a little astringent.’
A ballpoint pen wouldn’t be my first choice for a drawing but, as I’ve explained before, I’ve struggled to find something that doesn’t go through the absorbent paper of my current sketchbook.
Cataloging my old sketchbooks, I’ve been reminded that in the early 1980s, when I did a lot of travelling and commuting, I found a particular make of black ballpoint pen useful.
Link; Clive Simms, talks and courses
Sometimes I can spend so long looking for a particular drawing amongst the stacks of my sketchbooks in the attic that I realise it’s going to be quicker to redraw it.
For the past two years I’ve been writing my Wild Yorkshire nature diary for The Dalesman magazine and, a couple of weeks ago working against the clock to get my November article off, I found that even a couple of sketches from November last year had gone astray.
They’re there somewhere but I use so many different sized sketchbooks simultaneously that I couldn’t track it down.
I decided that it was about time that I settled down to cataloging my sketchbooks, so that I can use them as a picture archive. Thanks to my long-running online nature diary come drawing journal I can usually track down the date that I drew a particular drawing so I’m writing a start and a finish date on a sticky label for each sketchbook and then writing a few words to indicate content.
If I line up each size of sketchbook on the shelves in date order, it shouldn’t take too long to track down any sketch even if I can’t remember what size book I drew it in. If I can work out how to do it, I’ll enter each sketchbook on a database as well.
It’s fascinating going right back with my sketchbooks. For instance, this Daler A5 portrait format hardback from spring 1979 when I was starting on my Britain sketchbook for Collins features ‘People, buses, zoo and Hathersage’.
Amongst those sketches is an attractive young woman who I met in a pub when I asked if she’d mind if I drew her.
I still see her a lot today as we got married four years later!
‘Who says an artist needs to have a steady hand? ‘ is the question posed by a current television advertisement for the Mazda3 which goes onto suggest that you need to do a bit of creative thinking to overcome the challenges that you meet in automotive design and in your limitations when drawing.
Phil Hansen, the featured artist, blames years of intense work on pointillist drawings for nerve damage that has forced him to look for other ways of making art.
Last time I saw my doctor, I asked him about it. I remember having had shaky hands since the age of seven.
‘Does it go off if you have a glass of wine?’ he asks.
‘How did you know?! It’s worse when I’m tired or when I’m upset about something. For instance I was at a party the other week and had to hold my champagne glass close to me because I was worried that someone was going to want to shake my hand. I can’t manage a cup and saucer. I was wondering if you could give me some advice on it as a medical problem.’
‘Let’s not call it a medical problem,’ he suggests, ‘it’s a human condition; everyone’s hands shake to some extent.’
He diagnoses it as essential familial tremor. There’s no cure for it as such but if it gets worse (I can move on to affect the neck, voice or even legs) I could try beta-blockers. I think I’d rather stick with red wine for now.
‘There’s a hypnotherapist just opened above our hairdressers, might that help?’
His sceptical smile says it all but he admits; ‘I would have dismissed it altogether until last week when we were given a demonstration and I was quite impressed.’
It’s good to know that I’ve got the option of a back-up, either for specific events that I might be worried about, or if it gets worse as a regular thing but for the moment I’ll try not to get so stressed or so tired and to try and relax and enjoy life.
Like my colour blindness, I think my shaky hands have given me a challenge to spur me on in my artwork.
Link; Phil Hansen, Mazda commercial
‘If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.’