Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I’ve been reading three inspiring books on urban sketching but I haven’t quite lurched into action again with my sketchbook habit. I sketched these cushions on a bank holiday visit to family this morning and you can see just how long it’s been since I last used this little Moleskine.
Simba is a restless dog to draw but she did eventually settle. The trick is to draw her without letting her notice that you’re looking at her, otherwise she’ll start getting excited again and coming over to find out what is going on. 
In contrast little Benji is a Shitzu who likes to stay in the background.
While his owner browsed in the bookshop he kept her eyes on him and I had to move around to see him face-on. However as he’s such a small dog that, even kneeling on the floor, all I could see most of the time was her top-knot. Drawn in pen and watercolour crayon.
Since we came back from our short break in Germany we’ve been catching up with things but I did manage to put pen to paper when we stopped at the Riverside Cafe near Hathersage on our book delivery rounds.
We can’t always find a table within a few feet of an array of well-stocked bird feeders but after our tour by rail and ferry I’m back in the habit of drawing whatever comes my way.
My first attempt at making a model after completing the basic tutorial in SketchUp.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could get through all your errands then, when you have a blank day, feel fresh and thoroughly inspired?
It doesn’t work like that for me. There’s plenty that I could do but nothing pressing so to celebrate the launch of a new version of SketchUp, the first in eighteen months, I’m dipping back into the program again. Mine isn’t the latest Pro version but the free version has plenty of possibilities.
I could argue that as illustration involves depicting three-dimensional objects in two dimensions it makes sense to explore all the possibilities. Playful experiment can feed into my regular illustrations in surprising ways.
It’s probably much more to do with my fascination for making models and creating imaginary worlds. I feel that we should all be allowed to do some things just because we enjoy them.
I’ve been through these tutorials before but it’s several years ago, so it’s been worth going back to first principles.
In the fourth and final part of the SketchUp basics video tutorials in which you get to construct a hall table, you get to grapple with such subtleties as tapering the legs, mirror imaging two of them to create the other pair and, the final touch, getting the drawer handles spot in the middle of the drawer front. There’s a trick to it.
Link; SketchUp
In my determination to draw a page a day, which I’ve kept up since before Christmas, I’ve had to resort to working a lot from photographs taken on walks to fill in the gaps for particular days. What a refreshing change to have the time to get into the back garden for an hour or so to draw from life.
I feel as if I’ve got so much more freedom working from the real thing; freedom to be less literal with colour and detail. Because I’ve got a better understanding of what’s in front of my eyes I can be more playful in the way I draw it.
Whenever I go to a movie if there’s a 3D version that’s the performance that I’ll go for and it’s the same with drawing. I can relax and let the drawing flow more freely because in real life – HD, HDR and 3D as it is – I’ve got a better understanding of how things are arranged in space – for instance woodland seen through a hedge. That kind of thing can give you cause to stop and ponder when you’re working from a photograph, which breaks the flow a bit.
I’m convinced that I’ll be getting out more often as we move into spring.
My drawing might not be as resolved as the subject deserves. Perhaps if I’d had two hours I’d have gone for something more ambitious but any drawing is better than none. I look forward to having the time to go over the top with a drawing.
Wouldn’t it be great if I always had a team of young helpers ready to fill in the blanks when I had a big illustration to do? While the crew set up the eight flats that we use as the backdrop for our Pageant Player pantomimes I set about sketching out some ideas.
Robinson Crusoe & the Pirates starts in a village in some unspecified country in South America. We’ve never featured South America in one of our productions before and as I’ve never visited the continent I’ve got the nearest thing that I know in mind; Pollenca, Majorca. I add Rio’s Sugar Loaf mountain in the background, although Pollenca has some pretty impressive limestone crags of its own.
When they get the flats in place, I realise that I need to go for more of a letterbox, wide-screen format, cutting out the ground altogether.
I usually concoct this year’s scene from the basis of last year’s but this time I decide we ought to make a fresh start.
While my team of young helpers put a coat of white emulsion over last year’s Snow Queen village, I make a more accurate drawing to grid up onto the 11×4 ft flats, which have three cross-members – easily visible beneath the canvas – which I adopt as as my grid.
The swatches are a reference for Ken for mixing the emulsion paint.
My proportion goes awry as I get to the right hand side mapping things out and the village church ends up looking more like Barnsley town hall. No bad thing.
It’s soon got around to Burns Night – one month since Christmas day already – and this is only my second post of the new year but I have been busy; for the last month I’ve managed a page a day in my holly green sketchbook. For that I’ve been trying something new by scanning the whole page each day.
I’ve also enjoyed sticking to just one theme, natural history, as it’s got me noticing things that I would have missed if I hadn’t set myself the task of finding something fresh, however trivial, to draw and write about each day.
In contrast to the simplicity of that page a day approach I decided to go for a different look for this Wild Yorkshire blog, making it less of a drawing journal and more of a newsletter for my other projects, such as the somewhat neglected www.wildyorkshire.co.uk nature diary website and my even more neglected www.willowisland.co.uk, which includes my walks booklets, guide books and published sketchbooks.
I’ve decided to go for a new theme for the new year, one which makes navigation a bit more obvious, rather than relegating it to the bottom of a long page. The latest WordPress standard theme, called 2014, seemed a good one to go for.
25 February; As the 2014 looked a bit black and formal, I’m now trying an airier theme called Mon Cahier, which still includes a column for navigation, hopefully combining what I like about Aldus with the functionality of WordPress 2014.
A NEW SKETCHBOOK and, as I started it over Christmas, I had to go for the one with the holly green cover.
Rather than fit it into this regular blog, I’ve given it it’s own website and the new format, putting the emphasis on the sketchbook page itself, has worked well for me, encouraging me to complete a page a day.
One A5 page a day might not seem like much of a commitment but believe me with the distractions of Christmas that’s been quite a challenge.
I’ve also decided to give the sketchbook a theme – natural history – and I think this helps to give me some focus when deciding what to draw. I’m also making efforts to tell little stories rather than always to immerse myself in the drawing.
Pages so far include;
Leaf prints, hunter’s marsh, spear thistle, canal bridge, pheasant feeding, cherry galls, holly & ivy and Tuscan black cabbage.
IT SEEMS such a simple thing to do a drawing, scan it same size and print it in a book but mysterious things happen in the process – such as a bright blue line suddenly turning to indigo as it goes from screen to paper.
I’m reading Louis Benjamin’s Photoshop CS5 in Simple Steps to get to know more about the process. But reading isn’t enough for me, I need to go through some of the processes to take them on board but then, if I don’t happen to need to use a particular technique for a while, it can slip from my mind.
I’ve tried making notes as I go but they end up on scraps of paper or in various notebooks so today I’ve started an online notebook.
I won’t need to go rootling through a draw to refresh my memory. My experiments and notes will be beautifully organised in a mini-website. Well that’s the theory.
Link: Colour Profiles, my experiments in Photoshop.