Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
On Román García Mora’s Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate course I’ve gone back to a ‘task’ in an earlier unit, ‘Sketching in Front of the TV’. On YouTube I’ve found a National Geographic video of Canada geese taking off and drawn them on freeze-frame.
Having drawn them so much from life with wings folded it’s interesting to see what happens when the wings open up.
More recent sketches on the iPad and in pen and ink and watercolour plus on today’s sketch of the railway bridge seen from Books on the Lane, Walton, a dash of Gold Blend coffee to create a blotchy ink wash.
Unfortunately our local art shop has been closed for a week due to the latest bout of flu so I’ve gone for an Eco Grey Leather A6 Freewriter with a ‘recycled’ cover made from an offcut of leather. The cover makes it difficult to scan, but the Chambers Biographical Dictionary is sufficient to flatten it on the scanner. The creamy coloured paper doesn’t take watercolour as well as my regular sketchbooks. I prefer white paper when I’m scanning watercolours.
But as a sort of pocket notebook it should be fine.
The sketchbook and pen were drawn in my A5 Seawhite travel journal and you can see it’s more sympathetic to watercolour.
No, this isn’t a goose watching its favourite anserine TV soap . . .
I’ve learnt a lot from the online course Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate but some of the ‘hidden’ features of the program are a bit difficult to grasp when the course is in Spanish and you’re trying to take in both subtitles and – to me – unfamiliar names on the Spanish version of the various tools and menus, so today I booked a free ‘Introduction to Procreate’ session at the Apple Store in Trinity Light in Leeds and I was able to delve into the mysteries of Alpha lock, importing a reference image and the various options for blending.
Rather than re-draw the Canada goose from my sketchbook, today I went to Procreate’s ‘Action’ menu and chose ‘Take a photo’ and used the rear camera of the iPad. I scaled up the photo to get the drawing I was after to fill the canvas.
Now that I’m more familiar with the process of putting together a drawing, following Román García Mora’s suggestions for an ‘illuminated drawing’, the next stage is to get more of the natural variation of watercolour washes into the illustration.
Wet weather even for the ducks and geese this morning so I’m trying the process of drawing an animal in Procreate on an iPad Pro as suggested by Román García Mora in his Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate course on Domēstika.
His favourite style is what he calls ‘illuminated drawing’ in the tradition of 18th and 19th century natural history illustration where a line drawing of the animal was printed and the colour added by hand in watercolour, so you get the definition of an ink drawing and the luminosity of watercolour.
10.05 a.m.: I’m counting about 85 Canada geese this morning but a passing dog walker tells me that for two days last week he thought that they’d deserted, there were none on the lake.
Two passers by comment on the single drake mandarin that is looking immaculate but sadly hasn’t yet attracted a mate. I’m here for the geese but if he swims over towards me I won’t be able to resist drawing him.
Meet my Great Aunt Eliza, one of the Blaco Hill Bell family from Mattersey, Nottinghamshire, my grandad Robert Bell’s elder sister.
She married William Henry Mitchell, a local postman, on Sunday 23 April 1899 at Sutton-cum-Lound Church.
She was 31 years old and he was 36
Witnesses were her eldest brother, George William Bell, aged 36, and Hannah Bell, who had flowing copperplate handwriting, which I rather envy, but who I’ve yet to add to my latest dip into family history.
In the register William Henry’s father George Mitchell is listed as a ‘Labourer’ and Eliza’s father, my Great Great Grandfather John Bell, then 57 years old, was working as a ‘Groom’.
Seven years earlier, as recorded in the 1891 census Eliza was working alongside William Henry at the house of Sarah E Hunt, a lady ‘living on own means’. William Henry, then 29, was the butler while Eliza, 23, was one of three female domestic servants at the house, number ’53, Sutton’.
Moving forward, by the time of the 1911 census the couple are living in Bardney, Lincoln. Henry is still working for the Post Office. They have a son George William aged 8, and born in Bardney.
I wonder if little George William added this decoration to the census form?
Or was it John Bell, also aged 8, his nephew who was staying with them and who had been born in Mexborough, Yorkshire.
The wedding photograph is stamped ‘Caleb C. Smith’.
Caleb’s photographic studio was at Norman Place, Lincoln.
11 am: All the geese leave the pond and a flock of about 50 graze on the grassy slope.
After two hours I’d almost finished this spread in my sketchbook but the last Canada goose was drawn back home from a photograph on the big screen of the iMac. I’m pleased that it looks equally as messy – let me rephrase that ‘equally as spontaneous’ – as the sketches done on location, sitting by the outlet of the Thornes Park Fish Pond, sometimes under an umbrella as fine rain fell.
When I was drawing them in action from a distance yesterday the female pheasants seemed fairly plain – light tan with streaks – but drawing in close up from a photograph I took yesterday with a telephoto lens there’s lots of complexity in the pattern of the plumage.