Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Perhaps this card for basketball player and cat lover Alex was inspired by seeing Benedict Cumberbatch in The Electric Life of Louis Wain last autumn.
Also celebrating a birthday recently, and the arrival of a new puppy in the house, was Annabel.
Happy birthday last Friday to Connie, who enthusiastically organised a memorable newt survey of our garden pond last summer.
The final count of smooth newts was 22, of which only 5 were female, so in this sample less than a quarter of the population is female. This is despite the fact that on the occasions that I’ve seen a newt caught by a blackbird at the pond I’ve often spotted the bright orange belly of the male.
I’m reading Marcos Mateu-Mestre’s Framed Drawing Techniques and trying his suggestions for using tone. This cloth hat lying on my desk was drawn with an Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro in areas of tone only – no initial line drawing – using the Lasso Fill tool in Clip Studio Paint.
Previously, as in this drawing of chitted potatoes, I’ve gone for a linocut or silkscreen printing effect using areas of solid tone, set to 100% opacity.
But following Mateu-Mestre’s method in his chapter on The Gray Scale, these tone swatches are actually all based on pure black.
Tone number one really is black but it was applied with a Clip Studio brush set to 70% opacity. The resulting grey was then sampled with the eyedropper tool and painted as swatch 2 but again at 70% opacity, making it that bit lighter and so on, grading the tones almost to pure white.
Meteorologist Tomasz Schafernaker apologised for using the phrase ‘easterly breeze’ repeatedly through his forecast yesterday but that’s what’s dominated the weather today. My barometer is showing 29.6 in Hg, 1002 mB, so it’s fine but the breeze from across the North Sea is keeping it cool and keeping the cloud moving.
This opium (not Himalayan) poppy had seeded itself on one of the veg beds, so I’ve transferred it to my plants for pollinators bed and it seems to be settling in.
This foxglove rosette will be relocated too, when we put in the runner beans and dwarf French.
Last month I was interviewed in Vis News, the Visual Narratives Academy Newsletter, by David Haden, who writes:
This issue we interview a fine British comics maker and illustrator who clevely combines digital methods with traditional looks. It’s a long and informative interview.
Vis News, March 2022
You can download a PDF of the article below (and it looks good if you can view it as double-page spreads).
Happy birthday to John, who waited for five hours for the black-browed albatross to show up at Bempton but was then rewarded with a flypast at eye-level.
Happy birthday to Van Gogh enthusiast Ivy. I’ve never been as keen on Gauguin, but Googling his self portraits I love the character he creates for himself. But definitely not a guy that I’d like to share the Yellow House at Arles with during the mistral season.
The shocking moment when Franklin Clinton gets banned from the Games Oscars for punching Mario.
Happy birthday Ben.
I’m reading Shawn Martinbrough’s How to Draw Noir Comics so I’m on the look out for seedy characters and bleak urban settings on the mean streets of Methley and Birstall.
He suggests that you should take photographs of characters, cars and ‘still lives’ – plants, tables and chairs. Set the camera to black and white because that gets you looking for compositions in dark and light.
There were several diners in Pizza Express who would have made suitable characters but I didn’t have the nerve to ask them if they’d mind being photographed and opted for a discrete sketch instead.
