Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I’ve made a start on the fireplace for the Redbox Gallery’s Night Before Christmas display but I keep going back to my model to work out the details on the grounds that it’s easier to make changes there than it is when you’ve already cut into an A1 sheet of foamboard.
There’s not a lot of room for the armchair and table we’re planning to add but hopefully I can dovetail a couple of foamboard cut-outs into the two corners without obscuring the fireplace.
Drawn this afternoon at Navigation Walk, Wakefield, colour added in Photoshop.
Reading Chris Ware’s hefty graphic novel (really six closely related graphic short stories) is good for building up my biceps but I’m struggling with the one millimetre high all caps captions, some of them on coloured backgrounds so I’m calling on the opticians today to see if they can recommend some extra strength reading glasses, specially for reading Chris Ware graphic novels.
It’s clear enough when I come back to it in the daylight, so perhaps I should be thinking about improving the light that I read by.
The night before Christmas: ‘a fire place with roaring fire & stockings hung down. Maybe a chair & table & treats left out for Santa on the table . . .’
That’s what we’re aiming for, now all we have to do is work out how to fit all that into the Redbox Gallery, the old telephone box on Queen Street, Horbury.
I’m designing the stage set and it will be up to the local Brownies to add the decorations. I think that I could fit a small fireplace diagonally across the far corner of the box but that doesn’t leave any room for a table and chair, so I’m imagining those as illustrated cut-outs, as if we were looking at a pop-up Christmas card.
Sketches from Whitby and from ‘Yorkshire’s Food Capital’, Malton. Tone added in Photoshop.
This morning our pond had frozen over but a month from today the days will start getting longer.
On the little roof terrace at the Boathouse Cafe, Newmillerdam, black-headed gulls glide past the castellated balustrade a few feet away from me at eye level, a fluid, effortlessly elegant flight. A grebe preens out on the lake, a male goosander swims by, crisply black and white in the low winter sun.
A coot calls tetchily, mallards quack and the smell of fresh coffee drifts up from the kitchen below.
Drawing the dogs and trying the s’mores kronut, a cross between a croissant and a donut, at the ØL cafe in Horbury this morning.
The dogs took so much interest in their surroundings that they soon wound their leads around table legs and chair legs.
A musical interlude.
A birthday card for one of my more energetic relatives.
I’ve done so much black and white work recently that I thought it was time to return to base and go back to brown Lamy pen and my Bijou watercolours to draw this rowan leaf from the front garden. Unfortunately my Pentel Water Brush is all but clogged up now, so the watercolour wash is a bit limited.