Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
This sweet chestnut stump by the Lower Lake in the Pleasure Grounds at Nostell had been cut so that it created a Tolkeinesque throne.
Starting at the top of the drawing, I drew in pen then inked in the dark crevices using a Chinese brush but as I got onto the main trunk, I brushed in the darker areas first, then added the line.
There’s an old sandstone wall, a possibly reused beam, some handmade bricks and modern brick: this old outbuilding on Station Road, South Ossett, evidently has quite a history. Part of it was formerly a small stable, later a garage.
The old fashioned toilet roll holder still fixed to the modernish brick wall on the left is another clue.
Ash roots grow over an old quarry face near the ice house at The Menagerie at Nostell.
I’m experimenting with pen and ink and Chinese ink and brush, partly to free up my drawing but also because there’s a possibility of an inky project coming up over the next few months.
It involves Victorian werewolves, so a pen with a Victorian nib would be appropriate and Chinese ink is unpredictable enough, especially in my hands, to add some gothic texture and mystery to the drawings.
I can’t work out how a werewolf could wear a top hat but I don’t think a character like the sly fox Honest John in Disney’s Pinocchio is the way to go. I’ve been reading Isabel Greenberg’s Glass Town and The One Hundred Nights of Hero and I think something more in the realm of graphic illustration and European folk tales would suit the subject but I’ve also been reading up on Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit so I’m not discounting something more homely.
‘Always draw with movement from the elbow or shoulder, never from the wrist’ was the advice that I read in a book on illustrating graphic novels recently. So that’s where I’ve been going wrong all these years. I’ve always had shaky hands so drawing from the wrist rather than the fingers is usually about as free as I get. For this geranium I made a point of moving my whole arm, so it helped that we were sitting in a cafe table and I could steady my arm by resting it on the table.
I didn’t find it so easy when I was kneeling, clutching my little A6 Hahnemuhle Watercolour Book, beside one of the beds in the walled garden at Sewerby Hall, drawing a red admiral on what I think was Hylotelephium telephium, a relative of the sedums. I find it impossible to sit in a crosslegged yoga pose, so kneeling is the best I can do.
Hoverflies were also attracted to the flowers and basked in the sun on the surrounding box edging.
Reading up on comic strips and graphic novels makes me more aware of the stylisation that we’re familiar with in everyday life. Looking closely at this apostle teaspoon, part of the mismatched cutlery and crockery at Hilary’s in Cawthorne, I could see that someone had designed him with the sort of stylish simplification that you’d put into designing a character in a manga or comic strip story. He could appear as the ‘wise old man’ mentor for some hero, like Alec Guinness’s Obi-Wan Canobi in Star Wars.
‘You have much to learn, Grasshopper!’ would be a suitable aphorism for the Apostle-spoon character if he was admonishing me for my inability to adopt the lotus position, but it was actually Master Po’s line to David Carridine’s trainee monk in the 1970s television series, Kung Fu.
My mum had some teaspoons with Egyptian characters on them and I hope that I managed to keep one when we cleared her house. Now I’m thinking could they have come back with my dad from Egypt after the war. I don’t ever remember asking my mum about the story behind them.
Latest card, for Alistair, who we’re hoping to meet up with at the London Wetlands Centre sometime soon. Of failing that Beckton Sewage Works is a bit of a biodiversity hotspot these day.
Rather than sit at the computer dubbing in the lines of each character in my Ode to a Duck, I set up a makeshift recording studio and Barbara and I each read through the whole poem, with just a few out-takes. As I’m taller than Barbara, I moved the drawing board up to the next shelf for my read-through.
I thought that it would sound better if we stood up, rather than record it sitting in my office chair. To cut down on any slight reverb we might get from the bare studio wall behind us, I hung a blanket over a clothes horse on top of the plan chest. The wall of books absorbed any reverberation from behind the microphones, which, by the way are iRig Lavoisier (snapped up in the sale when Maplins was closing down a couple of years ago).
In Adobe Audition, I cut and pasted each rhyming couplet, then used that for each of the characters in the film, Barbara and I reading alternate couplets.
After all the trouble that I’d gone to to avoid reverb, I added an echo effect to the grim warning given by the Pike and Perch in the penultimate verse.
Ode to a Duck on YouTube
At last, the world premier of my cartoon inspired by the ducks, swans, geese, squirrels and monster pike seen on our Monday morning walks around Newmillerdam.
Hapee Burfday to Jo.
The ring-tailed lemurs at Sewerby Hall were eating the green leaves from bundles of freshly-cut bamboo. One perched, sitting upright, on a log and spread its arms to soak up the sun.
The llamas were also looking relaxed. This one, sitting munching with its companions in its paddock barely opened its eyes as I drew it.
The Humboldt penguins were more active, swimming around in their pool, twisting around to preen and scratch themselves.
After a few minutes they started making their way out of the pond, heading for a spot in the sun to dry off. Amongst them, Pickle (bottom left), still in her plain grey juvenile plumage. After initial enthusiasm, parents Sigsby and Twinny had started to neglect their incubation duties so the egg was transferred to an incubator and Pickle was hand-reared by head keeper John Pickering and his wife Tracey.
New Humboldt Penguin chick arrives at Sewerby Hall and Gardens