Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
You wouldn’t guess that it was midsummer from the way people are dressed in waterproofs, parkas and high vis jackets this afternoon on the windswept precinct behind the town hall in Ossett.
Figures drawn as I waited in the hairdressers. Watercolour added later from memory, but for most of the people I could remember that as the colour seemed as if it was a part of the character, as much as the way they walked.
Two useful pieces of advice from Agathe Haevermans’ Drawing and Painting the Seashore:
This mussel shell is encrusted with keel worm tubes. This is the left shell valve. The beak of the shell (top) is the anterior or front end from which the mussel’s foot emerges the its siphon emerges from the posterior end, at the bottom of my drawing.
We did a bit of beachcombing along the strandline at Bridlington yesterday, between award-winning North Beach Fish & Chips and a champion roast latte at the local Costa.
Most of the mussel shells were small single valves, broken off at the wider end, but a few remained complete and still connected, including this one, partly encrusted by barnacles.
It’s a good time of year to go back to Agathe Haevermans Drawing and Painting The Seashore. It’s rare for me not to start a drawing in pen and ink, but, going back to Havermans’ examples, which are so evocative of summer strolls along the strandline, I thought that I’d try out her techniques.
My homemade card for Simon is my tribute to Gary Larson’s cartoon ‘The Holsteins visit the Grand Canyon’. Larson later wished he’d done a whole series and sent the family off to different locations, ‘such as Three Mile Island’.
I was tempted to replicate his gag of one of the Holstein calves ‘doing the old hoof-behind-the-head trick to its sibling’ but Larson concluded that this was just too subtle in the original and that most people (myself included) read it as one of the calves wearing a ribbon. Even knowing the artist’s intention, I still see it as one of the calves wearing a bow!
It’s 5 or 6 years since we last got to walk around Kew Gardens with our nephew Simon, so I hope we can join him again there before too long.
At this rate I’m going to spend more time working on my scale model than on the actual exhibit in Horbury’s Redbox Gallery, but it’s better to sort things out at this stage, rather than hope for the best when it comes to installing it.
I’ve thought about using recycled materials only, but there’s a slight risk that, although the box is watertight, if we had a spell of really wet weather, it might get humid in there, which would warp the corrugated cardboard that I had in mind. Graham, from the Civic Society who maintain the box, suggests thin marine ply, but that’s going to be difficult to cut out when I draw my cast of characters and scenery.
So, as illustrated in my scale model above, I think that the most practical solution would be white foam board, which is very light, dimensionally stable and much easier to cut. Half a dozen A1 boards would be as much as I’d need.
Or there’s the conceptual approach.
‘Will you just stand in it and (try to) look interesting?’ asked my sister on Facebook.
Brilliant idea, here’s me practicing my ‘interesting’ look.
Should work like a charm.
My first one-man show for over 25 years . . . and I’ve got to fill the entire gallery! The good news is that it’s the Redbox Gallery on Queen Street, Horbury: the box that appears on the cover of my local history booklet Around Old Horbury.
I’ve seen documentaries about how the Royal Academy prepares for a big show and it involves making a cardboard model of the gallery space, so here goes . . .
Ducks and geese are beginning to gather again on the lake at Newmillerdam with a small flotilla of Canadas hanging around the war memorial. Three drake mallards surround a duck as she swims along with her ducklings following behind. One of the drakes mounts duck, grabbing her by the head and pushing her underwater. The ducklings form a tight circle and the duck manages to head for the cover of overhanging branches and extricate herself from the drake. The ducklings soon follow her.
I usually say that May is my favourite month but cold weather has delayed blossom, birds and butterflies to such an extent that this year June is feeling as fresh as May, even though we’re not just nine days from midsummer.
I’m trying to focus on natural history this summer and to try and keep my main sketchbook – an 8×8 inch square spiral bound Amelie watercolour paper Pink Pig – as a nature journal but I do need a pocket-sized sketchbook for when we’re dashing about on errands, so this morning I started an A6 landscape Hahneműhle Watercolour book which is a sturdily bound hardback, so it slips into my little art bag more easily than a spiral bound version would.
There isn’t a handy bench in the library garden, so I’m trying a new pocket-sized (if you’ve got an extra-large pocket, that is) folding foam mat. It’s never going to replace my folding chair for comfort but it will just about do for ten minutes sitting on the concrete paving slabs, resting my back against one of the raised beds.
It was a plastic plant label from our Musselborough leeks left lying in the middle of the back lawn that made me suspect that we’d had a fox in the garden. What else would take such an interest in a plant label?
Today we’ve got conclusive evidence of its presence with a dark, curled fox scat that has appeared overnight in the corner of the lawn by the pond.
Over the past week or so we’ve noticed a few fresh scrapes – about teacup size – mainly in the veg beds but also in the wood chip path.
One morning two weeks ago, shortly after we’d laid down a thick layer of wood chip on the path by my little meadow area, we saw a magpie eating carrion. We found the remains of a brown rat – by then just the vertebra were left, picked clean by the magpie – and we now think that it’s likely that this had been cached by the fox.
Mr Brooke was a stickler for pencil and rulers, Mrs Johnson was the school’s hedgehog wrangler, Mrs Manning was noted for getting in the groove on the school’s upright piano and Mrs Argent – in those pre-mobile days – apparently had the job of summoning teachers to the phone, but I think my favourite member of staff from St Ignatius R.C. Primary School, 1994, would be Mrs Claypole, cheerfully pushing the the school dinners trolley.
After more than half a century, our tea towel is gradually fading and getting thinner, so I thought that it was time to scan it, as it’s now a bit of a historical document.
It was produced by Stuart Morris Textiles of Hadleigh, Suffolk. It dates from when one of our nephews was in his last year there. Haven’t spotted him yet amongst the self-portraits.
The Serpentine Lake at Wentworth Castle has silted up over the centuries and been colonised by willows. Last time we were here we met an 80-year old man who started work as a gardener here aged fourteen. A week after his retirement, he returned as a volunteer. He remembered when there was more open water on the Serpentine and, as a boy, he could paddle and swim his way down, taking the occasional egg from the nests of the waterbirds on his way.
A mallard duck leads her brood of young ducklings amongst the dense cover of the willows.
Alongside the tracks of the birds in the soft mud at the water’s edge, there are the slots of fallow deer. I can be sure of my identification: there are no sheep to confuse the issue in this section of the park.
