Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
More unusual visitors at our garden pond and although my cut-out characters now bear little resemblance to the Patrick Stewart and Richard Tolan as Joby and his dad in the Yorkshire Television version of Stan Barstow’s Joby, they have the folksy quality that I was after for my Redbox Gallery show.
They’ll be sitting on a riverbank, a folding screen of two A1 sheets of foamboard. Time to get out my largest brush, a varnish brush, to add the indigo blue of the Calder.
It may seem obtuse to turn my artwork upside down as I enlarge my characters from A3 to A1 with the aid of a grid, but with such a large sheet of foamboard, it’s easier to reach the top this way. When it came to the faces, I drew a tighter grid to help me get the details in proportion.
Besides, as Betty Edwards points out in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, upside-down drawing helps you make the shift to ‘R-mode’, so that the logical left side of the brain isn’t continually saying ‘Ah, I know what this is . . .’ (a nose, for example) ‘so don’t need to look so carefully now’. When you switch over to your right side, she suggests, you draw the shapes as they are, without preconceptions.
Even so, when I came to the eyes of these characters, I could feel myself thinking, no, that’s not right, that doesn’t feel as if I’m drawing an eye.
Look forward to turning the board right side up.
I’ve started on the main characters for my Redbox Gallery, with a cloth-capped Patrick Stewart as Joby’s father and Joby himself, played by Richard Tolan.
I’ve gridded up my A3 drawing, ready to transfer to A1-size foamboard.
My little rough yesterday was sketchy enough to suggest the figures but now I’ve started defining them more, I’m going to have to tidy things up a bit, hopefully without losing the liveliness of the rough.
And what’s this, down at our garden pond? These foamboard cut-out storks might seem too big for a phone box-sized gallery but I’ve checked that out with my little scale-model mock-up and they should fit in nicely. Being white, they should show up well in what can be a rather dimly-lit space.
This morning we took a look at a gardening display in the old telephone box at Horbury Bridge, which included a small selection of items – a tomato plant, a pair of gardening gloves and a trowel – to tell its story. It made me realise that the simpler and bolder my display for the Redbox Gallery, the better.
My main characters were always going to be Joby and his dad from Stan Barstow’s novel and I realise that including historical characters, such as railway and canal engineers, will overload the display.
Watching the closing scene of Yorkshire Television’s 1975 production of Joby on YouTube, I’ve found a perfect exchange of dialogue which will work as the keynote for my show. I’d been thinking of phrases to sum up Addingford such as ‘just ten minutes walk from this phone box’ and ‘Horbury’s unofficial nature park’, which would be fine but I don’t want too many text boxes. People often skip reading labels but dialogue is more compelling.
As we’re trying to get people to stop briefly and peer into the box, we need something eye-catching – like the pocket cartoon amongst the articles in a newspaper – to hook passers by.
I’ve added a light watercolour wash to my sketch map and to the Addingford Steps A1-size pen and ink artwork, keeping it light so that it shows up when viewed through the windows of the Redbox Gallery.
These two panels are the backdrop and the cut-out figures that are the main event.
I’ve printed small scale versions to try for size in my mock-up phone box.
I feel that the Redbox is more like a shop window than a regular gallery. Five minutes wouldn’t be long to spend wander around a small show in a regular gallery, but five minutes peering into a phone box would be a lot to ask.
From a galaxy far, far away . . .
(Grosmont)
At first they welcomed the surge in interest but soon the good people of Grosmont began to regret that Hans Solo had told all his friends about the great time he’d had visiting Yorkshire.
Happy birthday to Iris (who fortunately doesn’t need as many candles on her cake as Yoda.
And I should explain that Hans Solo himself was recently spotted filming on the North Yorks Moors Railway. Although on this occasion Harrison Ford was playing Indiana Jones.
I hadn’t realised how abstract and scribbly my artwork was in close-up until I scaled this drawing of Addingford Steps. I drew a grid over my A4 print, but the original is just six inches tall.
It was like doing a jigsaw: the individual squares sometimes didn’t look like anything at all, also, because I’m working on A1 foamboard in portrait format, I turned the artwork on its side, so that it was easier to reach, and painted it in two halves, so some things, such as the perspective of the foreground handrail, didn’t make any sense to me until I saw it right way up.
Just the watercolour to add now, which is a a quick job compared with reconstructing my drawing.
Meadow vetchling, heath bedstraw and cocksfoot grass in the Deer Park at Wentworth Castle, artichoke, a grass-head, a multi-stemmed cypress trunk and a dead hedge in the gardens around the house.
Taken using the macro lens on my Olympus OM10-D E-10 MarkII DSLR except for the cypress, taken on my iPhone 11, as I couldn’t get the angle that I was after with the macro.
For today’s homemade card for my brother-in-law Dave, I was torn between a Bob Dylan 80th birthday tribute or The Wurzels at Glastonbury.
Ooh Arr, difficult choice.
For my Redbox Gallery show, I’m enlarging a map from my Walks around Horbury from A4 to A1, so I’ve drawn a grid to scale it up.
I was looking for a bigger and bolder equivalent for the fountain pen of the original with but I found that my Pentel Brushpen took too long to dry on the resistant surface of the foamboard, so I’ve gone for a fine point Sharpie.
I’ve experimented with colour and it looks as if coloured ink will be my best option.
