Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
More bird anatomy studies from photographs in the Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness Guides Bird and Skeleton.
The Canada geese are from a photograph in The Encyclopedia of Birds by Perrins and Middleton.
This is from an illustration in the 1969 AA Reader’s Digest Book of British Birds, artist unknown: eight artists worked on the project but illustrations aren’t credited individually.
I’ve drawn a sketch which is a combination of some of the poses of the Canada geese that I photographed last week.
Our next assignment in the Domestika course, Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate with Román García Mora is to roughly drawn in the underlying bones. For this I referred to a photograph of a goose skeleton that I’d found on the internet.
Next the main muscles. If goose has its wings folded the cover the top leg muscles and the body muscles such as the large breast muscles, the Pectoralis. I’ll try this exercise with a four-footed animal where all that will be more visible.
But at least if I’m called up to carve a roast goose this Christmas I’ll have a vague idea about what’s going on.
Canada goose feet, drawn on the iPad Pro in Procreate.
I’ve just started a Domestika course, Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate
and illustrator and 3D modeler Román García Mora has asked us to choose an animal or bird and put together a reference sheet about it. As we were heading for the Thornes Park duck pond yesterday I decided to go for Canada geese, a bird that I can guarantee being able to find if I need to go back for further reference.
Photographic reference is fine but Román believes that the way to understand your subject is to draw it yourself, preferably from life in its natural habitat. Failing that the zoo or a natural history museum gives an opportunity to learn more.
I’d be surprised to find a stuffed Canada goose in any of our local museums but I do have a Victorian stuffed bird that I can use for the purposes of the tasks we’ve been set in this exercise so I’ve drawn this juvenile great-crested grebe.
The unfortunate grebe was shot on Bretton Park Lake at a time when the species was all but extinct in the area because its plumage was valued as ‘grebe fur’ in the fashions of that time. Unfortunately I don’t have an exact date.
I’m following Román’s technique for sketching in Procreate, working on a light grey background and starting with what he calls a ‘stain’, a rough tonal outline of the bird. I’ve downloaded the Procreate brushes that he used in the online demonstration and used them as you might use chalks, tonal washed and pencil.
Domestika online art courses
Black-headed gull, moorhen, mallard and Canada goose at Thornes Park duck pond this morning.
After recent heavy rain Newmillerdam is cloudy and khaki. A great-crested grebe pops up just yards from my table at the water’s edge at the Boathouse Cafe with a small silvery fish in its bill.
Down by the outlet a heron is watching, waiting and stalking its prey, so intent on fishing that it allows me to rest my iPhone on the railings just 10 yards away from it to take this photograph.
Curlews and tree sparrows at the Northumberland Wildlife Trust’s Hauxley nature reserve last week.
And some grazing teal from our return journey via RSPB Saltholme reserve.
On Wednesday morning the farmer was moving the cattle that graze the marshes at RSPB Saltholme from Paddy’s Pool over to the Saltholme Pools.
Boathouse Cafe, Newmillerdam, 11.20am, hazy sky alto-stratus, a few small spots of drizzle in a coolish breeze
A gulls gets the better of a crow, which stops to preen on the ridge tiles of the boathouse roof.
A juvenile cormorant – brown with a light breast – splashes its wings as it makes its way down the lake in what I presume is some kind of preening routine. It then takes off, skimming low over the water to join seven adult cormorants on their favourite resting place, the boughs of a half-submerged fallen tree.
The waters of Newmillerdam were rippling tranquilly in the autumnal morning light yesterday, so hypnotically that one toddler was standing transfixed.
‘He’s fascinated by the water,’ his mother explained to Barbara. The child, oriental and completely bald, like a young version of the Dalai Lama, who is traditionally chosen by senior monks who meditate at Lhamo La-Tso, an oracle lake in central Tibet.
Not so tranquil were the black-headed gulls mugging the tufted ducks to steal the freshwater mussels they were diving for. At first I saw a gull touch down on a duck’s back, swooping in from behind, but the duck immediately dived out of reach. Next two gulls were diving on a pair of tufted ducks which had just surface and I saw that one gulls managed to grab an acorn-sized object which was probably a small freshwater mussel.
Back to a bit of tranquility: I spotted these Victorian chromolithographs at the Drift Cafe at Cresswell, Druridge Bay. They’re so like the pair that my Grandma Bell had hanging in her cottage, and later bungalow, at Sutton-cum-Lound that I feel they must be from the same edition. When grandma died in the late 1970s my cousin Janet took them, and grandma’s dark-wood dresser to her flat in Poplar, East London. It was strange to see them in their new surroundings.
The canal below Hartley Bank, with the birches coming into their autumn colours reminded me of the tranquil atmosphere of grandma’s pictures.