Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I’ve been working my way over the veg beds weeding, mainly with a small hand fork but occasionally I need a pair of secateurs so I’ve gone for my garden tool belt. Also in there, my Olympus Tough camera. I had been keeping it in the leg pocket of my works trousers but if the resident robin hops down in front of me, or a holly blue butterfly lands on the nearby marjoram, it takes too long to unzip the pocket and retrieve the camera.
As I weeded the path behind the raised bed, one of the garden snail shells I spotted this morning was smashed, probably by a thrush; another was occupied, so I popped it into a crevice and a third was empty, a good subject to try out some Procreate illustration techniques on as I get back into my course.
I’m afraid it’s that time of year again when I have to briefly disturb our resident toad in the greenhouse. He or she isn’t too pleased about it but I make sure there’s a quiet corner under a plant tray available as I continue moving pots and pulling up spurge, chickweed and dandelion.
This spider with a plump abdomen is the most common beneath trays and plant pots. This is the male, the one with the ‘boxing glove’ pedipalps.
Resting on the wheelie bin by the hedge what looks like the Large Rose Sawfly, Arge pagana. The females have ‘saws’ to cut into plants when laying eggs. There’s a self-seeded rose growing up in the beech hedge right next to the bins.
Drawn in Procreate, using my homemade ‘worn nib’ brush for the line work.
The end of the garden has become a bit of a grassroot jungle and as I pulled bindweed out from around the compost heap I disturbed this small grasshopper.
Perhaps a stripe-winged grasshopper or common green?
We don’t often spot grasshoppers in the garden. This might be our first record.
Jenny, natural history illustrator, drawing by our pond. She recently completed a commission to illustrate an information board about the wildlife at a pond on a nature reserve in West Sussex.
She started on John Norris Wood’s natural history illustration course at the Royal College of Art a year after I left, in 1976 and graduated in 1979, focussing on the Chelsea Physic Garden, it’s history and plants.
Two young wood pigeons looking relaxed in our golden hornet crab apple.
Seedheads from the garden: Opium Poppy, Eastern Mediterranean; Sicilian Honey Lily, Mediterranean, Turkey and Black Sea; Chives, Temperate Europe, Asia and North America and Perennial Cornflower from the subalpine meadows and open woods of Europe.
These sketches from the hospital and the one of the wood were drawn with one of my regular fountain pens, the TWSBI Eco T.
But I’ve gone back to a fibre tip for these wood pigeons and sparrows in the back garden.
These were drawn with a Mitsubishi uni pin 0.3 fine line, which has water and fade proof pigment ink.
Cat’s-ear, Hypochaeris radicata, flowering and going to seed on the front lawn, which I left untrimmed during ‘No Mow May’ but which is now due for strimming.