Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Our visit to the walled garden at Temple Newsam brought back memories of working on the Readers’ Digest Guide to Creative Gardening, published in 1984. Rue and goldenrod, two of the plants that I needed to draw, are still growing there and I might have drawn a stately-looking Thalictrum here too, but I didn’t spot that on our visit.
Yesterday, 4.30 pm: The Ice Plant, formerly know as Sedum spectabile (will I ever remember that it’s now Hylotelephium?), sits in the last patch of sunlight on an early autumn afternoon as the house casts its shadow further down the back lawn. Its candy pink flower heads are constantly being visited by small bees and occasional bumblebee.
The small bees are gingery light brown with 5 or 66 dark horizontal stripes on the abdomen, so they look like our regular honey bees.
A buzzard circles over the wood and meadow, against a sky latticed with vapour trails alongside diaphanous swirls of cirrus.
I’m eyed warily by a bird in the hawthorn hedge. I get a brief impression of an eye stripe, so a dunnock, a wren or perhaps even an autumn migrant warbler dropping in.
The blue tit and a long-tailed tit seem to have decided that I’m harmless and they’re coming to the sunflower heart feeders just a few feet away from me.
A comfortable 20℃, 69℉, here in the shade with a hint of breeze to keep it fresh.
Clip Studio Paint on the iPad: experimenting with adding colour.
I’m also trying screen mirroring so that if I’m working in, for example, Photoshop on my iMac, and I’ve got something intricate to do, like erasing background texture on a scan of a sketchbook page, I can switch over to working with the Apple Pencil on my iPad.
It would be possible to do a whole drawing this way but with Adobe Fresco, Clip Studio Paint and even a version of Photoshop on the iPad there’s no need to, I can draw directly.
I haven’t noticed any delay when I’m drawing using screen mirroring; the marks appear in real time.
For years I’ve used as Wacom Intuos 4 graphics pad for erasing or drawing in Photoshop on the iMac but with the latest Apple operating system, Monterey, Wacom no longer support that model. Working on the iPad should be more flexible, once I’ve learned the ins and outs of it, as I can see the iMac screen on the iPad. The graphics pad was blank, so I got used to drawing on the desktop and seeing the results appear on the iMac.
Beech at Newmillerdam, drawn this morning with the constant accompaniment of cooing wood pigeons and the occasional clatter of a beech nut dropping from the still-green canopy.
Deep amongst the rhododendrons.
Old Rhododendron at Temple Newsam this morning.
As I sat drawing this alder at the lakeside at Newmillerdam I felt something drop on my back. An alder cone? No. My shirt needed to go in the wash. Not sure who was responsible but I’m guessing that the wood pigeon is the first one that I need to rule out of my enquiries.
Back down a rather overgrown bark chip path to my ‘Rough Patch’ in our back garden. The birds have finished nesting and it’s time to cut back.
This is my first attempt at composing a backing track in Garageband and also my first experiment with a dji Osmo gimbal mount for my iPhone.
Whitebeam growing by the canal at the Strands, downstream from Horbury Bridge.
A whitebeam, berries starting to ripen, in a car park in Normanton.