Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I’ve redrawn this border from my Dalesman nature diary featuring the walk around the lake at Newmillerdam Country Park, near Wakefield. In the first version, I thought that the pen and ink was competing too much with the text. To soften it I’ve gone for:
After the success of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s giant robot chicken, it was inevitable that rival attraction Illingworth Park, Ossett, would go one better and be the first to install ‘Robo-Parkie’, the world’s first automated park keeper.
This is another of my Monday Morning in the Park photo assignments: everything in this collage was photographed on our walk around with Barbara’s brother John and put together using Photoshop on my iPad, finishing off with Photoshop on my desktop computer. Taking it all in one session, and from the same angle where possible, meant reasonably consistent light. You might be able to spot bits of wheelie bin, bits of the railings around the football pitch, lettering from the park gates and sections from the goal posts.
Thanks to Sky Arts, I got a chance to draw actor and one of this year’s Turner Prize judges, Russell Tovey, today in a one-hour session of Portrait Artist of the Week. I won’t be standing by the phone next week to find out if I’ve won the coveted title as I’ve already seen some of the competition, however some artists had an advantage as they took the chance to start 3 hours earlier as the live programme was preceded by a podcast session. One hour drawing from a screen was enough for me.
At first I thought that perhaps I’d do better if he just sat still instead of chatting to the artist painting his portrait but really that was the point of the session. I could have drawn from a photograph otherwise. The way his expression changed and the way the light changed made the session feel similar to drawing someone in real life.
This was all the fruit that I could muster for my still life. Unlike the vegetables I’ve been drawing, this time I felt that I had to add colour.
The apple is a British-grown Royal Gala, originally a hybrid bred from Golden Delicious and Gala. According to Wikipedia, ‘it now accounts for about 20% of the total volume of the commercial production of eating apples in the UK.’
When I’m busy, it’s great to be able to turn to some state-of-the-art technology for a bit of help. Unfortunately this robotic illustrator’s helper isn’t yet available in the shops; I’ve concocted it using Photoshop on my iPad using pen knives and pencil sharpeners from my plan chest drawer. I found that coloured card worked best for selecting the background and cutting it out to isolate the shapes. Masks proved useful again in fine tuning edges but I haven’t yet worked out how to retain the masked effect when I copy and paste an element multiple times, as I did with the ‘Waverley Clip’.
The lens blur on the background image was added in the desktop version of Photoshop as filters aren’t as yet available on the iPad version.
I’ve been using Photoshop for over twenty years but I’ve never got into using masks to select areas of an image, partly because I find it difficult to draw precise outlines with a mouse or a graphics pad. Now that there’s an iPad version of Photoshop I’m beginning to see the point of it. Masks are non-destructive, so your original image, in this case the highland cow, is still there if you decide you’ve erased too much of it.
The meadow is the river embankment at Skelton Lake, while to highland cow (or bull?) was grazing in a pasture at Middle Wood near Redmire Force on the River Ure in Wensleydale.
These celeriacs smell deliciously of celery but as they aren’t much bigger than golf balls, by the time we’ve trimmed them down there won’t be much left. We’d never grown them before but a neighbour had plenty of seedlings so we thought that we’d give it a try. We probably won’t grow them again.
As I’m writing about our circuit around Newmillerdam for one of my Dalesman nature diaries, I thought that I’d represent our walk as a decorative border. The text fits neatly into the frame but it’s better to drop in the ducks, swan and coot to float above the background and text, then, in a program like Adobe InDesign, you can set it so the text wraps around them.
It makes a change to my usual nature diary format and I’d like to try it again with another walk, along the seashore, for example.
As the name suggests, our Stuggart Giant sets gave us plenty of onions from a 4×6 foot section of our raised beds. Unfortunately because of the unpredictable weather last summer we weren’t able to gather the whole crop in to dry them in the greenhouse – there wasn’t room on the staging for the whole crop – so a lot of them stayed out in heavy rain. Probably because of this we found that a lot of them had gone soft before we got the chance to use them – including most of those in my drawing; they’ll be going straight to the compost bin.
This wouldn’t put me off growing the variety again, they’re a mild onion, which we like. We’d just make sure that we started early drying them off.
Despite the stringent security, the sheep in the beet field have finally staged an escape and half a dozen of the more adventurous of them are enjoying the lush grass in the back garden of the end terrace house on the other side of the fence.
“What variety are they?” I ask the shepherd (I knew he was the shepherd because his 4×4 had an ‘EWE’ registration).
“They’re Swaledales with a few Texel, but they’re mainly mules. These came from Horton-in-Ribblesdale.”
So none of them are Beulah Speckleface, as I’d guessed the other day.
A few weeks ago in Hawes we saw Swaledales being rounded up from the moors. That morning we’d seen people gathering up at Bardale Head two miles south of the town, so I guess the sheep had been driven up Bardale and Raydale onto the moor then turned back down Beggarmans Road and through Gayle into Hawes. There were certainly hundreds, if not thousands of them.