Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
This mammoth looks exactly like my original frame from the Short History of Rhubarb comic strip from my Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle, except that it isn’t cropped (the tips of the tusks and the mammoth’s rear end are missing in comic) and, despite the flat colours, I’ve now reformatted it in eight separate layers, so that I can animate individual features like the trunk and the eyes.
My next step in Adobe Character Animator has been to rig my drawing of the mammoth’s trunk by adding a fixed point and a movable point, joined by a series of nine ‘sticks’ which act like a string of beads, so that the movement of the trunk isn’t too shapeless and elasticated.
The background is added to the scene in just the same way as you’d add an additional character, although so far I’m not intending to add any movement to it. I can always come back and add a ripple effect to the river or have the rhubarb leaves swaying in the breeze, but so far I’m concentrating on the essential action needed to tell my story.
I’ve added a couple of finishing touches in another Adobe program, After Effects, with a title and a snow effect. I probably won’t go for snow in the final version, but I couldn’t resist trying it out.
For my Rhubarb Festival animation, I’m going right back to the beginning, to ‘Southern Siberia, 30,000 years ago . . .’
My first little sequence, A Brief History of Rhubarb, goes back to the last ice age, when rhubarb thrived in the cold winters and in rich, moist soil. It’ll be an epic production, I’ve already got my mammoth poised to stroll across the vast open spaces of the tundra.
I’ve redrawn this illustration from my Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle booklet in HD format and in several layers, so that I can animate the mammoth’s trunk appearing from the top left of the screen and plucking what looks like a luscious leaf. Spoiler alert: that mammoth is going to be disappointed.
Lesson one, in Adobe Character Animator is to edit and lip-sync a simple face. The built-in microphone on my iMac seemed a bit distant. Once I’d exported the animation to Adobe Premiere Pro, I deleted the original track and re-recorded the voice using a microphone. I used a filter on the vocal track to make it sound more close-up and tried a special effect that aims to ‘thicken’ my voice.
My attempts to add a music track were, predictably, dreadful but just to try out the process of adding a backing track, I tapped on an empty treacle tin.
Hopefully having learnt some of the principles, I can now get on and produce something more intriguing.
Prophet Wroe is said to have based his mansion, built 1856-57, on old Melbourne Town Hall. Some of Wroe’s followers believed that the 144,000 elect of the Lost Tribes of Israel would gather here to await the Apocalypse.
I used Adobe Premiere Rush for this sequence of illustrations from the ‘Melbourne House’ walk from my booklet of Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle (currently out of print). There’s no sound, so that’s one of the next things that I’m going to work on, along with adding some movement using Adobe Character Animator and Adobe Animate.
I was surprised to see so much fungus growing on an old tree stump near the church at Nostell but this is Velvet Shank, Flammulina velutipes, which thrives during the winter and can survive being frozen solid. The stem becomes black and velvety with age and the cap becomes slimy when damp.
It’s grown commercially in a small, white, elongated form as Enoki, also known as Enokitake, for use in soups and salads.
You could eat Velvet Shank, as there’s not much else available at this time of year, although I won’t be trying it as there’s a similar species called Funeral Bell which is deadly poisonous (but which doesn’t survive into the winter).
After a month of working almost exclusively on the iPad, going back to pen and watercolour is like settling into a favourite armchair. In fact, I drew the pen and ink on a visit to Barbara’s brother John’s last autumn and today, after our regular walk with him around Newmillerdam, I added the watercolour.
It’s second nature for me now to head for the colour wheel in Adobe Fresco, so it was good to remind myself that it’s equally easy to find my way around my pocket-sized watercolour box.
You can still see where the Roundhead artillery hit Richard III’s Octagonal Tower, also known as the Well Tower, at Sandal Castle. I’ve also drawn one of the forty cannon balls that were found on this slope during the excavations. The tower was already in a poor state of repair before the siege of 1645 but the bombardment reduced much of the keep to rubble.
The rectangular structure immediately to the left of the impact was a garderobe chute.
An account from 1322 records what was being stored in the larder at Sandal Castle. This includes carcasses of beef, sides of bacon, casks of herrings and measures of salt.
Googling for ‘measure of salt’, I found a Market Scene by an van Horst, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, with a tub of salt which I thought looked just right for how I imagined the larder at Sandal, even though it was painted two centuries after the inspection of the castle.
As I discovered when I researched my booklet of Walk in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire, 1322 was a momentous year for Sandal. On Monday, 21st March, the Lord of the Manor of Wakefield, Thomas of Lancaster, was sentenced to death by beheading after a trial for treason at Pontefract Castle at which the previous Lord of the Manor, John Earl de Warenne, was one of those who sat in judgement. John got his castle back – presumably along with the casks of herrings, sides of beef and legs of bacon in the inventory.
But a year later, after miracles there, the tomb of Thomas of Lancaster in Pontefract’s Priory Church was attracting huge crowds, and Archbishop Melton of York was concerned that people had been killed in demonstrations there.
This is all that remains of the Great Hall at Sandal. The hall itself was on the first floor and the arches – recently restored – opened on to the ground floor cellar which was used as a store room. The windowsill on the left has a groove for a wooden shutter.
As with the garderobe drawing, I’ve gone for a simple graphic style, with flat colours, as a contrast to the main illustration, which is an aerial view of the castle in ruins.