Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
The Yorkshire Wildlife Trust’s Creature Count is underway this weekend, getting people to count as many species as they can in their gardens. Here are some of the usual suspects that I would now be rounding up, if I’d signed up for the survey this year, but I’m a bit pressed with work in the studio. Must try and join in if they run it next year.
During his time at the Mission at Horbury Bridge, from 1864 to 1867, the newly-ordained Sabine Baring-Gould wrote the hymn Onward! Christian Soldiers, met and fell in love with mill girl Grace Taylor and wrote The Book of Werewolves (1865), which Bram Stoker considered the definitive account of lycanthropy (Bram Stoker had heard rumours that there was to be a sequel on vampires, but sadly that didn’t happen).
There is no evidence that Sabine had to fight any werewolves during his time as a curate, working alongside Canon Sharp, but how could I resist him as a subject for the latest challenge from Swedish cartoonist Mattias Adolfsson in my Art of Sketching online course. We were asked to show aspects of a character’s biography through tattoos.
Illustrator Alex Jenkins on today’s Adobe Live ‘From the Sofa’ session. I attempted to match his style in Fresco, using the Blake pen and the Natural inker but my line work is never as calm as his.
Alex said that his early influences included Robert Crumb. I was reminded of Glen Baxter and Gary Larson.
My initial sketch in Conte had a bit more life to it than the coloured version that I drew on the layer above it.
Another homemade birthday card, this time for Barbara’s nephew Simon, who we’ve been playing against in an online family quiz.
Our first visitor since March: Barbara’s sister Susan joins us for a socially-distanced coffee and bran loaf in our back garden. This group of foxgloves were self-sown but they’ve positioned themselves perfectly in the border. Thanks to lockdown, we’re more ahead in the garden than ever before and yesterday we made a trip to the garden centre to buy enough pollinator-friendly plants to fill the last gaps in the border.
During the last three months we haven’t set foot in anyone else’s house, with the exception of Barbara’s brother John, who needed our assistance on a couple of occasions.
I’ve been putting my enforced spare time to good use by giving myself a refresher course in illustration and getting a bit more familiar with the work of illustrators, photographers and designers through the daily podcasts from Adobe, but I could soon get back into my usual sketchbook habit. I feel that what I’ve learnt over the past few months feeds into my regular observational drawing, even if that’s something as familiar as drawing a foxglove in the back garden.
My thanks to Suzy Scavenger and to her hen Garstang, the chicken with the twisted beak. This is the latest assignment in my Mattias Adolfsson online course, The Art of Sketching. We were asked to draw a comic featuring the self-portrait comic character we’d created.
The dialogue is taken from directly from an exchange of tweets between Suzy and I about the removal of slave trader Edward Colston’s statue from his plinth overlooking the harbour in Bristol. What could have been a serious discussion of whether it’s acceptable to destroy works of art has been somewhat undermined by Garstang, who has overacted in every frame she appears in.
“Marvellous!” said Suzy, when I explained what I had in mind for the comic strip, “Garstang deserves some recognition.”
As you can see for my Clip Studio iPad cartoon (left), all this celebrity could easily go to Garstang’s head. In my cartoon, she’s standing on a copy of the popular Victorian magazine Tit-Bits (which I remember still being in print in the late 1950s). A copy dating from 1895 was discovered hidden in Colston’s plinth.
Gavin Campbell, illustrator, on today’s Adobe Live ‘From the Sofa’ session, started his career with a series of portraits and photo-realistic pencil illustrations, ‘drawing’ with the rubber to create the highlights. Watching him working through a composition featuring multiple layers in Photoshop, I could see his pencil-drawing background coming through, for instance in the way he built up the tones. In places where some illustrators might have used a 3D mesh to create a contoured effect across the subject, he preferred a ‘liquify’ option which enabled him to create the same effect through drawing.
I’ve drawn this in Fresco on my iPad Pro, making a lot of use of the cross hatch brush which I was reminded of during one of the ‘Sofa’ live streams last week.
“You might not have heard of me, but you’ve probably seen my work.” said Martina Martian, illustrator, designer and lettering artist, on today’s Adobe Live ‘From the Sofa’ session. As her animated graphic GIFs have had 9.2 billion downloads, you have probably seen her work literally popping up on social media.
I’ve drawn this in Adobe Fresco, the iPad drawing program that she often uses for her lettering and design. After starting my usual pen and wash approach, I went for Fresco’s Conte Crayon and Old Bristles brushes.
In today’s ‘From the Sofa’ live stream, Tony Harmer gave us a masterclass in how to draw cats, using Adobe Fresco and Adobe Capture. Okay, mine didn’t turn out looking quite like Tony’s . . . but I learnt about masks and generating textures and I particularly enjoyed drawing with the Fresco ‘Cross Hatching’ brush.
You drive down through what feels like a factory yard, cross a small swing-bridge over the canal then cross the River Aire via a century-old 38m long Pratt truss steel bridge to reach a low-lying area of lagoons and meadows, enclosed on three sides by a meander of the river, so that being on the reserve feels like being on an island. We’re actually on the inner side of the busy Leeds Ring Road, but I feel as if I’ve got a long way away from all that rush.
As a change from my usual approach, I thought I’d launch straight into watercolour for this sketch – no pen, no pencil – which is based on a panorama that I took from one of the hides on a Wakefield Naturalists’ Society field meeting at the reserve in August this year. No field meetings at all this year, which is probably a first for the Nats since the end of World War II.
This is the header image for my August Wild Yorkshire nature diary in The Dalesman.