Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
There’s a new film version of Watership Down on television this evening, which prompted me to look out this spread from my 1981 sketchbook, published as Richard Bell’s Britain by Collins in 1981. I’d walked the route taken by the rabbits from Sandleford Warren to Watership Down in 1976, so I was keen to include it in my itinerary three years later, when I started touring the country.
All that was missing was a flypast by the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight Lancaster but, after the funeral service on Thursday at St Peter’s Church, a rainbow to mark our old friend Thelma Littlewood’s last journey away from Horbury seemed suitably stylish. Her husband Jack flew Lancaster bombers during the Second World War, surviving a full tour of duty of thirty bombing raids. He was 22 years old at the time. Meanwhile Thelma was working, sometimes on the nightshift, at Sykes’ mill (later Slazengers) on the lathes, making butts for Lee Enfield rifles.
Thelma once told me that she knew when Jack was setting out on a mission because he’d come out of formation and fly his Lancaster low over Horbury (or did she say he’d do that on his safe return? I think she said on the outward flight). I’m told that this story is unlikely to be true as the RAF would never have allowed it, but who knows what happened unofficially. Possibly a roundabout route from one of the bases in North Yorkshire, such as Dishforth or Leeming, could have involved a flightpath down the Calder Valley.
Thelma (1924-2018), was a great friend of my mother’s during their retirement years, getting into all sorts of adventures on their travels, including being so keen not to miss their stop on a rail journey to the Lake District, that Thelma ended up swinging on the door of the carriage, leaning out of the open window, as the train came to a halt in the station.
As we lived not far from each other on Jenkin Road, I often walked to St Peter’s Junior School with her son, my contemporary, Adrian, especially in our third year when we were both in Mr Thompson’s class. Sadly, Adrian died over twenty years ago, in the early 1990s. Like his mother, Adrian had a sense of style and I remember being rather envious of his special pet, a beautifully marked garden cross spider, which he kept for a while in a makeshift vivarium in a mini-habitat of twigs and leaves in a Gales Honey jar with air holes punched in the brass-coloured lid. He called it Arthur (although I now realise that ‘it’ must have been the larger female of the species).
Members of Horbury’s Victoria Band were playing carols and Christmas songs at Di Bosco’s coffee & champagne bar on Thursday, which gave me a chance to try drawing them on my iPad Pro, using ProCreate.
The man on the right is playing a bass trombone but he ‘gets a lot of tenor notes out of it too’.
I like to set up pencil, wash and pen on separate layers but I found myself working on the wrong layer several times. For a drawing from life like this, I don’t think that matters, as I want the initial pencil to show through anyway, I don’t need to hide the pencil layer as I might in a more finished illustration.
The cat that is usually to be found lurking in the border by our bird feeders leaves its lair and sets off down our garden then makes its way through a gap in the hawthorn hedge. After all that waiting and watching, it’s ready for a work-out. It jumps onto next door’s trampoline and starts clawing around the entrance flap in the safety mesh. It evidently enjoys that, as it slinks in through the slit and indulges in another burst of claw-sharpening on the mesh from the inside.
Next it walks around the perimeter, then decides to attempt to climb up the netting on the far side. It almost gets to the top.
But that’s it for this session, it leaves by the entrance flap, jumps down and walks off down the garden path.
It’s time that I got back to adding watercolour to my drawings, real watercolour that is, not the virtual watercolour of my iPad drawings, so when we set off to Leeds I take a new A5 Bockingford 300 gsm sketchbook with me. My regular sketchbooks are often cartridge paper, which works fine for the light washes that I normally use but it’s a pleasure to use something with a bit more character. You might think that watercolour paper would be more absorbent than cartridge but this variety has a surface – probably a thin coating of size – which is slightly resistant to a wash. This isn’t a problem, I just need to have enough watercolour on my brush to cover the area that I’m working on.
My thanks to Cremede Art for letting me try a hand-finished sample of their sketchbooks.
We’ve just posted off all our Christmas cards, so far ahead of schedule that we deserve a coffee and a homemade lattice mince pie at Di Bosco’s. What a difference homemade mincemeat makes; plump raisins and sultanas soaked, we guess, in brandy with lemon and lime to give it a fresh hint of citrus.
I draw a few of the customers as they walk in from the car park. I’ve brought my Lamy Safari fountain pen with the B nib, which is the pen that I used to write the cards.
I enjoyed the opportunity to write sixty or seventy addresses as a way of trying to improve my handwriting. Inevitably, I started off feeling self-conscious about it, which makes me feel tense, which in turn brings out the shakiness in my hands.
I’d find that I was attempting to brace myself, keeping arms rigid and bending over so that my shoulders and back tensed up too but with so many envelopes to get through, I soon got into the rhythm of it and sat up in a straighter, more relaxed pose, my arms less constrained.
The rounded tip of the B nib makes it a pleasure to write with. Spikes, spluttering lines have their place but a flowing line is more relaxing to draw, or write.
I’m experimenting with the latest version of WordPress, so if you’ve noticed a change in the layout of my blog, that’s the reason. I’ve got a lot to learn but the best way is to try things out.
In the Pleasure Grounds by the Lower Lake at Nostell, the bark of some of the old sweet chestnuts twists to the right while others twist to the left but on the majority of these old trees the fluting on the bark goes straight up, often dotted with knobbly swellings on the swollen bases of the trunks.
The two scars where the bark has been stripped from the lower trunk (above) might be the result of a lightning strike. The tree’s sap is instantly converted into steam, with explosive results.
The horse chestnut, which isn’t a close relation of the sweet chestnut, has scaly bark. This section of bark on the bough of an old horse chestnut, growing out towards the lake near the Cascade Bridge, has been worn and polished by generations of adventurous children so that it’s come to resemble the skin of a reptile.
I can’t draw a tree with twisting, carunculated bark without thinking of Arthur Rackham’s lively pen and watercolour drawings. No tree twists more than the hornbeam which always seems snakelike to me. This tree by the Lower Lake at Nostell is also dotted with pale lichens, echoing the cryptic colouring of a boa constrictor.
I’m going to add some colour to this, but I like it as a simple mapping pen drawing (Clip Studio Paint version on the iPad).
From my diary for Wednesday, 8 September, 1971, Horbury, West Riding of Yorkshire:
On our way back [from visiting grandparents in Nottinghamshire] I noticed that Horbury Station was half demolished. I cycled down and asked them for the clock – they let me have it.
Man in charge of demolition (note: in my drawings no-one is wearing a hard hat!):
“Ahh, you like old stuff, do you? We demolished an old place in Leeds with faces and things carved on it. All in stone and they’re just going to put an office block up there. This thing would have stood while the new buildings fell. I had an old watch, a little silver one, from a site in Leeds.”
The clockwork was missing, I soon lost the wooden frame, which was in comb-jointed sections and, if I remember rightly, was painted in a dull turquoise. I suspect my father might have thrown the pieces out. My brother-in-law Dave found me an electric motor, but it drove the hands in reverse. Eventually, on my move away from Horbury, the glass, which I suspect was Victorian float glass, got smashed and I’m afraid that in a clear-out a few years later, I disposed of the clock-face.
There was no maker’s name and the numerals were Roman.
I probably wouldn’t choose to draw any of these building individually, but I enjoyed drawing the jumble of shapes of the Leeds city centre skyline as seen from Cafe Costa at the Crown Point Retail Park.
As I drew a single magpie was pecking between the slats of a ventilation grill at the side of the Mothercare building. Perhaps there were spiders or insects sheltering there.
We’re waiting for Hobbycraft to open, a store that I don’t think I’ve ever visited before. At one time, I couldn’t have browsed around the extensive art section without buying a particular pen or sketchbook but I’m so happy with my TWSBI EcoT fountain pen that I’m not really on the look-out for the next best thing. I’ve still got a drawer in my plan chest and a shoe box in the attic stocked with new sketchbooks but my rate of getting through them has slowed since I became fascinated by drawing on the iPad.
It’s good to alternate between iPad and sketchbook, to be reminded what a pleasure it is to make real inky lines on paper. There’s a feedback from the texture of cartridge paper that I’m never going to get from my Apple Pencil on the glassy surface of the iPad.
