Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
THERE’S A NEW fungus emerging on the edges of the woodland rides at Newmillerdam, Shaggy Parasol, Macrolepiota rhacodes. As you can see from these two young specimens, which had been uprooted, they don’t start out with shaggy scales; the one on the right still has its cap almost intact while the one on the left has broken the surface of the cap as it continues to expand.
Roger Phillips in Mushrooms classes it as edible but warns that it ‘may cause gastric upsets in some people’.
THIS IS the kind of building that I find myself drawing when I doodle; a series of triangles, semi-circles and rectangles. I like those interlocking roofs. The tower has a compact sturdiness, like a pepper-pot or a chess-piece.
The clump of ash saplings and one or two shoots of bramble (top), growing in a courtyard amongst buildings is the kind of subject that Frederick Franck often drew in his Zen of Seeing books. Unlike the building, you can’t simplify this tangle of vegetation into geometric shapes, you’ve just got to let yourself go and hope that the rhythms that run through the clump will appear in your drawing.
A man-made object such as a fence-post or old wall would give some definition and contrast but all that I had available was the grid of the paving slabs.
I’M BACK exploring the final frontier; comic strips. Here’s the next panel in the little story that I’m illustrating as part of the Drawing Words & Writing Pictures course.
My first attempt had the astronaut planting the flag but for him to do this with his right hand was awkward, if I wanted to keep the left to right action that runs through a western comic strip (it goes the opposite way in Japanese Manga comics).
Hopefully the implication is that he has just planted it himself, rather than discovered an existing flag on the moon he’s just landed on.
It’s tricky explaining a sequence of events in just one panel, but I can now move on to the end of the story. These last two panels show his return being greeted with much fanfare and his realisation that he’s landed on the wrong planet.
The next part of the exercise is to add some extra panels and gags. The first thing that occurred to me was to cover the abrupt jump from moon to alien planet so here’s the lunar module heading back on its return journey.
How does the astronaut become lost in space? It’s got to be his sat-nav that’s faulty. Uttoxeter was the first town to mind when I thought of sat-nav, so Utopia sounded like a suitable name for an alien planet. Taunton and Titan might just work or Mars and Marsden . . .
No, it could only be Uttoxeter. That ‘x’ in the middle makes it sound suitably alien. Or wrong.
Just to tie things up I include a frame to show touch-down on the wrong planet.
Here’s the new, extended sequence;
Seeing all eight panels together really gives the impression that this is some kind of a story.
So my truncated new story could start with the sat-nav problem and end with meeting the aliens. Not very funny but at least it has a beginning a middle and an end. I have much to learn.
‘WE HAVE ignition!’ . . .
I’ve been eager to get back to my Drawing Words & Writing Pictures tutorials but other commitments intervened however here I am with a – shh!, don’t tell anybody – free weekend so I’m resuming with the chapter 3 tutorial The wrong planet, an activity devised by Pahl Hluchan.
I’m starting by illustrating their suggested five panel story. Each panel is drawn on a 3 x 3 inch square of cartridge paper to which I’ll add extra panels to pad out the action and extra gags if I can think of any, then subtract panels to see how few panels my extended story can be whittled down to.
A three inch square of cartridge is a fiddly piece of paper to draw on; the tutorial recommends using post-it notes which sounds a better idea as they’d stay put as you work on them, but I hadn’t got any, so I’ve cut down some 120 gsm Canson cartridge which is a pleasanter surface to work on than the scrap paper that I usually grab for tutorials.
The panels need to be separate for the editing process. This is intended to be a group exercise where you’d mix and match each other’s artwork, sticking the post-it notes on the wall, but I’m going for the one-man version, for the kind of student that the authors refer to as a Ronin, a Ronin being, as I mentioned back in the summer, a freelance samurai who wandered around feudal Japan, or, in my case, a wilfully reclusive freelance illustrator enjoying being holed up in his studio for the weekend (shortly after I wrote that Barbara and I had to pop out with an urgent book order!).
I’m using my Lamy Safari fountain pen which is my current favourite for writing and for relaxed drawing. I’ve been inking in the blacks with a Pentel Brush Pen.
The Safari is filled with a Lamy ink cartridge. I haven’t tried it with waterproof Noodler’s ink.
Link; Drawing Words & Writing Pictures by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden
THIS MAKES A CHANGE; sitting with my sandwich, leaning against the trunk of an oak, the tree canopy above me and birches and bracken stretching down to the stream below. I’m deep in the wood yet only 15 minutes walk from my front door. I timed it because yesterday, when I first tried a lunchtime mini-adventure, I had assumed that I would have time to walk the full circuit of the valley but I hadn’t factored in the number of times that I’d stop to photograph fungi so I ended up rushing to get back home on time.
It’s better to have more time to stop and enjoy my surroundings. Even half an hour of brisk walking is better than none.
My habitual lunch break, when I’m on my own and Barbara is working at the bookshop, would be something on toast then to slump on the sofa with a mug of tea and listen to The World at One. But we’re in the 
middle of the party conference season so what better time for a change!
Of course, I’d love to have time to draw too but these photographs give an impression of what you can see in the wood, even during a one hour lunch break.
I can’t make a case for my life being particularly stressful but I couldn’t resist picking up Stress proof your life; 52 brilliant ideas for taking control by Elisabeth Wilson when I saw it in the library.
I had to work away one day last week, doing some lettering on boards, which gave me an opportunity to observe how someone else ran her business. Although she ran a much bigger, more involved business than mine, it got me reassessing my working habits.
As a freelance illustrator, I can choose what I do and who I work for, so why, so often, do I feel frustrated at not being able to settle to my work?
Self-help books are something that you have to read when you’re in a suitably open-minded mood otherwise the content washes over you and you think ‘that would be a good idea, if I ever have the time to put it into practice’. But things are settling down for me this autumn. I’ve cleared the decks by completing the illustrations for the museum and my article for the Coxley newsletter so I’m more than ready to settle down to my own work.
In this situation, chapter 4 in Stress proof your life, ‘Never procrastinate again’ seems especially appealing. Wilson explains the ‘rotation method’ devised by Mark Forster, featured in his time management book, Get Everything Done.
You divide your working session into segments;
Working down each column from left to right, I spent ten minutes on each of the activities, half an hour in total, then twenty minutes on each, finishing with three half hour sessions. I used a kitchen timer to keep track.
Coffee breaks are taken in between. There’s nothing magical about the 10, 20, 30 – you can change those times to suit yourself – and you needn’t limit it to three activities but those three reflect the three strands of my work.
One of the big advantages of being freelance is the unbroken blocks of time you can sometimes find yourself with, so why should I want to break up my day like this?
Three reasons:
During the couple of days that I’ve tried this regime, it’s worked well. I’m keen to keep escaping to the natural world during my lunch break. If my morning and afternoon sessions are suitably productive thanks to a spot of time management, I should be able to justify an hour’s break each day – a little over an hour as I have to fill a flask and make a sandwich (peanut butter and local honey in homemade granary, based on Ray Mears’ suggestion for his favourite fellwalking sandwich!).
Oh, and in autumn woodland, there’s more essential; a folding foam mat to sit on.
I think you’d get more stressed if you attempted to sample every single one of the 52 stress busting techniques in Elisabeth Wilson’s book, but I like what she says about work in the chapter on ‘How to love the job you’ve got’;
‘ask yourself how you can make it special, imbue it with your own uniqueness, breathe creativity and a little bit of love into it.’
Not a bad mission statement for me to have in mind as I work on my book.
Link: Mark Forster’s Get Everything Done. His latest is book is intriguingly titled Do It Tomorrow, which sounds like a time wasting technique but Forster has a knack of offering a fresh approach to people like me who’ve got themselves in a bit of a rut.
I can’t find a website for Elisabeth Wilson.
AT FIRST I thought that this ‘Witch’s Egg’ was an extra large earthball fungus. It about half the size of a tennis ball and not as firm to the touch as an earthball. It was on its own, lying on a shady, moist woodland bank amongst the leaf litter in Stoneycliffe Wood. This seemed strange as most fungi grow up from the ground rather than on it and I thought that perhaps it had been dislodged.
But this ‘fruiting’ part of the fungus has only a single white cord connecting it with the mycelium, the growing part of the fungus which is associated with rotting wood.
The ‘Witch’s Egg’ is said to be edible but poor but this is certainly one that I wouldn’t have tried, even when I was down and out and living in a tent in Iceland, as it’s filled with olive-green slime. It’s the initial stage of the Stinkhorn fungus, Phallus impudicus, which grows up from it, wafting its carrion odour through the wood.
Buczacki comments that ‘it is usually detected by its evil smell‘, which he find ‘repulsive‘.
WE SPOTTED this Treecreeper climbing up the crab apple by the pond, meanwhile a Nuthatch had flown to take a sunflower heart from one of the bird feeders. Our delight at seeing these two infrequent visitors in our back garden at one soon turned to shocked horror as the Treecreeper hurtled like a missile towards the feeders then continued, hitting the patio window and instantly killing itself by, as far as I can tell, breaking its neck.
I didn’t want it to have died in vain so I picked it up to draw and also checked the internet and phoned the British Trust for Ornithology just in case someone might be studying the species and might have a use for a fresh casualty for analysis, but they didn’t know of any study at present, unless the bird had died of disease.
Length: 12.7 cm
Beak: 1.7 cm
Tail: 6 cm
Weight: 8 grams
COMMON EARTHBALL fungus grows in woodland and heathland sometimes on its own but often ‘in small, trooping ± tufted groups’ as Stefan Buczacki explains in the new Collins Fungi Guide. ‘Trooping’ means that they’re growing close to each other but are physically separate, ‘tufted’ means that they grow from the same base.
He describes the fruiting bodies as covered in ‘coarse brown scales or low pyramidal warts’ and you can see from my drawing that the texture varies amongst this group.
The older one (top) has burst open at the apex, revealing the dark brown spores inside.
They were growing on the grassy verge of a track through the plantations at Newmillerdam. I photographed them, then drew from the photograph but I do hope I’ll be able to make time to draw on location before too long.
Buczacki describes the Common Earthball as ‘possibly poisonous’ but it really depends on how hungry you are. I ate young specimens when I was in Iceland living in a one-man tent at Lake Myvatn for 4 weeks on a stretched to the limit Minor Travelling award from the Royal College of Art. The flesh is whitish at first and I thought that it smelt of mushrooms.
Delicious fried in butter. But probably poisonous. You have been warned.
THIS YELLOW fungus was growing on a log at the edge of the path through a conifer plantation at Newmillerdam. I’m not sure whether the log was hardwood or softwood.
It’s the first species that I’ve tried to identify from the Collins Fungi Guide, by Stefan Buczacki and going by his description and the illustration by Denys Ovenden I think this must be Yellow Cobweb, Plebiella sulphurea, formerly known as Trechispora vaga, although I’ll admit that my photograph, taken on the 17th, makes it look more like yellow vermicelli.
Thank you to Monique in the Netherlands who tells me this isn’t in fact a fungus (see comment), I did wonder about that:
It’s called dog vomit slime mold, in Dutch “witch’s butter”. It’s very slimy and it can “walk”.
You can see its slime trail over the moss in my photograph.
THE OLD WINDMILL just up our road, here in Middlestown, was already disused and converted to a dwelling when this photograph was taken about one hundred years ago. It had evidently been a good year for cabbages.
On most of the photographs that I’ve been drawing from, I don’t get an opportunity to put a name to the face but in this case it shouldn’t be difficult to look up the old mill in the 1911 census records to find out the names of, I’m guessing, mum and dad and their two daughters.
I’d love to know the names of these two boys (and their dog) who appear in the corner of the postcard of the haymakers that I drew yesterday. If I was the photographer, I’d have been annoyed that my timeless scene of rural life had been infiltrated by these Artful Dodgers but looking back after a hundred years they’re probably the best bit of the photograph. They’re so spontaneous and full of character. Looks as if they might be planning some minor mischief.
Unless they lied about their age and enlisted towards the end of the conflict, they should have escaped the horrors of World War I. It’s possible that in the past I’ve walked past them on the street but they’d have to be about 107 years old to still be with us today.
Making an altogether more elegant pair, these two girls are part of a group dressed in their Sunday bests strolling by Coxley Dam.
Straw hats were the thing to wear in those long gone Edwardian summers. I’ve found a young women in the 1911 census returns for Coxley Valley listing herself as a milliner.