Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
We’re almost at the end of the apple blossom and the embryo fruits are beginning to form. I’ll need to thin out the fruits to two per cluster and I think most growers would then recommend just keeping the best of those as they develop. If I leave five in each cluster the tree will shed several as they start to grow.
Doodling with the ‘Real G-Pen’, Lasso Fill tool and Pastel in Clip Studio Paint
Unfurling at the back of our pond, one of our commonest ferns, Male Fern, Dryopteris filix-mas. Most of the year it’s just a shuttlecock, so not that interesting to draw, but I like it when the croziers are opening into fronds.
Delivered today, my summer sketchbooks, and I’ve gone for five A5 landscape Pink Pigs. I’ve been working in 8-inch square and A5 portrait sketchbooks but I for me a landscape format works better for natural history, as you’re always in a landscape of some sort. My A6 landscape travel sketchbook can seem a bit cramped and A4 landscape can seem a bit too much to fill in one session but A5 landscape is right there in the ‘Goldilocks Zone’. Not too intimidating to aim at one page of natural history a day.
A card for a Terriers supporter. The Trinity Wildcat is known as ‘Daddy Cool’ and the Leeds Rhino is ‘Ronnie’. In real life our Yorkshire sporting mascots are much better behaved.
Recent sketches from my pocket sketchbook, colour mostly added later. Sometimes I’ll take a photograph for colour reference but with these I’ve added the colour as I remember it.
Kippax: from the Old Norse ‘Cippa’s Ash Tree’.
Happy birthday (yesterday) to soon-to-be Kippaxian Olivia.
A drake mallard stood resting by the duck pond in Thornes Park this morning. This was the only bird that didn’t move much during the whole time that I was there but I still found it difficult to draw get the correct proportion of head to body. With each drawing I started with the head but by the time I’d drawn the body I’d find myself coming back to redraw the head.
I couldn’t resist adding colour, which immediately made my sketches more mallard-like.
I drew birds in our back garden in the afternoon and, as with the mallard, added colour to each one as I went along.
The stock dove was an unusual visitor, smaller than the wood pigeon but quite capable of chasing it off, reaching out as if threatening to peck it. By the time they’d got down to the edge of the pond the wood pigeon gave up and flew away, leaving the stock dove to return to foraging beneath the bird feeders.
Mahonia, otherwise known as Oregon Grape; croziers of unfurling ferns with matching wrought ironwork; cross-bedding in magnesian limestone and dryad’s saddle fungus at Brodsworth this morning.
A group of these plants were growing on the riverbank and on a rubbly bank at the side of the riverside path behind industrial units. It looks like a relative of water avens but doesn’t have the drooping flowerheads of that species. Most of the flowers were yellowish green but some plants had flowers midway down the stem with magenta petals. A garden escape?
Next day we spotted this plant amongst the ferns at Brodsworth Hall and Gardens. It’s a Heuchera, a member of the saxifrage family from North America, so definitely a garden escape.