Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
A rainswept night by the pond proved too much for my trusty trail cam, the Browning Strike Force Pro XD.
Despite the rugged rubber armour the damp appears to have got into it.
Let’s hope that Browning can help me get it into action again.
For a lean rescue dog, Pepper the Lurcher seemed remarkably calm but her owner tells me that he’s noticed that if he gets out any kind of pole, like a garden rake, she’ll go straight back in the house, so she might have had a troubled history. She reacted to bangs from the kitchen in the Coffee Stop at the Junction where I was drawing her and looked at me with soulful eyes when I tackled a slice of cheesecake. Needless to say she didn’t get any (but the dog-friendly cafe provides a healthy option canine treat).
Drawing indoors and in a rainswept car park: this morning’s rain meant that we didn’t get off to Newmillerdam. I was looking down on the cars at the same angle as I was looking down on the piles of books and CDs on the shelf under my brother-in-law’s coffee table, so they look like a couple of models.
The Main Street end of Church Street, Haworth, from a photograph I took in 2013, that’s the church on the right and, according to Google, we’re looking at the back of what is now Haworth Wholefoods.
The gallery of sketchbook pages that I posted the other day reminded me of a comic strip. Haven’t worked out the story yet but the chair reminds me of a Sherlock Holmes story . . .
The Tattie & Neeps Mysteries and it looks as if our hard-boiled inspector and his rookie sidekick D.C. Neeps might have made a breakthrough in tracking down ‘Mr Big’.
Also known as ‘The Haggis’.
Yes, it’s birthday time again, and this is for Rob, a vegetarian ex-detective living on a Scottish Island. I think that I’ve discovered a demographic that even Moonpig and The Card Factory haven’t latched onto yet.
“Was D.I. Tattie one of the original ‘Peelers’?” asks Rob.
I feel that I know my home patch pretty well but when I drew this parish map for Sitlington I realised that there were one or two paths that I’d never set foot on.
I drew this in 1995, working with Wakefield Council’s footpath department and the Parish Council.
Recent sketches from my Hahnemühle D&S (Draft & Sketch) 125x90mm pocket sketchbook.
Himesh Patel plays Jeevan Chaudhary in the TV mini-series Station Eleven, adapted from Emily St John Mandel’s novel about a band of travelling players in a post-pandemic Great Lakes landscape.
Once again this is drawn in Clip Studio Paint on the iPad, using a standard drawing figure for the pose but this time instead of relying on my memory and imagination I took the details of the character and costume from a photograph in last week’s Radio Times.
When I travelled around the country drawing and writing my Richard Bell’s Britain natural history sketchbook, I found that pages including manmade objects in a natural landscape – such as an abandoned forestry lorry on a track through a pine plantation – often worked best.
The Persil factory had made an impression on me as I passed through Warrington on the train.
It appeared as a thumbnail sketch on one of the maps in Britain and when my editor Robert MacDonald suggested a sequel, focussing on industrial Britain, I returned to draw it.
I did more drawings closer to home, one series documenting the last coal barges to operate between British Oak, near Crigglestone, and Thornhill Power Station.
The Persil Factory made it onto the cover of the dummy of the proposed book, but the project never got off the ground, however I did sell the original pen and watercolour at one of my one-man shows a few years later. I was quite honoured that my French teacher from Grammar School days, Miss Deacon bought it.
This mock-up of the cover is a hand-coloured photocopy, as this was long before the days when I would have a scanner in my studio.