Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
As Ralph has his birthday on the run-up to Christmas, I’ve gone for a combined advent/birthday card this year.
Surprises include, in box no. 4, my copy of a Beano-inspired portrait of Ralph’s mum, Abby, drawn by his sister Ivy.
The traditional Selfridges hamper was a Christmas box from work for Ralph’s dad, James. Since the family moved a year ago, Ralph has developed a habit of trying out boxes for size, a human jack-in-a-box.
As we walked across the deer park at Wentworth Castle, two fallow bucks looked up then decided we were harmless and went on grazing as we passed them. The does and fawns were more wary. One made a show by ‘stotting’: prancing off stiff-legged, alternately putting the two front legs, then the two back legs down. This behaviour is thought to be a signal to predators that the deer is so fit, with its fancy footwork, that it won’t be worth the trouble of attempting to catch it.
Archer Hill Gate (all three arches of it: I’ve framed it with the tree to show only one of them) stands half way up the slope between Wentworth Castle, a Georgian mansion, and the ruins of Stainborough Castle.
These characters are the Vladimir and Estragon of nursery rhyme mice, so a dim and glowering background suits the piece, and fits in with the ‘lost in the Scottish Borders’ setting.
Drawn at Diana’s this afternoon, sadly P.C. the black cat is no longer with us, as I usually drew him when we visited.
Some of my Night before Christmas mice have been drafted in for a comic strip version of the nursery rhyme How many miles to Babylon?
Although first published in 1801, it’s possible that the rhyme originated in the 1600s as a Scottish Border folksong.
Scottish Borders is the setting I’m going for.
The tones and textures were added to these pen and ink mice by using a clipping mask in Adobe Fresco. For the comic that I’ve got in mind, Mouse 1, Row 2, is the one to go for, drawn with Fresco’s ‘watercolor wet spatter’ brush. I want to rather dreary and slightly disconcerting look, like a production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. If it was a Victorian story, I’d go to town with the ‘cross hatch’ from the selection of ‘Comic’ brushes.
Molly, a black cocker spaniel, takes a break.
‘Britain’s Biggest Model Railway’, the 200ft-long Heaton Junction layout, on show at the Old Market Hall this weekend, evokes the railway that I remember from school cross country runs in winter. The River Calder was often the colour of the resin used in the model, occasionally tinted dull indigo, probably when they were dying textiles upstream at Dewsbury.
The construction team have gone to great lengths to capture the sights and sounds of the Calder Valley in the post-British Railways era but fortunately they haven’t added the smell of the local sewage works.
The wintry feel and rusty, oily ambience is just as I remember it. I’m looking forward to the Heaton Junction layout moving on to stage 2 as their next project is to recreate a marshalling yards based on Healey Mills, which lay at the foot of the slope alongside a section of the river that had been diverted to allow the construction of the yards. Scale models of the lighting towers will be included.
A favourite spot for Horbury’s feral pigeons to gather is the Co-op roof.
I drew these in my pocket-sized sketchbook and rearranged them in Photoshop before adding the tones in Fresco on my iPad Pro, using an Apple Pencil.
With our Christmas finally sorted, it’s time for one our wilder walks around the reservoir at Langsett.
A stable mass of high pressure is starting to establish itself over Britain, forcing the jet stream into an Ω (omega)-shaped diversion right around it to the north.
This morning, the Pennine watershed marks the division between air masses and we can see a large grey cloud hanging over Manchester and rolling over the moor tops to envelop the Holme Moss transmitter but it doesn’t make any progress towards us.
