A birthday card for one of my more energetic relatives.
Climb Every Mountain
Rowan
I’ve done so much black and white work recently that I thought it was time to return to base and go back to brown Lamy pen and my Bijou watercolours to draw this rowan leaf from the front garden. Unfortunately my Pentel Water Brush is all but clogged up now, so the watercolour wash is a bit limited.
Pots of Pens
Mustard pot, yogurt container and treacle tins on my shelf in the studio.
Stump Fungus
When you look closely at this fungus growing on a stump by the lake at Newmillerdam you can see that the cap is dotted with scales and the stem looks rather shaggy.
The nearest that I can get to it in the field guide is honey fungus, but I hadn’t realised that the stems could be so shaggy.
On a felled log, water had gathered in a hole in the bark, creating a temporary habitat.
On our errands this afternoon, I drew one of the carved heads on one of the former banks in Ossett and the door in the Carnegie Free Library in Horbury.
Hedgehogs go Viral
What birthday card do you get for someone who’s just passed their HGV?
Water Mug
The Falcon Houseware enamel mug that I use when I’m painting watercolours or ink washes in the studio. The pieces of timber are offcuts from when we constructed the compost bins in the spring.
Drawn with a dip pen and Rohrer’s indian ink, coloured in Photoshop using a limited range of greys, mainly 25%, 50% and 75%, with a few darker shadows and highlights.
Lucky the Hedgehog
Arkan Sonney, the Isle of Man’s lucky hedgehog, makes a return appearance, along with his chums Moddey Dhoo a.k.a. the Black Dog of Peel Castle and the Buggane, everyone’s favourite Manx bogeyman, on another of this week’s homemade cards.
At Home with the Roach Family
A Kafkaesque take on Gary Larson’s domestic scenes of insect life in my latest homemade birthday card.
I often do quick roughs of these cards, not usually as elaborate as this one. I was going include a suggestion of the interior with a Gary Larson-style curtain and an open door, but decided to keep things as simple as possible in the final version.
Mario
For Remembrance Day I’ve looked out this slide of my dad, Robert Douglas Bell, meeting Mario, a policeman on duty at the entrance to the Vatican Museum in August 1963.
They got talking a discovered that they’d been on opposing sides at the Siege of Tobruk in 1941. The siege lasted 241 days, from 10 April to 27 November and was the longest in the history of the British Army.
Mario remembered the big guns pounding away and I believe that he was taken prisoner. My dad never talked about his experience there but my cousins in Sheffield say that he was trapped behind enemy lines when he attempted to rescue a wounded comrade. The local Bedouin tribesmen helped him escape.
At the time he was in the Royal Engineers, along with his old friend Alf Deacon manning a Bofors anti-aircraft gun.
Booster Folk
“I thought you were writing us a cheque,” quipped the nurse at the Covid Vaccination Centre.
“We’re not allowed to take photographs – but it said nothing about sketching!”
As with my first two Covid vaccinations, I’ve had no bad reaction. Except that I’ve decided not to have a glass of red wine at the weekend for a couple of weeks. Tough.
And I remembered not to go for a glass of Sicilian Nero d’Avola at Pizza Express at lunch time. This is going to be a long two weeks.