Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I’ve been looking for the average scruffy duck: an adult in eclipse, a juvenile moulting into adult plumage or a part-domestic duck. I’ve taken the colours from two ducks that I photographed by the war memorial at Newmillerdam last week.
We’ve started shooting, and the duck’s looking a bit worried about that.
I’ve dived in to the mysteries of Adobe Character Animator and I like the way the simple ‘puppets’ that you create in the program can be so expressive. Other aspects such as how to stop the character floating about are a mystery – although the duck might be quite relieved to hear that.
Lip-sync and bill-sync are working well though.
T'was the last week of summer And, down by the lake, We hear the sad quack Of a hungry old drake.
The grebes and the tufted ducks Dabble and dive But our poor drake is struggling Just to survive.
The foraging moorhen
Has plenty of luck,
But that doesn't extend
To the desolate duck.
In the woods, the grey squirrels
Eat beech-nuts galore,
But our poor drake is starving
Down here on the shore.
I know what you’re thinking:
‘I’ll give him some bread!’ –
But just one mouldy bread crust
Can leave a duck dead.
This ode to a duck Might not be the best, But what were you expecting? - I'm not Colin West!
Cartoon ducks drawn at Newmillerdam this morning. We didn’t see any drake mallards in breeding plumage, so my guess is that they’re all in eclipse plumage, and we’ll see their true colours appear in the autumn.
Out of the goose feather quills that I’ve cut, my favourite is the thinnest and most flexible, so it’s quite suited to the curvy shapes of ducks, willow branches and alder leaves, drawn this from a fishing platform at Newmillerdam.
But it isn’t practical for field work because the ink goes on so thickly that I can’t close the sketchbook. Over three hours later I’ve put it on the scanner and blots of ink have stuck to the glass.
Even carrying back my open sketchbook I managed to leave my thumbprint on the wet ink of the drawing. It’s part of what makes drawing with a quill more spontaneous than drawing with my usual fountain pen, but for field sketches, that’s what I’ll be going back to.
There was plenty of action on the duck pond in Thornes Park this morning but these two mallard/farmyard drakes were a more appealing subject, dozing in the sun amongst the ferny cow parsley by a woodland path.
We’ve been in a high pressure area for a while now, which means sunny days but cold nights. So far our tomato plants in the greenhouse had survived unscathed but an extra heavy frost last night has shrivelled most of them. There’s still time to plant replacements.
Barbara’s birthday today and last year, still under the first lockdown, the highlight of the day was a click-and-collect visit to a supermarket, the furthest we had been since our previous click-and-collect. This year we can entertain a limited number of guests in our garden.
This animation was a way of getting more familiar with onion skinning and using the Light Box in Clip Studio paint so it’s turned out to be a bit of lame duck because, having drawn the 12 frames needed for one half of its waddle, I didn’t feel that I needed to continue to complete the second half of the step. If I was starting again, I’d pay as much attention to the sway of its body, which is such a feature of ducks waddling along.