Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I get more time than usual to draw the goldfish in the dentist’s waiting room and they’re not as fidgety as usual. No feeding frenzy.
Goldfish can see in ultraviolet in addition to the regular colours that we see. The small openings – called nares – that look like nostrils just in front of the eyes direct water over scent receptors. They’re not connected to the gills, so they play no part in respiration.
Small pits dotted along the lateral line are sensitive to pressure.
There seems to be an extra burst of activity amongst the goldfish this afternoon, centred on the face of the octagonal pillar of a tank nearest the centre of the room. The tail end of a feeding frenzy perhaps after their daily dose of fish food.
You’d think that they’d recognise me by now; this is the third temporary filling that I’ve had in the space of a week!
It’s a shame that I broke a tooth but at least it gives me chance to take a close look at the goldfish in the tank in the dentist’s waiting room. I notice that each goldfish has a small, stiffish looking flap in front of each of its eyes, perhaps adding some protection or alternatively helping to stabilise the head as it moves through the water.
Since I discovered a pen that doesn’t bleed straight through the paper in my urban sketchbook I’ve been more tempted to draw in the odd vacant moment.
An ArtPen tin filled with a dozen Derwent Watercolour crayons replaces the watercolour box that I’d prefer to use, if the paper was up to it.
The colours were those included in a plastic pod (which didn’t stand up to being squeezed into my bag) so they’re not exactly the ones that I would have selected for the kind of subjects that I draw – there’s no grey for instance – but I feel that any attempt to indicate colour, however wide of the mark, records information that I couldn’t otherwise include and adds a bit of warmth to the starkness of pen and ink.
It was just the pair of fins on the belly that I couldn’t name of when I drew this goldfish at the dentist’s last month. They’re the pelvic or ventral fins. It’s probably the fact that there are two names that I find it difficult to remember.
Members of the salmon family have an extra fin; the adipose, a small upward pointing fin between the dorsal and caudal.
This drawing is an amalgam of several fish that were in constant motion in the tank in the waiting room. They varied widely in fin length and colour patterns so I tried to keep coming back to the individuals that were closest to the standard goldfish.