Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
It’s close to freezing so, despite the crisp winter sunshine, I decided not to to sit and sketch at Newmillerdam this morning but headed off to the top end of the wood, pausing only to photograph Gnome Jeff on the diversion through the arboretum.
This morning our pond had frozen over but a month from today the days will start getting longer.
On the little roof terrace at the Boathouse Cafe, Newmillerdam, black-headed gulls glide past the castellated balustrade a few feet away from me at eye level, a fluid, effortlessly elegant flight. A grebe preens out on the lake, a male goosander swims by, crisply black and white in the low winter sun.
A coot calls tetchily, mallards quack and the smell of fresh coffee drifts up from the kitchen below.
We missed out on Newmillerdam last week as it was raining heavily but today it’s looking good with plenty of autumn colour, however I’m still experimenting with pen and ink so I’ve focussed on these Victorian chimney pots and a stone wall by a horse chestnut tree.
To give the gatepost a black and white treatment, I marked the shapes of the shadows – the spot blacks as they’re called in comics – with an ‘x’, then filled in with a Pentel Brush Pen. Drawn using a Lamy nexx with a bold nib.
I stuck to black and white at Newmillerdam this morning – a B-nib Lamy filled with De Atramentis ink and a Pentel brush pen.
When people are wearing bright yellow or blue, it’s tempting to add that as a flat wash but I’m experimenting with black and white for my werewolf comic, to create an inky gothic atmosphere.
Also as an experiment, I scanned these at 600 dpi (dots per inch) in ‘1 bit B/W’, reducing everything to either pure black or white.
10.15 am, sunny, slight breeze: A heron is patiently watching and stalking in the shallows by an old coot’s nest near the outlet of Newmillerdam Lake. This is an immature bird; it has moulted out of its brown juvenile plumage but still has a shade of grey on its neck. It has yet to grow its crest into the breeding adult’s pigtails.
But it’s successful with its watch, bend neck and lightning-fast stab technique of fishing, catching two small fish in the space of 5 or 10 minutes. The second fish seems to me to be rather squat, and I wondered if it might be a bullhead.
By the time that I move over to the Canada geese, gathering around someone feeding them near the main car park, my pen has stopped running freely, perhaps because there’s a bit of grease on my sketchbook page or the ink is running low. I bend down from the fishing platform and dabble the nib in the water. I like the transparent effect it gives to my drawing.
The tufted duck is so buoyant that it needs a little burst of power to push itself below the surface. It looks to me as if almost the whole duck jumps out of the water before diving sharply in headfirst, with legs ready to act as paddles to propel it deeper.
At last, the world premier of my cartoon inspired by the ducks, swans, geese, squirrels and monster pike seen on our Monday morning walks around Newmillerdam.
The preening routine of a Canada goose involves Pilates-style stretching and twisting.
There isn’t time to add colour when drawing passers-by and when I start writing notes it soon gets a bit complicated. ‘B’, for instance, could stand for blue, black or brown.
I’ve used the colour printer’s CMYK – cyan, magenta, yellow and ‘key’ colour, which is usually black.
A capital letter indicates a strong or darker colour, lower case a paler version, so my ‘gB’ is supposed to indicate blue with a touch of green in it.
I’ve drawn ducks, pond life, trees and flowers at Newmillerdam, so I thought that it was about time that I turned my attention to the people visiting the country park.
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.
