Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
View from the first floor Barbara Hepworth sculpture gallery looking down on the weir on the River Calder. Drawn in Procreate, using Román García Mora’s set of brushes from the Domestika course, Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate.
In week two, ‘Brains’ of the University of York’s The Biology of Bugs, Brains and Beasts course, for our homework we’ve been asked to get our neurones and synapses working by trying to memorise Pi. They give us the ratio to a hundred digits but in my comic strip mnemonic I’ve gone for the first fourteen:
3.14159265358979
I have a habit of looking for dates when I’m memorising numbers, so the first four digits 1415 set the historical period for me. I did actually have a Welsh granny, Anne Jones, from a Welsh-speaking family in Connah’s Quay, so for the ‘9’ I decided to go for ‘Nain’, pronounced ‘nine’, the Welsh for granny.
To really make this work as a memory-jogger, I’d have to try and bring in all my senses when remembering this story: the buzz of angry bees, the sweet scent of the meadow flowers, the texture of the old gate as it creaks open. It’s important to get a flow going for the story because I need to remember the numbers in a particular order. It’s different to one of those memory games where you’re asked to remember a collection of random objects in any order.
I crammed four digits into the final frame. At this rate, to remember one hundred digits, I’d end up with graphic novel seven or eight pages long. In case I ever need to know the ratio of Pi to fourteen decimal places, I should be able to remember by thinking back to the comic strip but, more usefully, I’ve enjoyed getting back into drawing on my iPad, which I’ve taken a bit of break from over the last three months.
The Future Learn Biology of Bugs, Brains and Beasts course run by the biosciences department of the University of York
I’ve switched from hiking boots to these Clarks GoreTex trainers recently and I’ve noticed the difference; you flex your feet more in trainers. You might think that would put more pressure on the toes but its the calf muscles on the back of my legs that have been doing the extra work and which feel taut. On one occasion in the middle of the night I got a touch of cramp, so I’m making sure that I keep doing a bit of stretching.
I’ve drawn these in Procreate on the iPad and this time I’ve left the initial pencil drawing showing, which makes it more like a regular still life drawing as you get a hint of the process that went into it.
To make it less self-consciously an iPad drawing, I did consider doing the drawing all on one layer but I thought that the pen might run into the paint as I added it, which wasn’t the effect that I wanted, so it was drawn as normal, in three layers, as above, plus a background layer of white ‘paper’.
People on the precinct in Ossett were hurrying by in the cold, gloomy, afternoon rain, so I was grateful to be sketching them from the shelter of Bistro 42 after sampling a selection of tapas.
Passers-by were crossing my field of view so quickly that the only way to draw them was a to focus on an individual, take a mental photograph and then try to get the impression down on paper.
It makes a change for me to draw people. With natural history subjects, I’m keen to record enough visual information to identify a species of plant or animal but we’re all so familiar with humans as a species that the emphasis can instead be on trying to suggest character.
I drew in pen with no watercolour in my sketchbook but then redrew the figures on my new iPad Pro using a program suggested my comic artist friend John Welding. Procreate is more closely adapted to the possibilities of the iPad than Clip Studio Paint, the program that I’ve been using a lot recently, but I’ll keep coming back to Clip Studio because I like the page design tools that are incorporated into it.
I don’t normally draw in pencil because with the rough handling my sketchbooks get, pencil lines soon get smudged but I like the pencil tool in Procreate as a quick way for starting a drawing. There’s a tool for smudging it too, if you really want that.
Procreate gives the option to make a thirty-second movie of your drawing.