Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Towering cumulonimbus over Smithy Brook valley, white against a blue sky in the morning sun.
Until a few years ago there were twin filling stations at the traffic lights at Shaw Cross but now one of them has closed and it’s surprising how soon the forecourt has reverted to a woodland glade.
Even the bund across its former entrance has already been colonised by sycamore saplings and buddleia bushes, in contrast to the still fresh-looking road markings on the stub of the entrance drive.
Birstall Retail Park: Beyond the stores you glimpse belts of trees interspersed by hillside meadows. The nearby M62 is out of the sight, if not quite out of earshot. This is such a contrast to when we first came here (see link below), when old colliery spoil heaps to the east were being used as a municipal rubbish dump prior to landscaping the whole area.
Even the car park itself holds some attractions for the local birds. A magpie scouts around beneath a shrub, a sparrow closely inspects the links of a chain, a crow surveys the scene from a lamp-post, a wood pigeon flies over.
Daisy, sowthistle, willowherb, creeping buttercup and black medick are in flower on the verges. Leafy backwaters aren’t far away beyond the stores.
With a hour to spare before the film, we take a walk around the Showcase cinema car park. Beyond the steep grass verge at the bottom end of the car park there’s a steep valley where alders, willows and giant hogweed grow beside a storm channel which is currently running dry.
A chiff chaff is singing and we hear another warbler – a bubbly song – which we identify as garden warbler. This deciduous woodland with dense undergrowth is the right habitat for it.
Link: Lapwings over Ikea, my Wild West Yorkshire nature diary for Tuesday 1 December 1998.
9.20 a.m., Market Place, Ossett, 52°F, 13°C: A town pigeon perches on the antenna on the town hall roof then flies off in a stiff winged display flight. A stubble of rush-like spikes prevents these feral pigeons, descendants of the rock dove, from using sills, mouldings and cupolas as cliff ledges but the strings of Christmas lights still festooned across the facade provide an alternative perch. One has found a niche on a jutting corner.
It’s not much more than a year since the building was given a major restoration but already two elders have sprouted and are blossoming in crevices in the stonework.
A black-headed gulls flies over and a swift soars around hawking for insects.
A buzzard circles near Woolley Edge Services; by the picnic benches rooks gather crop-fulls of scraps.
Calling at a motorway services when we live just five miles away, I feel as if we shouldn’t really be here but we’re meeting with an old friend and her husband who are taking a break here on their journey north.
Driving along some roads in the district, I feel as if every last patch of ground is being built on but heading out this way, I’m astonished at how much countryside we’ve managed to hold on to and how beautiful it looks in the late afternoon sun as woods and hedges burst into fresh leaf and blossom.
On our morning errands, we take a break at Starbuck’s, Calder Park, next to junction 39 of the M1 motorway. We’re on the verge of spring but in the view from our table the only area of green is winter wheat on the far side of the Calder valley at Lupset.
Black-headed gulls, now with neat chocolate brown masks, flap and glide in random search mode above the car park. A town pigeon zooms off on more urgent business.
11.10 a.m., 49ºF, 9ºC, Wakefield Cathedral; A flock of town pigeons circles and chacking jackdaws return to the belfry ia the louvred shutters, unperturbed by the presence of a peregrine preening on a crocket, halfway up the north-east side of the spire.
It’s wonderful to be able to sit on a bench in the precinct and sketch a peregrine. 
When I started birdwatching in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the first peregrines that I saw were in a remote glen in Scotland and on the far south-west corner of Wales, on the Pembrokeshire coast.
Over much of the country they had been wiped out through partly through persecution but probably more because of pesticide residues in their prey species, which caused a thinning of the shells of their eggs.
Link: Wakefield Peregrines
When we drop our car in for its annual service in Hunslet we like to walk alongside the River Aire to Leeds and make a day of it. Over the years on the river we’ve seen goosander, mallard, teal, cormorant, moorhen and kingfisher. We’ve seen goldfinches feeding on the cones of the riverside alders and a wagtail flitting about on a landing stage. Last year we saw our first warbler of the season, just flown in from Africa.
One year we met a knight walking his charger along the riverside path. This was at the time that the Royal Armouries Museum at Clarence Dock staged regular jousts in a tiltyard next to the museum.
I sketched the Birds of the Aire (left) on our first walk into Leeds from the garage, eleven years ago (on the same date, the 9th, and the same day of the week, a Wednesday).
Rain all day means that, for the first time, we miss out on our annual riverside ramble and content ourselves with dodging in and out of the shops in the city centre for a few hours. The art material stores of my college days in Leeds, Dinsdales and Jowett and Sowry have now moved out of the city centre so we were delighted to come across a new(ish) art and craft materials store, Fred Aldous, behind Leeds Market as you head towards Leeds Parish Church (now restyled as the Minster).
Naturally I have to buy a sketchbook. Will the acid free paper in the pocket-sized Leuchtturm 1917 notebook prove more sympathetic to watercolour than the Moleskine sketchbooks that I was using last year? It’s going to be a while before I get around to trying it as I’m currently using my Derwent Black Journal as a pocket notebook, carrying it in my pocket along with a Lamy Vista pen and a small wallet of children’s crayons. I used it when drawing the trees as we waited for our car after its service at the Luscombe’s Suzuki.
Link: Birds of the River Aire, 9 March 2oo5.
First Warbler, 2 March 2015.
Fred Aldous, art & craft supplies
Leuchtturm 1917 sketchbooks
Wetherby Town Hall is like the town hall you’d find in an old fashioned children’s story or a Wallace & Gromit adventure but, despite the doll’s house simplicity of its facade, I always find it difficult to get just the right angle when I’m drawing the pediment.
As it’s such a symmetrical building, drawing the facade is like drawing a portrait and small changes in an angle can change the expression on its ‘face’.
It’s a problem that I don’t mind coming back to. I drew the window during our coffee break – which included a wholemeal scone and honey – at Filmore & Union on the way to Knaresborough yesterday and the pediment after a walk by the River Wharfe at brunch today – when I opted for the healthy pancakes with coconut milk, seasonal fruit, maple syrup and Greek yoghurt.
Urban sketching can be so tough.
Link: Filmore & Union
Perhaps the reason that I find cars so difficult to draw is that they’re almost human. Headlights can be like eyes, so, as when drawing a portrait of a human, if you don’t get the shapes or proportions right, you can lose the likeness. If I drew cars often enough, I might get to the stage where I could take liberties and come up with a caricature.
The first car got driven off just before I got a chance to add colour. As I added colour to the second, a Fiat Punto, I realised that because a car is so shiny it mirrors its environment with a reflection of the sky highlighting the roof and the reflection of the tarmac adding to the shadows below.
A magpie came and perched in a street-side cherry tree as I drew this old warehouse from the Unity Works Cafe Bar, Westgate, Wakefield, on Thursday.
The building just visible on the left is the Old Printworks.
Links; Unity Works
The Old Printworks, ‘a family run pub with a passion for real ale.’
