Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Apart from the squirrel-nibbled cone, which is from Nostell, I picked up these seeds and the lichen and the snail shell on a mossy tree-fringed lawn in Ossett.
Some of the sycamore seeds had begun to sprout while all that was left of the lime seed was the pair of wings that propelled it through the air.
The lichen, Xanthoria parietina, would normally be yellow but it turns greenish when it grows in shade. The insides of the spore-producing cups – the apothecia – have kept their colour.
We’re pleased with the way the flower bed by the rowan in the front garden has come on since we planted it out in spring last year.
The spiky ornamental grasses, the shrubby purple hebe and the tete-a-tete daffodils have all bulked up but the stars of the show are the primulas. They’ve been no more than a bedraggled rosette of leaves all winter but over the past couple of weeks we’ve seen more and more flowers appearing.
12 noon: When we arrive at Charlotte’s Ice Cream Parlour, Whitley Lower, there’s a clear view across Mirfield and the Calder Valley to the hills beyond, with patches of sunlight scudding gently across the landscape.
On the highest ground in the distance, there’s a white brilliance, which appears to be a powdering of snow.
A buzzard circles over Liley Wood, below us to the west.
Grey cloud and misty rain obscure the view for ten minutes or so, as a shower passes over.
Charlotte’s used to be a regular weekly destination for several years, when we’d head here on a Thursday morning for coffee and scones with my mum. She died a little over two years ago but, had she lived, we would have been celebrating her ninety-ninth birthday last Sunday. In fact, she once suggested that for her one hundredth birthday she would like treat all her family and friends to a gathering at Charlotte’s.
Her latest great-grandchild, Henry, is making his first visit here today, but he’s far too young to appreciate the ice cream.
A large spotted pig is contentedly snoring in its pen.
Also taking a break, there’s a pochard on the duck pond, sleeping with its bill tucked under its wing.
7.55 a.m.: A male reed bunting perches on a dried up purple loosestrife stem then flies down to the edge of the pond and stays there for a minute, not apparently finding anything to feed on.
If it’s checking out our small pond, it isn’t impressed, as it flies up into the crab apple, joining the regular tits and finches for another minute or two before flying off towards the lower end of the wood, perhaps to drop in on Coxley Beck. It takes no interest in the bird feeders.
We can’t see an accompanying female.
Reed buntings are regulars in the marshy fields by the river half a mile away but it’s a rarity for us to spot one in the garden. In fact, I don’t remember recording one before; if so it must have been over twenty-five years ago.
It’s the last day, meteorologically speaking, of winter but at times it has seemed more like spring today. It’s a good time to go through my pocket sketchbook, to upload the drawings that didn’t made it into my posts.
For so much of the winter, we’ve been preoccupied by medical matters, especially in Barbara’s brother John’s gradual recovery from a stroke at the beginning of December. He’s now back home and doing well.
The stroke unit at Dewsbury Hospital is on the fifth floor of the Brontë Tower, with views, on a clear day, of the tops of the Pennines. They were at their most striking one clear sunny morning, after a snow shower over the moor tops.
Just time at 4.30 for a quick session drawing the pheasants that have been gleaning spilt sunflower seeds beneath the feeders for most of the day.
Working in fountain pen with regular ink speeds up the process of drawing. I’d normally use Noodlers waterproof ink because I find it so useful, being able to add a wash of watercolour without the ink running but, in the time available today, regular ink seems to flow more freely. Besides, I’m in the mood for a drawing with an inky quality to it. For once, I won’t add the red, green and red gold of the cock pheasant’s plumage.
I enjoyed watching The Great Painting Challenge from ZSL Whipsnade Zoo yesterday. The warm-up exercise that Pascal Anson gave the contestants, urging them to spend 60 seconds looking at the elephants, then only 8 seconds drawing, is more or less what I’m trying here – except without Pascal standing there with his stopwatch: the pheasants are so active that I’ve got no choice other than to try and take a mental snapshot of a pose, then draw the whole thing. But I do then work on the details of the plumage in short bursts.
8.00 a.m.: A sparrowhawk flies over the rooftops followed by a loose flock of smaller birds, which appear to be mobbing it. The sparrowhawk swoops down on one of them, but misses out on its breakfast.
On the sunflower heart feeders, a pair of bullfinches are joined by a siskin.
8.45 a.m.: A buzzard circles over farmland beyond the houses. Buzzards are such regulars now but because I first got familiar with them in the Lake District and on Speyside, at a time when they were far less common than they are today, they still conjure up a feeling of wild places for me. It’s great to be able to sit on the sofa with a mug of tea after breakfast and see one soaring in the distance.
We had a single clump of frogspawn in the pond yesterday; today there are thirteen.
Back to the future: welcome to my school for the space age, as envisaged in my art homework in 1965. I was ahead of my time: that airy auditorium reminds me of the Scottish Parliament, which didn’t get built until forty years later. No wonder I felt so relaxed and at home, when we visited Holyrood last summer.
My high-tec teaching aids are now commonplace in the classroom: projectors, televisions and my analogue version of today’s computer-controlled whiteboards.
Each desk has its own reel-to-reel tape recorder but, typical of school, the pupils have to share: one between two.
When we call on our friend Diana, I usually struggle to draw her cat, PC, because, if he’s in, he hankers to go out but, once he’s out, it’s not long until he jumps on the outside windowsill to demand to be let in again. A busy cat.
Not today though, as it’s cold, dull and rainy out there. Snoozing in his basket or reclining on the windowsill, as he is today, you might imagine that PC would be far too laid back to catch a bird. Unfortunately not: Diana has had to stop feeding the birds in her front garden, which is a shame because she used to enjoy seeing goldfinches crowding onto the nyger seed feeder.
This weekend my old brass alarm clock appears in Harrison’s Garden at Nostell Priory, an installation by artist Luke Jerram to celebrate the 300th anniversary of one of John Harrison’s early longcase clocks, created in 1717 (see link below).
My alarm clock, made by Peter of Germany, dates from the late 1970s, when I needed something more robust to get me out of bed in the morning than the little travel alarm that my Uncle Fred bought me for my 21st birthday.
In a drawing from 1977 (or 1978?), I included the alarm clock hanging from a metal shelf unit in a cluttered corner of my room.
Whatever I bought for my room, I tried to select something that I might use as reference for an illustration, so I went for a brass alarm clock that seemed to me to be the essence of what an alarm clock should look like.
When I chose a brush to sweep the ashes from the hearth, I went for a traditional design: one that I’d be able to draw if I ever needed a brush as a prop in a children’s story. I chose well with that because, earlier this week, I used the same red brush, now with its bristles much worn down, to sweep up in the greenhouse.
These still life studies were mainly pencil and watercolour but I sometimes finished off with just a spot or two of gouache: the highlights on the handle of the brush are stipples of white gouache and the light tips of the bristles are streaks of yellow ochre. I remember being particularly pleased with how those bristles turned out.
One of my favourite paintings at the time – and it’s still one of my favourites – was Vuillard’s La Cheminee in the National Gallery in London, so I guess that was the inspiration for this sketch of my own mantlepiece. I’ve still got a couple of those golden syrup tins on the end of the bookshelves right next to me as I type this. Today they’re mainly filled with pens and pencils.
I’ve still got the blue Thermos flask too; it’s on a shelf at the back of the garage, rusted through at the base but still usable. 
We’ve got better flasks now, but I can’t bring myself to throw it out, as it’s been on so many adventures with me. It once rolled part way down a cliff top slope on Skokholm Island, West Wales, and it appears in my Richard Bell’s Britain sketchbook, published in 1981 by Collins.
As a natural history illustrator, I found that when I visited a publisher and showed them my portfolio and some of my sketchbooks of animals, plants and landscapes, the editor would ask me, ‘Do you ever draw people?’, so at that time, in the late 1970s, I made a special effort to improve my figure drawing: sketching at local markets, enrolling in a life class and reading up on anatomy.
I drew a series of self portraits in pencil, looking for features such as my:
I set up two mirrors so that I could draw myself the right way round, as others would see me. Curiously since I drew this thirty-nine years ago, I’ve hardly changed, apart from looking thirty-nine years older.
