After last week’s somewhat rampant start to the Artists Open Houses (in terms of sales that is!) – the 2nd weekend has been much more sedate. A lot more visitors, matched ironically by far fewer sales. Never the less, having started off last week by displaying the paintings that I’ve sold I feel somehow beholden to… Read More
With only nine days to go until the opening of our Park Gate Collective artists open house things are beginning to come together. The weekend was largely spent cutting yet more mounts, getting frames ready and whitewashing walls. I took the measurements for ‘my’ wall and did a quick 1:100 scale mock-up of the space and… Read More
One of the great things I enjoy about watercolour painting is, with practice, being able to see demonstrable progress and improvement. This, combined with maintaining this brushes with watercolour blog, means that I have a ready means of being able to trawl through my archives to look back on and chart or reflect on my… Read More
Sometimes I regret revisiting a painting when the first is still so fresh. Other times however, it feels the right thing to do. On this occasion I’m really pleased – and hugely relieved – that it seemed the right thing to do. As much as I liked my first attempt at this view that I… Read More
While I’ve very familiar with, and a great admirer of Alvaro Castagnet’s work, and have watched a few Youtube clips of him at work, I’ve not really studied his approach in any detail. Recently however, his DVD Alvaro Castagnet paints Antwerp came up on my favourite bargain hunting site and I was fortunate enough to… Read More
I often find that a really successful painting works from whatever distance you view it from. Invariably, it will usually work better from a distance but often it will draw you in to look closer and still not disappoint. Less successful works however usually only work from a single viewpoint. This week’s efforts certainly fall into… Read More
In my recent plein-air post I mentioned that I hoped to do some more paintings of my hometown. During the recent few days of beautiful weather, the time felt right to tackle this view of Brighton seafront. It was based on some photographs that I took recently during a wonderful evening’s walk along the seafront,… Read More
Aside from the plain and simple truth of ‘spend more time painting’ – the single most effective thing I could do to improve, is to spend more time painting on location, plein air. Unfortunately my circumstances – primarily work and family commitments – make this difficult. I was however recently inspired to make an extra… Read More
Only two weeks before my micro-exhibition and I’m still hoping to produce new works to show! A few weeks ago I posted some small A5 sketches of a cafe view in Paris. I was quite pleased with these sketches and I signed off wondering whether the scene would work at a larger scale. You can… Read More
Following on from last week’s experiments with new colour mixes for greys and siennas, I was keen to do some more practicing to help build my confidence and proficiency. I wasn’t sure how much time I’d be able to dedicate to painting and I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired to tackle a new subject so found… Read More
