paintings prints and stuff

Ogwen Valley and the little river Ogwen winding through, watercolour/mixed media The Ogwen valley, watercolour and mixed media sketch I'm just back from a week painting in Wales with friends.  Wales + mountains means we knew there would be rain - but it made for some lovely atmospheric scenes to sketch. Friend Ros, that I travelled with, and I stopped on the way in a beautiful valley I last saw about 20 years ago when my daughter was at Bangor university,  I was determined to get there to paint again.  Nigel another member of the group met up with us there and we all got thoroughly wet and bedraggled sketching. The end of the valley was lost in rain/mist and the little river Ogwen tumbles through the valley from Llyn Ogwen (Lake Ogwen) above.  The narrow, single track road goes up and down like a switchback along the side of the mountain.  The waterfalls were beautiful with all the rain we've had.  Welsh black mountain cattle ambled by, with h...

  Clovelly Harbour, Misty Summer Day, coloured pencil and white gouache I was looking at this sketchbook with buff paper, thinking of working in it.  Instead I edited the 3 images in there.   I'd never been quite happy with them due to the whites being dull, making the whole image dull.   White pencils are very disappointing when used on coloured paper I find - I'd used 3 different brands in trying to get the whites brighter. I used a little white gouache, drybrushed where I wanted a gleam in the water, scrubbed a little into part of the wall of the house (but not all over) and used the small colour shaper tool that came in a set of Derwent tools to apply thin drawn lines of gouache for the edges of the waves. I'm much happier with it now.  This is also a better scan, bringing out the colours in the stone wall at the front and the water colour is more like the original.  Maybe it's having that white there to help it get the white balance to s...

I looked at some possible compositions for aerial views, particularly of Aylestone with the ancient packhorse bridge, Victorian canal bridges and footbridges, paths, tracks and roads making patterns across the landscape. It will be a while before I start any finished paintings from them as I want to do more sketching and finished paintings plein air before I start this. It will be more abstracted, playing a little with perspective and I need more knowledge of what is happening at ground level - the colours and textures and contours and details - before I start a large canvas from these. Most of these are in mechanical pencil but the one below is a mixture of oil pastel and coloured pencil - It was going to be watercolour over the oil pastels scribbles but then I decided to experiment with coloured pencil along with them. I quite like this composition with its 5 bridges packed into such a small area and criss crossing of paths and tracks. There are interlocking arrow shapes and Z shape...