paintings prints and stuff

Yesterday (and this morning when I should have been getting ready to go out) I worked on this piece in watercolour with some coloured pencil. It's about 8 inches square. I'm planning to continue with the watercolour/mixed media pieces alongside the works on canvas.

today I picked a pansy from the garden and sketched it from various angles. I'm not sure if it will feature in the larger canvasses but I enjoyed doing it anyway. It was much more interesting working from life again, I really don't like working from photos - there's more vitality in images done from life. mmmm - as vitality is from the Latin for 'life' I suppose that's a bit like saying there's more life when I work from life , repetitive. I had been planning to paint but I've ordered some canvasses in the size I want and decided to wait. I'm going to work on 24in square canvasses at first and do the larger canvasses later.

manipulating the sketches in the computer to work through ideas for the canvasses.

Rosie is still very upset by Paddy's injury and bandages and hisses at him as she passes aah well, I suppose being prepared to be in the same room has to be progress. Paddy is getting on well and is scooting about much faster in his sling but is getting cross about not being allowed out and being force fed antibiotics and pain killers. I'm not their favourite person at the moment. :( so I've been drawing them.

A really hectic week this week. I've nearly finished another poppy sketch - I liked the way the petal had dropped off and you could see the inside clearly. It needs intensifying a bit and the darks pushing a little I think. Youngest cat, Paddy, had some sort of accident on Monday and struggled home, obviously in a lot of pain, crying and swearing piteously. I was on the vet's doorstep at 8.30 when they opened. They gave him painkillers and antibiotics and an appointment to go back on Tuesday for a review. He was no better and now they decided it was dislocated - no wonder he was in so much pain. So, on Wednesday it took them an hour and a half to put it back but it kept coming out again so he's now sporting the sling in the sketch here. He's coping really well with it and isn't fussing about it much apart from shaking the leg a bit. Rosie on the other hand is absolutely freaked out by it and hisses and runs away. She's the one sleeping with her paw over her nos...

a coloured pencil sketch done from one of the photographs I took yesterday when I was out working plein air. Hopefully leading to a largish canvas.

On Monday I went out sketching flowers with a friend. She's working on a series of paintings of poppies and I want to do some large canvasses of close ups of flowers. Mine will become quite abstract using poppies and other flowers. So first I want to get out there and do some studies, looking hard at form and colour. The first sketch on the left is of some foxgloves, which I love, they always remind me of the country lanes in Cornwall. Poppies have such beautiful, dramatic centres - the ones I did a couple of posts back were vivid red with electric blues in the dark centres. These were a pale delicate pink but with very dark markings and centres. Sadly the red poppies had been dashed down and left petal-less by a thunderstorm the previous night. I would have liked to have sketched those as well. Close up details of seed pods and a flower bud The whole page of sketches in an 11 inch square sketchbook

I went out painting today with a friend, sitting at the top of a high hill on a hot sunny day, in the shade of a tree, with a cool breeze blowing :) The light wasn't wonderful - it was over the middle of the day so a flat light. It was very hazy so lots of lovely blue distance and a patchwork of fields and hedges. I usually work on paper plein air as it's easier to carry but decided to take a couple of very small canvasses this time, a six inch square and a 12 inch square. They are wet at the moment but I'll photograph them when they are dry and my camera batteries are charged up. I also need to get the little black flies off the larger one when it's dry :( why oh why do they have to commit sucide on my painting? I did this quick sketch when I got home. Madame was snoozing contentedly on the doorstep in the sunshine.

I normally only use coloured pencils on top of watercolour in sketches, to strengthen shapes and tones or work on textures. Inspired by the lovely work of Katherine on http://makingamark.blogspot.com/ and http://www.pastelsandpencils.com/fine_art.html I decided to sketch some flowers from photos (another thing I never normally do is work from photos) while my husband was glued to sport on TV :( and work entirely in coloured pencil. These were done with a very cheap set of 20 from Tesco for £1.53 :) I'm planning to do some large canvasses based on flowers and thought I'd do these as studies. I find it difficult to paint from photos as they contain too much information in some ways and not enough in others. I thought these would help me move on from the photographic image, a step towards the freer canvasses I want to create. I ended up with some little images I quite like in their own right and a new medium to exploit :) I The poppies are about 3.5 inches square...