paintings prints and stuff

Pendeen lighthouse sketched in watersoluble pen  A quick sketch with a Tombow water-soluble pen and a waterbrush.  Again it's in the Stillman and Birn Beta sketchbook (A4) with its lovely heavy paper. The family went for a walk along the cliffs, while I did this sketch and another looking down on the sea seething round the rocks below, which I'll show next time. It's a place I've sketched before in watercolour mixed media - see below ...   Each time the colours are different, the weather, the mood, the flowers.  As a child, living further north in Cornwall, I loved those changes - each time we took the coast road and swooped up and down hills, passing another cove, the light would be different, the tide and sea swell different.    The sea changed from almost navy blue on the day above to the pearly tones of the sketch below on the following day.   On the day I did the pen sketches the wind was creating lacy skeins of foam tha...

Sunset at Sennen Cove, oil on deep sided canvas, 12 ins square I did a series of sunsets in watercolour and oil of the sunsets and it really brought out how cameras distort the colours of sunsets and aren't really at all helpful.  The silhouetted rocks and breakwater lose all colour as well. They make beautiful pictures in their own right - but they aren't the reality of the experience at all. In the photographs, there is far more red (which there wasn't in reality) and the sun is white.   In fact , the sun was blazing red and the skies were a range of softer reds and peaches and sometimes soft yellows.   So the canvasses were done quickly while the memory of the colours was still fresh.   There were vivid pale blue ripples against the darker shadows and subtle reflections of the reds in the water.  Those electric ripples were beautiful and just didn't show properly on photos.  These are 2 examples - the actual sunset look...

A sketch done from our holiday cottage in watercolour/mixed media in an A4 S&B sketchboo We had wonderful views from the house, right left and front .... and even the steep hillside/cliff at the back had primroses and bluebells. This is looking sideways when the tide is high, past a row of terraced cottages that climb up the steep track.  That's 'our' garden ..... for a week anyway! I used watercolour with some pen and a few touches of coloured pencil - oh and a little FW white acrylic ink, a new favourite medium, used with a bamboo pen or brush.  It is really opaque and a clear clean white. so useful for surf etc when you've lost the white of the paper in places,   I work fastish, the painting evolves and I don't always retain all the lights so use this or white gouache to regain them.  I like mixing media, choosing whatever will create the marks I want.  I'm trying to catch a spirit of place and have no interest at all in rules about 'pur...

Sennen Cove,. against the light, evening.pen and wash I'm back from Sennen Cove with sketches :>) This one was done with a Tombow dual ended grey pen and a Derwent brushpen to create the washes.   An ideal combination for this kind of light.This is in the S&B hardback Beta sketchbook.  On this holiday I used pen and ink, watercolour, oil paint, some coloured pencil, oil pastel. and charcoal in various sketches and it has handled them all brilliantly.  I do like these books and they are now selling larger sheets of the paper, loose.  Definately something worth trying.

Afternoon light in Sennen Cove.  Watercolour.