Today's painting was an experiment that went really badly. I sketched out a composition first. A bit of sky, a field in the background and a...
Year: 2019
Broken
It's been brewing for a while but I finally went to the shops yesterday to buy a transparent warm (orangey) red as a potential replacement for the...
I’m on Instagram!
A friend who's a full time artist told me the other day that I really needed to set up an Instagram account and put loads of hashtags against my...
Denali National Park
I thought it was about time I did something more conventional. Nothing abstract, no acrylic inks, no salt. Just a plain simple landscape. And I...
Keep Painting, Gordon MacKenzie – Book Review
This one is 144 pages long and the first thing I notice is that it doesn’t feel like other art instruction hardbacks. The cover is warm and matty...
Sparkly Tree
After four paintings in a row based on the tried and trusted abstract silhouette style, I thought it was time for something different. I was in...
He Knows, Doctor, He Knows
I'd had a couple of requests to paint a Star Trek scene and this is what I came up with. It's based on a shot near the end of The City At The Edge...
Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid
And here's today's second painting. This one really is a Western. For once it's an action scene rather than a pose. I'm going to claim that I've...
Invasion!
I'm doing two paintings today. Both are based on photos transcribed onto paper by dividing them into grids. Both have the figures masked out, the...
The Q1 2019 Poll
I thought it was about time I checked out public opinions on the pile of artwork that I had sitting around waiting to either be framed or put to...
Tombstone
After the roaring success of Once Upon A Time In The West, I thought I'd have a go at another Western. This time it's Tombstone, the best of the...
Hotel California
After Free Bird and Comfortably Numb, I thought I'd have a go at another concert closer. Believe it or not, I was wanting to make this a realistic...
Realistic Abstracts, Kees Van Aalst – Book Review
This one is 160 pages long, but it’s one of those square shaped ones with smaller pages and a bit more white space so, content-wise, is probably...
Mastering Composition, Ian Roberts – Book Review
144 pages plus DVD. I thought I'd check out a book on composition and this book by Ian Roberts has been getting rave reviews for some time. So I...
Once Upon A Time In The West – In Progress
I shared a photo of today's painting on Facebook before I filled in the silhouettes. I was told I should stop there and frame it but I carried on...
Once Upon A Time In The West
After the rubbish that I put out yesterday, I was determined to paint an ink-free watercolour again as soon as possible but to do it properly,...
Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, Where Did Your Garden Go?
For my second stripy gesso experiment, I thought I'd better try it out with inks. The gesso stripes this time are slanted, top right to bottom...
Path To The Lake
I was in an experimental mood today. I dug out the gesso and thought I'd have a go at applying it to the paper in stripes rather than all over....
Experimental Landscapes In Watercolour, Ann Blockley – Book Review
128 pages. This is a well-titled book. Any piece of artwork is an experiment. You never know how it's going to work out. Especially when you...
Learn To Paint People Quickly, Hazel Soan – Book Review
This book was 112 pages long but felt much shorter. Ah, maybe that's because it's A5 sized, meaning it's more like a 56 page long pamphlet that's...