Thorpe Bay Beach

Today's little painting outing took me to Thorpe Bay Beach.   I was intending to just sketch out the main shapes ready for a sunrise visit another day but I rather liked what I saw and decided to crack on with the view anyway.   It's painted in Acrylics as I wanted to get a bit of practice in ahead of a demo I've got coming up as I rarely use acrylics in my own work.   I'll take a better photo another day and I think I will work a little more on the beach but as the light was fading it was time to stop.

Yippee Snow!

Hadleigh Castle - Oil on board 10"x10"

I was so exited this morning as last night it snowed here in sunny Essex!  I think the last time I can remember us having any proper snow was in 2013.   It didn't stick around for long but thankfully co-incided with me having a painting morning.   This was the second of my sketchy paintings.  I've never seen Hadleigh Castle in the snow so I was keen to take a peak!  

Southchurch Hall

I've been wondering if this view might be worth painting?   At this time of year this tree starts to turn a lovely colour so I popped over to see it the other day to see if it had started yet.

The boating lake at Southchurch Park, Southend, Essex, England.  A4 Size.   I sketched this one a week ago in our local park and then used the sketch and some photos I took as the basis for this painting which I painted as a demo for Boreham Art Circle.  The painting needs a bit more work to get it up to scratch but I think I'd quite like to move it on a bit.

Another little pic from our hols last week in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire. My son and I sat and sketched this little alley way with the Old Baptist Church leaning in. We were joined by a very friendly cat that insisted on trying to drink our water colour water. In the end I improvised a cat bowl from a lid.

Driving to Tewkesbury

I thought I'd start using my blog again! It's been a wile ...

Here's a little sketch I did from the back of our car of my wife Red driving to Tewkesbury last week where we spent a few days on Holiday.

Water colour on brown craft paper sketch book with a bit of pastel added.   This year I've been trying out a few different sketching mediums.

Beach Huts in the Snow Christmas Card Design.

This was a nice little project for the weekend, creating a painting for this years Christmas card. For the last few years I've created a Christmas card from one of my paintings,   It always feels a bit more personal and hopefully a bit more special to be able to give one of my own cards to family, friends and my students at  Christmas time. I'd left it a bit late this year as I like to give cards out to all my students and as one of my classes was due to take a break for Christmas at the start of the following week I only had the weekend to come up with a design and print a few off.     I wanted to create painting that had a flavour of  Southend-on-Sea, the coastal town in which I live so I based my painting on a photo I took a wile ago back in 2013. We don't get much snow at all in our little corner of Essex so I had to rely on photos rather than going out on site for this one. As I wanted a few figures in the image I also had a trawl through my lap top for a few suitable reference images I could add in. I didn't quite get the painting finished in time for my Monday evening class but had enough completed to crop a section out of the middle which when I'd printed it up I was happy with.

The Technical stuff: If you're interested in seeing how the imaged developed stage by stage and what decisions I made on the way please read on...

I was feeling a bit rough at the weekend with a cold so I opted for the comfort of my sofa as a make shift studio for this one:

I started sketching out the design using a light grey pastel pencil.

I then used Acrylic paints to block in the main colours

And make a few marks where I thought the figures should go.

 After lunch I had another look and realised the beach huts were feeling a bit small in the painting so I zoomed in a bit and re painted them a bit larger and moved the figures over a bit.

A bit more work on the figures...

With the under painting completed I swapped to Oils which I feel a bit more comfortable with and changed the colour of the child's coat to vary it a bit.

The card blanks I had in stock were all square so I selected this section of the painting just to be able to print out a few cards for the evenings class I was about to teach but I rather liked them as a square cards so I  decided to stick with the shape.