Art at Milly's - Paint Out Norwich.

Elm Hill  Oil on board 16" x 12"  £225

Over the last few years I've been showing my work at Milly's Deli in Leigh Road, which has also been my venue for the Leigh Art Trail since 2009.   

I swap the work around on a fairly regular basis and this time I thought I'd show a few of my paintings from  Paint Out Norwich for the next few weeks.

Paint Out Norwich is a plein air painting competition I took part in last October.    

The rules were that we should paint for a maximum of 3 hours, work directly from the subject and not use photographs.   
Elm Hill was painted on the first day of the competition and was a real struggle to get finished in the time.   I defiantly took to much on with this one for the time I had!

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.