Watercolour Plant Ladies

I'm getting back into using my watercolours again. I love how they flow on the page leaving behind tide-marks. Some people call it 'cauliflowering' in the sense that it's unwanted. But me? I love it! 

I don't live near any shops so a trip to the big city is far and few between. Exeter was looking lovely when we had a brief visit there last week to buy table lamps for the bedroom.

At the weekend we went to Saltram House, it was cold but still nice to walk around the gardens.

What a magical looking tree this is.💚

Have a great week and I'll see you again soon. xx

Trerice and Watercolour Pages.

It's the May Bank Holiday, time for a day out so on the way to visit our Middle Daughter we visited a National Trust house in Cornwall called Trerice. It was bright and sunny and the garden looked beautiful. The scent of lavenders filled the air and made me want to have even more at home in the garden than I have already. If I could take a picture of the aroma to show you here I would have. It did cross my mind!😉

 

We had a quick look around the house, I loved the bathroom wallpaper!

Isn't it lovely?! 

I enjoyed the room with all the embroideries too. I liked the stitched pictures decorating a mirror frame, such a lovely idea. I'd like to think that I'll make something similar one day. Don't hold you breath on that one though!😉

I would have taken a photo of the cream tea we had but it was a bit of a rush at the end because it was time to go and meet her from work.💙

So here are my most recent sketchbook pages. I love using watercolour and it was nice to have a play with it again. I tend to paint as I go, intuitively and the page ended up with this girl (above) who seems to have a lot on her mind!

In this one I used a black ink pen for her dress, I like how it ended up with the contrast of the monochrome against the colour.

 This was the very last page of my moleskine sketchbook. It's always a nice feeling to get to the end of a sketchbook, like an ending ready for a new beginning.

Have a wonderful week and I'll see you next time. xx

Head and Shoulders

I've noticed that there's been a theme of head and shoulders happening in my artwork lately. 

 I had some little wooden egg cups that I painted with colourful ladies. I loved adding the gold paint and glitter to them!

They make lovely little trinket bowls!

 I sold both of them within a day and I'm so very happy that they've found their new homes.

When I'm painting, I often go from one painting to another to let each of the stages dry. During the painting of the egg cups, I drew a page of ladies with black hair

and an art journal page using a swatch of curtain fabric for a background. The egg cup ladies are still having an influence with this one too I think!

I'll leave you with this beautiful textured tree trunk. Have a I mentioned I love trees? 

See you again soon! xx

Mother and Baby Watercolour and a Visit to Gardens at Buckfast Abbey.

 Having talked about all the mediums I love to use in my last post, I have to say that I often come back to watercolour even though I find it the most difficult because it has its own mind and if you have any experience of it yourself you'll know that it quite often does what it pleases! This painting is a combo of watercolour and coloured pencil and I used it as a Mothers Day card to give to my mum this year. I'm thinking about getting it printed to sell in my shop but I haven't made up my mind about that yet.

 At the weekend, we often go somewhere a bit different and last Sunday we visited Buckfast Abbey.

It's always so calm and peaceful there. I'm not Catholic or even a church goer but I love the spiritual atmosphere and the beautifully kept abbey and gardens.

  The Millenium Show garden has a beautiful wall made from cut logs. Isn't it lovely?

I'd love a wall like that in my garden. My own gardening efforts are a bit hit and miss. The past couple of years I've been trying to grow cornflowers because I absolutely love the colour but last year's crop got eaten. I carefully nurtured them indoors and planted each of them outside when they looked big and strong enough. They were all eaten by the wildlife apart from just one plant!

This year I have my hopes up again with a new batch that have started sprouting.

If anyone has any tips on how to keep them alive I'd be very grateful to hear them!

Have a great week and I'll see you again soon. xx

Favourite Mediums in my Moleskine.

Over the years I've tried out all kinds of mediums and I don't think I've ever settled on just one or two absolute favourites but I have a feeling people who have seen my sketchbook pages over the past year might think differently? Anyway, the top picture you see here is an acrylic background with a stamped pattern and the drawing done in Posca pens.

Here below are a few of my most recent paintings that I do on a daily basis in my little A5 Moleskine sketchbook.

Let's see what my current fave mediums are.

This one has a background of FW inks with Posca pens on top. The white flowers and the bird were done with a Liquitex paint marker. 

You can't see the lovely shininess from the photo, but these are my Spectrum Noir brushpens. They are lovely and glittery. I also used some cobalt blue watercolour because I don't have many of the Sparkle pens and I felt the picture needed an extra colour.

Here's another Sparkle pen painting, the only other addition is the bottom left where I glued a torn piece of birthday wrapping paper, and painted on top of it.

More Sparkle pen painting! with some purple watercolour.

This one is mainly watercolour with a small amount of coloured pencil.

Still using the coloured pencils, this was done on a background of purple acrylic with patterned tissue paper glued on. The dried paper had a nice 'tooth' to it, perfect for coloured pencils.

For this one I used my Faber Castell Pitt pens, I've had them for ages and almost forgot I had them! It was nice to have a complete change from the watery paint and to make some strong opaque marks on the paper.

And finally,

After using my almost forgotten Pitt pens I thought I'd get out something else that I hadn't used for ages, my Inktense pencils.

So I'm still not sure if I have a favourite medium, I like to use all kinds of pens and paint but one thing is for sure. They have to be beautiful colours, oh yes.

See you next time! xx

The Painting of Frida and some Sea Glass.

This painting was a long time in the making.

Not so much the painting of it but the journey it had over a long period of time before it became my colourful little painting of Frida.

Many years ago we had a shop at St Nicholas Market in Bristol. We sold all sorts of handmade objects and one of the things we had for sale were little carved notice boards that held a little notepad. 

I liked them a lot so I took one home and for many years I used it for the family shopping list. If you look at the shape of my Frida painting, you'll see the original shape of one of these boards.

A few years ago we moved house to Devon and I saw how battered my little shopping list board had become but I still loved the shape of it so I held on to it with the plan of filling all the broken parts and repainting it one day.

So one day I decided to prepare the board with filler and gesso and I began the portrait.

You might know that my painting style these days is usually very simple and not naturalistic at all so this was a complete change for me and I enjoyed painting the detail of her features. But when it came to decorating the background, I had no inspiration to carry on so it was left on a shelf for four months. (I had to look at my social media to see how long ago it actually was!)

Then one day I was experimenting with some very bright pinks in my sketchbook, it was enough to get me to take the little Frida painting out again and finished it off with as much bright colour as I could find!

It's now living with its new owner and I'm so pleased to have had a happy ending for her!

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One of the things I love to do when I'm walking on the beach is to find pieces of sea-worn glass. It's usually the days when I stop trying to find some that they seem to just pop up from nowhere!

This is my loot from a few days ago.

I love the pale aqua ones the best, they remind me of the sea.

Lovely Dartmoor in the distance.

 I hope you''re having a lovely week, I'll see you again very soon.

xx

Camden Market, Stourhead and some new Sketchbook Paintings.

We had a lovely time in London last week. It's a very long drive there from Devon so we stopped at the lovely Stourhead to break up the journey.

Being a weekday it was quieter than usual and it was nice to see the beginnings of spring there.

It was great to be able to take this photo inside the grotto without anyone standing in the way!

So onwards to London Town...

The next day we met up with Youngest Daughter and took the tube to Camden. In all my years of visiting London, I've never been there before and what a treat I had for my eyes!

I loved all the outside decorations on the shops, even the dark ones!

 This tattoo shop pictured below has amazing decorations but what made me laugh was that Youngest Daughter thought it said "ERIC from the needle"!🤣🤣🤣

 

It does in fact look like that, I do so hope the tattoo artist is called Eric!

You have to be there to see how big this statue actually is! He looked amazing from every angle, there's such a lot of creative talent in Camden. 

There was so much to take in on my first ever visit that I didn't stop to buy anything other than a very delicious wrap with deep fried halloumi, yogurt and mint dressing, chilli flakes and pomegranate seeds, from the West Yard. There's so much food to choose from!

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 Before I go, here are a few recent pages from my sketchbook...

Have a fantastic week and I'll see you next time.😊xx

💜