November Challenge.

Pemaquid Wave - Photograph

This month's challenge subject shared with my friend Peter Ward, (watercolourfanatic.blogspot.com). I set the challenge with the photograph above. It is a shot that I took whilst in Maine last month. As is too often the case I became pressed for time and don't think I've given this the attention that it deserved. Art fair and house guests along with the usual grand parenting tasks seem to have eaten up the month.

What would I have done differently given sensible planning? Well the first thing would be to do a test strip on how the various hues worked together. First mistake was to choose the wrong blue as the basis for the sea. It jars against some of the hues. I tried to kill it a little by putting on a second wash and it's not as successful as I'd hoped. I was pleased that I decided to crop the sky out of the picture as it would have created another horizontal line across the picture. Some of my mixes didn't work out first time, again something that could have been remedied by testing beforehand. Just a bad day I suppose.

Pemaquid Wave - watercolour on Rough paper 14" x 11"

Another strange mixture

Last week I was talking about a strange confluence of events and this one has proved to be in a similar vein. Sheila and I took the opportunity to go to our caravan in the Lake District for a few days - beautiful, then on Sunday we joined the rest of the family for another baptism - our granson Oliver Joseph. In between times a lorry attempted to total me and reduced the car to something less than it had been. All in all the opportunity to paint has been somewhat lacking, but I have managed a little.

The first piece was something I did late last year after watching a DVD by E. John Robinson and I heard last week that he had passed away so I place it here as a small thankyou for the stimulus he gave me to look at the sea with a clearer vision.






Wave Study - Oil on canvas board 12" x 10"

Tuesday night is life class and after posting an oil last time I decided to listen to the exhortation of WC contributors and spend some time concentrating on drawing and this piece resulted from our last session. I found the pose extremely difficult to draw. Lots of problems with perspective and proportions. The page shows evidence of the many restatements required to get the drawing to its current state. I need to work even harder at this.




Hannah - Graphite stick on paper (touch of watercolour) 20" x 15"



An occasional indulgence of mine is to open a book that I treasure. It is a bound book of watercolour paper that I reserve for images drawn from a holiday that we took in Venice. I have the Venice tourist's compulsory cache of photographs from that glorious week and I use them from time to time to inspire a watercolour sketch. This one is from last week.



Venice - Watercolour 12" x 10"

Hopefully, this next week will yield something more substantial in terms of painting as I am travelling down to Norfolk to attend a two day workshop with Martin Kinnear who I'm sure will give me plenty of guidance in terms of the next stages in my development. I'm looking forward to reporting on it next time I sit in front of the computer.