PRIMROSES BY TREE STUMP

At long last I have put something new into my garden sketchbook.

I started off by sketching the tree stump using Stabilo pens then used both these pens and watercolour for the flowers. Made a big mistable putting those fine green leaves alongside and behind the trunk - they really spoil the composition.

It was a lovely sunny week and these primroses are in the garden alongside the stump of an old tree we lost last winter so when my ladies came yesterday decided to sketch them.

I then picked a flower to do a little study in the corner in watercolour, using negative painting to create the pale petals. Its like working back to front!!

SELECTION OF GOURDS

Jayne gave me some gourds to fill my long thin table dish that my sister in law gave me for the lounge coffee table. I purchased some Diamine saddlers brown soluble ink last week, filled my LAMY pen and sketched them in that, spreading a little colour with a waterbrush, keeping Clive company in the lounge as he is not too well at the moment.













Then during the ladies group yesterday afternoon, we decided to paint some of the gourds. With brush only I did a watercolour of two in my garden sketchbook, as there is not much peeping through the snow in the garden at present! Helen did all four on the tray in oil and Philippa in watercolour. A good afternoon was had by all, with Maggie painting some yellow roses she had brought with her.

THREE BUTTERFLIES in WATERCOLOUR

I am due to become a great grandmother this week!

So with the approval of my lovely grand daughter, chose some of the butterfly motifs from her lovely cot quilt and bedding to create this trio of watercolours for her room.

Believe it or not, the frame and specially cut mount used to hold the trio I did of Gemima puddleduck, the frog on a lilypad and mice in a blue shoe, which I did for Channais twenty years ago when she was born!! I put two coast of acrylic white onto the dusky pink mount, as it clashed with the pinks of baby's bedding colours.

Trusting all goes well.

LITTLE CYCLAMEN FROM FRONT GARDEN

Thursday Ladies Art group restarted today after the Christmas break. I got out my garden sketch book and sketched a double spread of some little cyclamen by bringing in the hanging basket from the front garden.

Here is the double spread in my sketchbook. Problem since I purchased my EPSON printer is that the scanner screen is not as wide as my previous HP to take both pages in full, but it gives you an idea of how it looks. Made a mistake in putting a shadow below the pot, as it was supposed to be a hanging basket although it stood on the table for the afternoon.

Good to be back to sketching and painting after what seems a long break.

CHRISTMAS GARLAND 2011

Created this little watercolour of a garland of winter leaves and berries with some Christmas tree baubles to

WISH YOU ALL A VERY HAPPY CHRISTMAS

AND HAPPY PAINTING THROUGHOUT THE NEW YEAR

and thank you for your interest and support throughout 2011

MOORED BOAT NORTH NORFOLK COAST

This watercolour was painted a few years back and hung in my permanent show at The Rising Sun Coltishall. As you may remember, it is currently closed for refurbishment and Sally and Richard the landlords have moved on, so all my paintings came out.

Don't think I ever posted this piece on my blog. So, as I have not worked on anything new of late, thought it would be one way of getting a new post.

Off to Sandra's in the morning for our monthly all day painting session together in her lovely comfortable roomy studio. Have plans to create work from photos I took at Salthouse (North Norfolk coast) earlier in the year. Want to tackle it or them in a less literal way although using acrylic on canvas.

TWO RED ROSES

Have not painted new work of late but did manage to finish the Trevi Fountain I posted recently.

So thought you might like to see what we did at last Thursday's ladies' art session I hold in my home weekly. Two of the ladies coincidentally brought red roses to paint, so I joined them and gave a little advice here and there. When they all left I sprayed the painting with my fine mist spray that came with my Artelier acrylic set, letting the colours run and adding some droplets of red, yellow and blue to strengthen the base, spraying and tipping the paper as I went. Resulted in a more interesting background than the plain white paper.

So thats it for now. I have some work to do for Christmas so hopefully will have a quieter couple of days to get down to it.

CROMER TOWN AND FISHING BOATS

I was up in Cromer on the Norfolk north coast last week, firstly invigilating at the COAST Festival and then spending time at my friend Anne's home where I slept overnight so we could visit more of the COAST events in Sheringham the next morning, finishing with a visit to Felbrigg Hall to see the NOVA sculpture trail.

Before going on to Anne's I had a walk round Cromer in the sunshine (but very breezy) capturing lots of ideas for small works for a Christmas exhibition at The Garden House Gallery in Cromer .

Firstly, I created this pen sketch with my Mitsubishi Uni pens from 0.4 right up to a brush ............

... and from this and some photos I have now created this watercolour for the Christmas exhibition. I drew in the detail with my Lamy pen and Lexington Grey waterproof Noodlers ink so that the linework was not intrusive once I had added the colour washes with my Daniel Smith watercolours.

SUNFLOWERS WITH SMOKEY BACKGROUND

Finished this sunflower mixed media painting on Lana Vanguard support a few weeks ago and entered in local Rotary Antique Fair and Art Exhibition and pleased to say sold it together with the white gladiola painting I posted recently. Nice surprise selling a pair of floral pieces to one buyer.

I wanted to soften the background so added some white acrylic ink just tinted with a little light blue and rubbed with a soft cloth until I could see the floral images through - thus creating this rather smokey background.

WET ON WET GERANIUMS

Another sunny afternoon in the garden and I could not resist painting the geraniums again in another way - this time wet on wet watercolour on my Lana Vanguard shiny surface.

Decided to add detail of the flowers with fineliner red pen to contrast with the loose wet washes.

PAINTING IN THE GARDEN IN INDIAN SUMMER

Although turned into October yesterday, we are having such lovely weather I have been painting in the garden, still full of colour and blooms.

GERANIUMS IN A POT

Here is the pot of colourful geraniums in the corner of my garden near the little garden house, showing the Japanese anemone in the background in the raised flower bed and part of the lavender by the side of the paving. Sketched in the sunshine in the garden the other day with Helen.

...... and then I painted it close up again as a full watercolour in the garden yesterday.

PENSTEMON IN GARDEN
Here is a quick study of a penstemon in my garden sketchbook. Although tall and lanky spikes the blooms are so delicate.

Plan to put colour to my pen sketch of the full right hand flower bed showing the penstemon, the trunk of the chopped tree which allowed me to plant more flowers there this year, the peony tree, dahlia, californian poppies, phlox, orange large poppy heads, petunias and an acer. Too big to scan, so I'll photo it after adding the colour and post it then.

MUNDESLEY BEACH HUTS

Mundesley is a small seaside resort on the north east coast of Norfolk. There is a sloping path leading down to a beach backed by colourful wooden beach huts. I must admit though I coloured two of them pink to add some warm colours to the cool palette. Another watercolour on my Lana Vanguard shiny support, mounted and framed in white to exhibit at the forthcoming Worstead Festival.

Here's an early stage of the watercolour:

MY NEW DATURA PLANT

During spring planting time I was looking for some exotic plants and came across this DATURA deep purple with lime green member of the Bragmansia family. This one, unlike an earlier posting of Angel Trumpets which has its blooms hanging down, has them growing upwards to the light.

I decided to sketch them yesterday, sitting at the bottom of a garden lounger so I could get on a level with the blooms rather than peering down from my little patio area. It wasn't until I had nearly finished, that I realised the sky had gone really dark and there was thunder and lightening drawing near and I was feeling cold in my summery top and skirt!

Needless to say, they were sketched and painted into my new Columbine garden sketchbook. Here are the left and right side of my second double spread.

... and try to imagine this watercolour alongside on the right hand side of the book:

The dirty pages are from balancing my watercolour palette on the page as I worked on my knee!!

ANGEL TRUMPETS

Thinking about another subject to go with the FAIRY FUCHSIAS watercolour on Lana Vanguard I posted earlier, I eventually came up with the idea of ANGEL TRUMPETS, not only because of FAIRY and ANGEL connection but because both flowers hang down. I had recently planted a DATURA, which is from the same Bragmansia family but its trumpets grow upwards and the one I found was dark purple with soft lavender edges. Maybe once it is in full bloom (currently has ten buds) I'll probably paint that as well.

Here is the finished watercolour 20" x 24" on my trusty friend Lana Vanguard. Like the FUCHSIA painting, I added black marker pen to accent the shapes of the main blooms.




This is how it began:

FIRST DOUBLE SPREAD IN MY NEW GARDEN SKETCHBOOK

We often sketch flowers from the garden when my ladies group meet on Thursdays. Last week I picked this little spray of what I think is an Alexandra rose climbing over my little corrner wooden garden house to use for my first sketch in my new Columbine covered sketchbook I showed in a recent posting. My watercolours were just perfect for those petal washes of soft peach tones.

I did this little second sketch with Stabilo 45 brown fine liner pen to show where the Alexandra roses were climbing. It makes a lovely double spread with the roses on the first page of my new sketchbook. There are a couple of garden chairs up there, but they made it too complicated and difficult!! As you can tell, I simply used my waterbrush to spread some of the water soluble ink from these Stabilo soluble pen lines - it took seconds!.

MORE FLOWERS ON LANA VANGUARD

After creating my iris and hibiscus watercolours on Lana Vanguard, I found I still had two further frames to match, though bigger at 20"x 24". So I got down to working on one of these last week and here is the start of my THREE FUCHSIA work.

I must have been mad because I drew it in with my LAMY PEN with Noodlers Lexington Grey ink but before I started adding watercolour washes I rubbed the lines with a soft cloth which made them blury and light. Nothing like experimenting as you go along!!



This is the finished piece, from which you can see I added background colour. I decided this because of the white sepals, but at the end I added black permanent marker pen to bring out some of the shapes - and I could have left the background white to match my earlier works after all!! Ah well such is art when you work my way by making decisions as the work develops rather than have any preconceived ideas.

Here is a close up of one of the finished flowers, so you can see how the watercolouor re-acts to Lana Vanguard.



Originally I had planned to do a strelizia, then had ideas about tulips and then poppies and finally when I got the Lana Vanguard sheet out the thought of fairy like fuchsia flowers just overwhelmed me. Wonder what the one to match will be!??

SECOND GARDEN FLOWER SKETCHBOOK

Here is the last flower sketch in my garden sketchbook I started way back in July 2008 a year after we moved to Coltishall. I have sketched some 32 double spreads of plants growing throughout the season over the past 3 years. It seems my plan of a sketch per month has not been far off but with some months more prolific than others.




I ordered a second book from Karen Jenkins in the same format of 7" square with Sanders Waterford paper and coptic binding but this time chose the COLUMBINE (what we know as Aqualegia) fabric for the cover. So saying farewell to my old book I added these pen sketches at the very back as an introduction to what was to come.

Here is the lovely new book, all pristine and fresh awaiting my bravery of starting anew. Afraid all our aqualegia plants have gone over now, but may still use photos to sketch them on the first page. It somehow seems appropriate.

PEONIES IN THE GARDEN

Philippa came round yesterday for an afternoon painting session and it was so lovely we went into the garden to paint the beautiful soft pink peonies that were blooming.

Here's the result of my effort in my garden sketchbook of flowers. I hope the new sketchbook ordered from Chalk Hill Studios arrives soon as I only have one page left!

Here's Philippa working in the bright sunlight with borrowed sunhat.

and here is how the bloom developed today after lots more strong sunshine.

CROMER PIER

Another watercolour on Lana Vanguard to go to the Garden House Gallery in Cromer next week with the Norfolk Lavender (same size 13" x 11" mounted and framed in plain box white wood). The pier supports nearly drove me mad and now I see the image on the screen it looks as though it might be collapsing! Ah well such is the life of a painter. Creating the sky, sea and beach were lots of fun in this technique. I had thoughts of adding boats on the beach but decided it would make two centres of focus, so simply added a little trickle of water to lead the eye in to the pier and some detailed stones in the foreground. Here's how it looked before I played with the beach adding different size stones and colours and lifting out to get back to slightly tinted highlights. Then added the trickle of water just kind of happened! Thats how my work develops nowadays - like magic - especially on this Lana Vanguard! Here's a closeup of the texture I created on this lovely support.

HIBISCUS ON LANA VANGUARD

I have now finished my second floral watercolour on Lana Vanguard surface of two hibiscus blooms. I photographed these in a garden in Port Elizabeth when I was visiting friends who have a second home there and they took me on a wonderful sketching tour of South Africa back in 2007. I had bluebird hibiscus in my garden at Cherry trees with many a photograph of the glorious blooms in my archives, but I wanted a contrast with the blue of the iris I have already painted in this trio.


Here is photo of early stages of the painting:







Thought you'd like to see an early closeup as well, so you can see the wonderful effect this slippery surface has on the many watercolour washes:








Finally, here is the completed work 12" x 16" to go in a 16" x 20" frame with nice wide ivory mount:





Now to number three - possibly the South African trip is inspiring me because I'm thinking of creating a very large strelizia from a watercolour I painted in my Saunders Waterford HP pad
in the garden in Port Elizabeth:








Here I am working on some kafferboom we picked from a tree just outside the bungalow where I was staying. When I painting the strelizia I picked one bloom but kept dashing back to the front garden to see how the leaves grew:




Ah! memories!