Latest Paintings

Sunflowers

This started out as a quick 'Shirley Trevena' style practice painting. It went a bit wrong in the middle so I thought I'd try adding some collage bits to it. I tried to keep it simple by only using some sheet music strips, some blue Japanese patterned paper and the central sunflower which is a piece of paper I painted yellow and then used pen and watercolour to add detail.

I'm not sure if it's finished yet.


Water Lily

This is another attempt to get the lose and expressive 'Shirley Trevena' style. It was a very late entry for the Lotus watercolour challenge from Lorus Maver's great photo: Lotus Challenge Photo. There were so many beautiful paintings from this photo, by the talented Flickr group, that I had to give it a try. All of the versions can be seen in the group's pool here: Lotus Challenge entries

The 'Watercolourist, Painting with Light' group has been running challenges like this for a year now but this is the first one I've taken part in. Hopefully I can start catching up with the others from now on!

This painting is predominantly watercolour, but I've also used a bit of salt and some coloured pencil in places. And quite a bit of wax candle for the sparkly highlights on the water and lily pads.

Little blue jug

Again, I'm trying to work on still lives in a Trevena style. I bought this great little jug and bowl in a charity shop recently and I'll probably be using them in many more still lives to come. I've used water-soluble pencils in the background and for some of the details of the bottle. I used a wax candle for the pattern on the bowl - not ideal, but I've run out of masking fluid. I've also used a bit of the pencil sanding technique in places - i.e rubbing watersoluble pencils on sand paper over wet paint, it gives a great speckly texture.