Painting in all weathers...even in Venice!

Showerws dont put us off....I showed the group how to balance painting with cover, umbrella and coffee today - they are getting the hang of it!!

Venice in the thunder and rain!

There's nowhere better to paint in a thunderstorm than under arches by acanalside in Venice....teaching my group this week to be resilient and not let a bit of rain put them off! Delicious subjects to paint!!

Preliminary sketches

Here are a couple of typical 'workouts' for a commission I will be doing soon. I do these in soluble pen first to sketch the composition and experiment with formats ie portrait, landscape, squeare etc, then dissolve the line with w/colours and play around with exaggerated and imaginative colourschemes. It's a low risk factor - it's only a sketch so more room to be creative, take chances and 'what if's'! Then select the best ( in this case the client will choose thorugh I already know which one I like best!) and do the painting in the agreed size, medium etc....watch this space for the decision and the finished article...

Travels-without pastels!!

Well my fingers are twitchy for pastels as I am just back from our Tuscan Dream alias daughter's wedding, and feel so desperate to paint some Tuscan scenes now instead of Glencoe and Skye! So spent the day carefully going through my sketchbook and sorting out a few new painting subjects for new work...watch this space....I LOVE Tuscany!!!

Rolling out the Oils!

Finishing off these 3 oils yesterday, was a good discipline for me. Pastels always take precedence over anything else, so I have to really work hard to produce these.
I find it helps to squeeze out lots of paint on the palette - I don't want to waste it and watch it dry out so I paint like mad to use it up!!! (ye olde Scottish philosophy!!) That makes a nice little set of 4 to go with the 12 pastels for the exhibition at EAS Studios Broughty Ferry Scotland!

.....from watery mists.....

here is the middle and the end stages..... I will be writing about this in 7 parts for a magazine and introduce it to my lessons on MyArtTutor.com

Wet watery PASTELS

Can you believe the fluidity and fun you get when you add water to pastels? Watch this space to see this flowing river of pigment transform to a real live painting - I can feel it in my bones!!!