Windsor Castle en plein ar and a little bit in the studio

I decided that I didn't like the guards in this painting - they were rather hastily put in and they didn't seem to belong to the scene at all, probably because I made them too big for their position.

Windsor Castle en plein air

North Terrace, oil on canvas, 50 x 70 cm

Yesterday (Saturday 16th July), I participated in the Windsor and Eton en plein air event. To celebrate Queen Elizabeth's 90th birthday, 90 artists were invited to paint within the grounds of Windsor Castle. My friend Rose and I were two of those artists.

It was a very hot ad sunny day, and the castle was thronging with visitors. Every now and then, a small group of red-clad soldiers marched smartly along the North Terrace, where we were both positioned. They were difficult to capture, and I very nearly scraped them off at one point, having despaired of seeing them again and fixing in my mind enough detail to make my image of them believable...

I think I only just pulled it off.



Edit: I changed my mind about the soldiers.

A Green Man, or the Sleeping Giant

30 x 40 cm, oil on canvas

An imaginary figure, part of his environment. Painted quickly from imagination using a restricted palette that included no white and no yellow, but that nonetheless included more colours than I often use... 

£75

Boxed Woodcuts: Knotted and Kneel

Cigarette Break

Lino print, 20 x 15 cm

I don't condone smoking in the slightest, but these two characters appeared outside a building on a business park while I was drawing the building and what could I do but include them? They spent a long time smoking their cigarettes - I was able to "zoom in" and sketch them on their own.

People at an Exhibition

Painting inspired by Penlee House (Penzance); title inspired by Mussorgsky.

I recently visited Penlee House art gallery in Penzance, Cornwall, to see their splendid Model Citzens: Myths and Realities exhibition, which looked at the human subjects of the Newlyn School. While there, I made a couple of quick sketches - including a few of my fellow visitors:

I decided to work this up into a painting. Using a subdued palette (buff titanium, black, ultramarine, yellow ochre, alazarin crimson (hue), hooker's green and - finally - a little titanium white), I hoped to echo the colours of the Newlyn School paintings that were on show. Two of my people were from sketches made in the exhibition. The third is borrowed from one of the paintings.

The three Newlyn paintings are:

William Holt Yates Titcomb, 'Jubilee Day, St Ives, Cornwall (Good News from the Front)'
William John Wainwright, 'Mackerel in the Bay'
Henry Scott Tuke, 'All Hands to the Pumps'

 And finally, here are a few of my in-progress shots:

People at an Exhibition
Acrylic on canvas, 18 x 22 inches

Imaginary Dancer 2 "Carefree" - SOLD

Dancer 1 was surprisingly well-received, and it was suggested that I paint her a friend.

Sharon

Three quick portraits of Sharon, a friend who is organising an event at which I will be drawing portraits for charity.

From left to right: Conté, Derwent Drawing Pencil, digital drawing.

Imaginary Dancer 1, "Freedom"

Unusually for me, this piece came almost entirely from imagination. It's not that I don't imagine stuff much - it's more that there are so many real things that I want to paint!

Dappled

The photograph I was working from was too blue, so I was making mental colour corrections all the way through the painting process - I wanted it to be a warm painting. After all, no child would wear that outfit if it were cold, would they... ?

I don't think I will provide a truthful answer to that.

But it was a warm day; a day for adventures. And she does look like she's off to seek an adventure. A nice one, of course.

Oil on natural colour linen canvas, 33 x 41 cm

Waiting for the Tide

This is another scene from Portreath on the 30th of December. It's a open-ended cave in the cliffs that I painted on Thursday; we all trooped through it and then looped back around the end of the cliffs. There was a very nice rock just the other side - more, no doubt, of that later.

The fellow you can see here was not so lucky as us. He got caught out by the waves; there he was, standing on  rock, keeping his feet dry and waiting for the tide to recede when I started waving my camera around. I thought he looked rather picturesque - romantic, almost (in a Walter Scott sort of way, rather than a Barbara Cartland sort of way).

Oil on box canvas (edges painted plain Paynes Grey in acrylic), 30 x 30 cm
06 January 2013
For sale

Edit: I managed to get a daylit photograph this afternoon (10 January 2013), so I've replaced the photograph taken under artificial light. 

New Forest Heather 3: Path (7x7)

This is painted from a photograph taken last Wednesday on the same trip that supplied me with the source image for "New Forest Heather 1: From the stream bed".

The original image is decidedly more rectangular, but I seem to have run out of suitably sized canvases with the right proportions for the big portrait version in oils that I was planning. This is a sketch to see if the image works as a square.

You may have noticed that "New Forest Heather 2" is missing from the blog. Well, it exists; I made two versions of this image yesterday evening. You'll find it on DeviantART...