Artworks, 2024

Time to catch up on what artwork I've done this year!

We start with this one from an old postcard of a steep street corner in Bristol. I use a lot of old Edwardian postcards as inspiration for drawing - they are all black and white (or sepia toned) which allows me to decide my own colour palette and in this case a daytime view painted as though it were a night time scene. Done in oil pastels on A2 sized paper this took from 26 March to 3 April 2024.

Monday 20 May 2024. We were in Devon for the week on a coach holiday using Torquay as a touring base. This is Powderham Castle, the seat of the Dukes of Devonshire. In fact we did briefly meet the current duke as we gathered in the castle grounds by the main entrance to meet the castle's tour guide. A very hot day, I found a spot to sit as we left the castle that gave us this view of the gatehouse. Pencil in the A4 sketchbook.

11 June 2024. Done a few weeks later but a view from the same holiday. This was a free day in Torquay and the day had promised rain and grey skies. We managed to dodge the rain which arrived a lot later than expected, but it was cold enough to make us reluctant to sit long enough to do a sketch of the promenade, which in any case was covered in scaffolding and fencing as a huge project was underway to transform the seafront. I did this one at leisure sitting at my desk with a photo from the Internet open on my computer screen to use as a reference.

We managed to do a cruise in August 2024, though due to a developing leg ulcer which was very painful we stayed pretty much on the ship with just a couple of outings during the week. I spent some time on the sun deck sketching over the side of the ship, and this was the first such one, a pencil sketch of Rijeka in Croatia in the A4 sketchbook.

The day after, 22 August 2024, we were in Zadar in Croatia and I switched to the pastel pencils which I had taken in a roll up case. I started to get a small following of fellow passengers and crew members who came to take a look at intervals as the sketches progressed.

23 August 2024, Kotor in Montenegro is a lovely place to stroll around and we did get off the ship today. It was very hot though and absolutely crowded so we just ended up with a rather frustrating walk through streets so crowded I was worried about my leg being knocked and we had a drink in a street cafe and then returned to the ship to do this from our usual seat on the sun deck.

27 August 2024. We anchored offshore at Mykonos and again pain from the leg kept us onboard in one of our favourite places. That night we were in one of the ship's lifts and a lady said "Are you the gentleman that does those beautiful paintings over the side of the ship?" It took me a little by surprise and I paused and looked round before answering in case there was another artists about to take credit...

6 December 2024. Bossington, Somerset, from an Edwardian era postcard. Pencil crayons in the A4 sketchbook. I had been looking for something to take my mind off the pain of the leg which by now had developed into a full ulcer looking like a gooey crater in the middle of my calf muscle. The leg was wrapped with compression bandages and fluid in the leg was adding to the daily wonder of shape and solidity of my upper leg. Not to mention my ability to resist some quite excrutiating pain... Normally I can ignore pain altogether, but when it's your own it's a bit harder.... Going through my collection of postcards, I came up with ten or so old postcards that I thought I might be able to do justice to. A project that is still ongoing...!

13 December 2024. This one depicts a narrow village street in Cheddar with a stream running down one side, bridged for each of the houses on that side, which are set higher up on the hillside.

21 December 2024. Bispham Village, Blackpool. Not often that I do one of a subject so close to home. I'm not sure why exactly. It's either a case of familiarity feeding reluctance or, in the case of Blackpool itself, the fact that it is so well known that people would spot any obvious errors. I did force myself to include a few figures in this one.

29 December 2024. The River Derwent at Matlock Bath in Derbyshire. Once again, pencil crayons in the A4 sketchbook.

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Colour Artworks Nov 2019 - Mar 2020

Winter in Burke Towers usually involves a degree of self-isolation even without any incentive from virus bugs. And whilst I've recently spent a lot of time trying to sort out my music collection, I have on occasion got out paints or crayons of one sort or another to have a dabble at some artwork.

I spent several days coming back to this one, which I finished on 15 November 2019. Clematis Cottage in Selworthy a few miles from Minehead, Somerset. It is a watercolour. Whenever I have paintings framed I use the same framer and he commented that he preferred my watercolours to the oil pastels as they had better detail. From my own point of view, it is much easier to mix colours in watercolour too. But because they are transparent, any mistakes usually have to be lived with as they are next to impossible to cover up!

30 November 2019, I was sitting half hypnotised by photos just flashing on and off on my screensaver one day and a photograph of Bourton-on-the-Water woke me up with the realisation that it might make a good subject for a sketch. I did this over the course of the day - around five to six hours in all. Coloured pencils in the A4 sketch book and it was done without any prior pencil sketching. A first...

This was done on Christmas Eve, again in five to six hours. This time the inspiration was a photo found on the Internet of Lake Halstatt, Austria. I used pastel pencils for this one and once more just got on with it without any pencil work beforehand.

I've had it in mind to attempt this view ever since I took a photo from this viewpoint in Portofino, Italy in September last year. Recently I found a 9x7 inch pad of watercolour paper that had remained untouched since the house move a year ago and did this at my desk, using a desktop easel that marked its own first use. A slightly different technique than my usual dabbing style and whilst it found favour with viewers on FaceBook, I might still try another version either in another medium or with my usual watercolour technique and on larger paper at some point in the future.

That brings us up to just a couple of days ago so until I splash or spread a bit more colour or pencil over a bit of paper, I hope you enjoyed looking at these and bye for now.

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More Pastel Artwork

After the success of the oil pastel larger scale painting of Villefranche on the French Riviera, I felt curious as to how it would be to use the hard pastel crayons I bought. So over the past few weeks I've experimented and completed a couple of A4-sized sketches. The set of pastel pencils I have is a Derwent set of 12, so it leaves me with a quite limited palette. But I did find that they were quite easy to blend together - certainly much easier than the oils had been to overlay colours and fade from one to another.

This sketch from one of my photographs of a Venice backwater took just two days to complete. This a decidedly sketchy drawing - the overlays are glaringly obvious but it also contains two elements that I usually find very hard to draw. People and water.

The second one was taken from a postcard and is of The Shambles in York. I took a bit more time with this, which was started on 20 March and finished on 9 April. Because of the narrow nature of the street, in real life I have never seen it in anything but deep shadow at this particular point where two medieval buildings look almost to touch across the street. I didn't want to make this a drab painting, so introduced somewhat more colour with the beige than there is in the actual buildings. The brickwork of the building on the right presented its own challenges as the bricks are worn and some of them are almost as smooth as porcelain and tend to reflect light, looking almost blue rather than the dull red that we associate with bricks. The perspective of the rows of bricks was also quite a challenge to me as I tend to draw everything freehand and not think too much about where lines might converge. I made a special effort here! It's not exact and the shop is definitely not called Green's in real life but hey - it might have been once?

I have in mind another larger painting using either the oil pastels or actual oils - I have some paints and brushes but so far the thought of mess is putting me off... For the subject I've got an old early 20th century postcard of Studland in Dorset.

This presents a number of difficulties and challenges. For one thing I'll have to choose the colours myself as the postcard is in sepia monochrome. Then there is going to be so much green, will it swamp the painting? Can I get enough detail into shrubbery and trees? And I've never attempted to cope with drawing a horse before. There are two here, but the format of my painting will not be quite so widescreen and I have in mind to have the cart drawn by just one horse, thus moving the cart forward and away from the edge of the image. It could take a long time and there could be other projects finding themselves squeezed in the middle to let me recharge and take a fresh look at how it comes along.

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First Attempt At Art Using Oil Pastels

Yes I know I've been a bit (a bit???) quiet on the blog this year. But this may go some way as to explain why. For some time I've been producing my pencil sketches a few every year, mainly done whilst on holiday. Last year I tried a couple of water colours over the top of existing sketches. I was fancying having a go at something more spectacular and challenging.

And this is it. An oil pastel painting based on a photograph of Villefranche which lies between Nice and Monaco on the French Mediterranean coast. There was a certain amount of preparatory work for this. I had no easel. I had no pastels... And to make it worthwhile it had to be done on a larger scale than anything I've attempted before. So the bits and pieces of equipment and pastel sticks were bought and a pad of pristine white paper in an A2 size sketch pad. I started work on the 24 January 2017 and finished yesterday morning on 3 March 2017. Not that I've worked eight hours a day every day, though... I've stuck little bits on my FaceBook account as I've been going along and a friend suggested I should collate them into an article. So this is it...

24 January 2017. The easel and paper is set up in the conservatory which will give me enough light to work with. I had been wanting to draw a colour sketch of Villefranche for some time so trawling through my photos of various visits over the years I printed one out onto A4 paper and used that as a guide. At this stage there was no real anticipation of producing anything wonderful and I didn't really think I'd be able to fit a load of detail in using pastels, but drew my usual style of pencil sketch anyway, but without any shading or detail such as foliage.

29 January 2017. This being the equivalent of four A4 sheets, there was no way of scanning it so I had to take photos of each stage. Whilst it was in the pure black and white (or grey of pencil) stage this meant I had to tweak the photo quite a bit to bring out the detail at the expense of the paper going dark and looking dirty! It took five days to get to this stage. A lot of the work got done in five minute bursts whilst I was waiting for the kettle to boil... Even as just a pencil sketch, this was still the largest thing I've ever done and I was starting to realise that I didn't want to spoil it!

3 February 2017. Very little had happened this week in fact, as other things were going on that took my attention. I had decided that I was going to use the pastels even though I might lose detail and to test this out a bit I started with the orange building on the left hand side. I tried it out on a piece of A4 paper first to gauge my technique and adjust if necessary. I bought a set of blending sticks which looked a bit like paintbrushes, but with rubber (like pencil erasers) instead of bristles at the end. I was also trying out techniques for the sky area. The first go was a real mess and I bought a cheap book on painting with pastels and tried out on another sheet of paper the techniques they described.

4 February 2017. After a couple of goes on an A4 sheet - one good, one bad - I thought "What the heck!" and went for it. I also tried out an area of distant hillside and a tiny building in the distance.

5 February 2017. I spent the morning adding in defining details to the upper storeys of the orange building and then tackled mountainside. The latter also has a few small buildings here and there. That was it for the day as we'd been invited out to celebrate a 60th birthday. Next steps will be to complete the background and do the cliffs towards the right-hand side. That was going to be another suck-it-and-see test on a fresh piece of paper before committing to the actual painting. I found that small items such as roofs and windows on the background buildings were best done with a tiny smudge of colour and then using one of the blending tools. For thin black lines I chose a blending tool shaped like a paintbrush and applied minute bits of paint by rubbing the blender on the top of the stick of pastel. I got enough pigment to do a millimetre at a time, two at the most. The hillside was done using brown and two shades of green and drawing intersecting wavy lines before blending the colours with my finger. Over on the left hand side a dark red was also added to the mix.

9 February 2017. A close up of the detail in the top left corner. Yet a third shade of green was used quite thickly to suggest trees and foliage. A bit tentatively at first with a couple of lines to suggest footpaths or roads along the mountainside, but then the yellow building got done and the cypress trees at the side of it and they were a sort of happy stumbling on something that made me use that shade quite a lot afterwards for trees and foliage!

11 February 2017. My FaceBook update went: I did quite a bit yesterday and have added to it today, but now getting ready to go hospital visiting and as it's half-term next week and we will have Grace a few days it might have to go upstairs out of the way! More hillside done, more trees and foliage added. A few more buildings done - I learned the hard way you can't mix colours easily. I'm sure you'll be able to spot where I found this out... Lower storeys of the orange building started and the car which Miss Franny said had to be blue. Suspicious now... I've never had that blue a car...

13 February 2017. I spent the previous day on the left hand side, working towards the lower part of the painting. The sea was going to be left until the very end. For one thing it was going to be complicated and needed a lot of layering of colours which I wasn't too sure of as yet. And for another, I suspected it may have to be done as one complete portion to avoid any obvious vertical breaks that might occur if I attempted t do it bit by bit. And for a third and final thing - proving that you can start two consecutive sentences with the word "and" - I always work top left to bottom right so that my hand doesn't smudge bits I've already done. I wasn't yet ready to make myself a long dowel with a small bean bag on the end to act as a hand rest whilst painting over bits already done.

Today I took a very deep breath and headed for the cliffs. One of those "this could ruin it" moments. I used grey and a dark ochre and smeared them together vertically, using the ochre to suggest soil seeping from ledges. I figured they were too far in the distance to start drawing cracks in the rockface so instead used small amounts of black to suggest the shadows caused by clefts and breaks in strata. Adding foliage along the ledges helped the illusion. I was not particularly keen on the far-too-pink building and friends agreed, with one suggesting it stood out like "a dog's..." well, never mind... I will see if I can tone it down any! Half Term starts and I move the easel upstairs for a week where it won't get knocked over accidentally.

21 February 2017. It's back downstairs and being worked. I have to hold my hand up and admit I never expected to manage this amount of detail. The sea still awaits to trip me up though. And the windows and shutters are getting smaller all the time now... I put a darker red pigment over the pink and managed to tone it down a bit.

25 February 2017. By now I was spending more time on it each day as it was starting to get quite exciting! Each time it's noticeable that the white untouched area is shrinking. A couple more foreground buildings to the right, another swathe of hillside and the large building - university, school or just apartments? - done. At the bottom, the sea wall extended and I swapped some concrete for a more picturesque Lake District style wooden jetty. Well they should have done it proper in the first place... The inflatable boat has been done and I gave a huge sigh of relief afterwards I can tell you! It will probably need a bit of tidying after the sea goes round it. And that's another serious psyching-up moment to come!

28 February 2017. The previous three days saw me just about reach a landmark. The next mark will be a seamark! The last few hotels have been done, the remaining buildings on the hillside and what looks like the old town walls at the right hand side (in the real Villefranche they support the railway!) had me trying a new technique for blending colours. I found it very hard to get a suggestion that it was made from large blocks of stone... Now the sea beckons and I need to experiment on fresh paper to get a technique for mixing horizontal splashes of colour for the sea with the verticals of the reflected colours of buildings etc. I commented on FaceBook "The next time you see it, I will either have finished or ripped it up and you will see it in the bin..." I'm pleased to say a number of people begged me not to rip it up!

3 March 2017. Sorry about the copyright notice, but despite the copyright notice already on this blog to the left it is absolutely amazing how many times my photos from this blog turn up without people having the courtesy to mention where they came from. I allow use for non-profit purposes but ask that I am credited. Most people now assume copyright doesn't matter, I've even had someone suggest I was deliberately spoiling his book by refusing to allow him to simply copy the tiny photo on here for a book without any consideration and he dismissed my suggestion that I would need to provide a large scan and then clean it up because old negatives and slides will be dirty. Duh... The Internet works at 72 dots per inch. Books work at least at 600 dots per inch. If you just lift an image for a book off here you could hope to get a good quality image if it was printed no more than half an inch wide. In the end after I refused, he protested that he was going to offer me a discount off his book (it was going to sell priced around £40!!!) Anyway, please bear in mind that I spent the 1980s and 90s freelancing to magazines. My photos were taken when it cost money to take photos and they were taken with the intention of selling them. So sorry about the copyright notice over the pic and the slight rant...

I had been seriously driving myself nuts about starting the sea area. I did a Google search for pastel paintings water reflections video and watched a few to see how people had done them. There are some really good videos about to help artists. So on the 2nd of March at tea time I started drawing horizontal lines of colour onto the sea area. The colours were all of those that would appear reflected from the relevant area above the waterline and positioned where I thought the top of the reflection would start. I ended up with a mess of horizontal lines of colour, lots of white space and my heart in my mouth.

Then where I had room, I used a finger and smeared downwards to the bottom of the paper. An artist friend - I'm going to name her, Christine (Katie) Astbury - gave me loads of help through private messages over FaceBook all the way through this artwork and never protested or dodged any of the naive and sometimes complex questions I fired at her, thank you xxx

Where I didn't have room to use my finger to smear the colour such as in the angles of sea wall and jetty, Katie suggested using cotton buds and that worked a treat. So now I had some quite vivid stripes of colour which looked rather startling. I had to tone them down and then make it appear as though they were reflections on water. I toned them down by scraping vertically downwards with a palette knife which took off quite a bit of pigment, smoothed out any lumps and gave me a fresh working surface to work on the water - as it were. This was achieved using three shades of grey, a silver-blue, a mid and a dark grey to create both short horizontal lines and random wavy lines but only straying from the horizontal a little. The dark grey was used to darken areas of deeper water away from the sea wall. Some white was added to suggest spray or eddies of water around the boats and the sea wall.

I started this as an experiment and never expected to end up with something like this. I'm every bit as flabbergasted as anyone else has professed to be. But quite pleased... My son-in-law has brought me a couple of sets of oil paints and brushes. Miss Franny is looking at the conservatory floor and looking pensive...

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