#30x30DirectWatercolor Challenge - 1) Rock Lobster

Okay, if you were around last year you may recall I participated in the 30x30 watercolour challenge in June. I've embarked upon it again - it's a day late, granted, but there we are. This cute lobster took about 30 minutes. Why a lobster - well, it helped fulfil the prompt on Sketching Every Day today. Y'ere 'tis

What's Happening? Well . . .

Sorry. After the one sketch a day for a whole year challenge I've been sitting back on my laurels for a bit. Not that I haven't been doing anything at all. I've done a few sketches - I made a trip to Cardiff sketching a week or two ago, for instance. I've also made the odd sketch for Sketching Every Day - here's a couple of them: -

The second one was a challenge to make a self portrait based on the style of a favourite artist - being a natural show off I did 4. I pasted that self portrait sketch I made in March 4 times onto the same Word page, printed it off and sketched the additions over the top.

Since I finished my plough horses painting, though, I have made another couple of paintings in acrylic. First there was this one:-

basically my wife said, these horse paintings you've been doing are all well and good, but couldn't you do an old railway poster for me? We looked on Google images and she gave me a shortlist of three. This was my favourite, and it must have taken about 15 hours to make.

Then a little over a fortnight ago I started painting another 16x 20 in canvas in Artists Group and in my spare time. I was so taken with the plough horses painting which I made over Easter that I wanted to see if I could do a totally different large animal. They don't come much larger than an elephant, so this is what I decided to do. Here's the finished painting:-

I didn't keep a stop watch on it, but again, I'd reckon that this was about 15 hours from first putting pencil to canvas to signing my name.

Coming up though, from tomorrow it's June, and the 30x30 direct watercolour challenge for 2019 begins. I'm not committing myself in the same way that I did last year, but I'm certainly going to start it and see how far I can go with it. Watch this space.

Using Your Sketches In A Simple Calendar

So, you've all of these wonderful sketches you've made. What do you do with them now once you've scanned or photographed them and posted them online? Well, one thing you might like to do is to make your own calendar. It's really quite simple to make a basic calendar using Word. If you don't think your computer skills are up to it, don't worry, it's simple, and I've put together a little tutorial video to show you how it's done. Because I can't post videos of much more than a minute, this is actually in 3 parts.

State Capitol Building - Nebraska USA

Today's prompt on Sketching Every Day was Capitol buildings. Well, there are a lot of American members of the group - nothing wrong with that either. So I spent half an hour or so this morning looking at photos of the various capitol buildings o each state. The vast majority of them are very reminiscent of THE Capitol Building in Washington DC. I decided to go for something a bit different. This is the capitol building of the state of Nebraska. I like it, even though, judging by some of the lists that it features on it certainly isn't everybody else's cup of tea. This particular 1920s/30s idiom is one I'm quite familiar with. Swansea's Gwyn Hall and Magistrate's Court are quite reminiscent, and the Great West Road and Western Avenue of my home town of suburban West London had several buildings in this particular 'Metroland' style.

At last - an ink sketch

Yes, having finished my painting project yesterday, and taken care of today's big chore, getting the car MOT tested, I went back to my old faithful ink pens, and my old faithful Sketching Every Day Facebook group. Today's prompt was firefighters, fire stations and fire hydrants. Immediately this brought to me the recent Notre Dame fire, which inspired the following sketch: - 

- And relax . . .

Yes, the plough horse painting is finished. Here it is:-

Well happy.

Plough Horse update

Here's where I am now: -

Very pleased with the way this one is coming. This is 4 days' work, probably with an average of 4 hours work each of those days.