30x30 Direct Watercolour Challenge - update

Here's the latest - all done over the last couple of weeks:-

10) Rhino Neal - I did consider painting another elephant, after enjoying making the acrylic painting a few weeks ago. On reflection, though, I decided that variety is the spice of life, so went for this rhinoceros.

11) Goldfish. I was really pleased with this one because I worked loosely and extremely quickly. As a result the different yellows, oranges, reds and golds all blended rather well. This painting, start to finish, less than 15 minutes.

12) Dancer. In last year's challenge I painted a pair of Flamenco dancers. This time I thought about ballet. I like the pose, even if it is possibly slightly exaggerated.

13) Chanticleer - Time to do another living creature, and this time a bird. Chanticleer is the cockerel who is the main protagonist of Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale in "The Canterbury Tales". It's an anmal fable, which may well have been taken from Aesop originally. As for this painting - a curate's egg. Good in parts.

14) Summertime. I really like this one, since there's no part of it which I look at and think - hmm, haven't done that as well as I could. The only problem with it is I can only get awful scans of it, which is why I'm using this photograph, which at least gives you an idea what it looks like.

15) What the Dickens. Time for another monochrome blue portrait, this time of one of my favourite writers. I mean, it does look like Dickens, but there was something about it which was bothering me when I finished it, but I just couldn't quite put my finger on it. Then I realised, the eye on the right of the painting - it's just too big. It's a shame. This makes this one close, but no cigar.

16) Salisbury Cathedral. High time for a building, and they don't come a lot finer than Salisbury Cathedral. Shame I can't say the same about this painting. What can you say? Workmanlike, but rather uninspiring. Let's move on.

17) Dance - This was to meet the prompt in Sketching Every Day. The body is Fred Astaire's. The face was meant to be as well, but you know what? It looks a lot more like Dean Martin to me. Still, not a bad effort, and this one was done in the space of about 20 minutes at art group.

18) Pint - Which left the rest of the time to make this old codger. I really liked the original photograph, ad was eager to do a real face. Ach, I like the face and the pint - but the grey at the back of the head just don't wanna work. It's a shame

19) Dog Walker  - Colour wise this full figure painting works a lot better. I didn't go overboard painting in the man's features, because it didn't need it. Quite a nice piece of work - happy with this one.

20) Lisbon Almost quite good,  but not quite. Too many thick black lines around the tram itself. Shame, because I rather like that I've done with the van and the cars on the right of the picture. 

21) Ginger Tom. I love cats. I'm currently owned by a black and white cat, and a black cat. I love them, but they're not colourful enough for what I wanted to do. So I made this painting of a rather nice ginger cat with tabby markings. I'm quite pleased with this.

22) High Hurdler. One of my paintings from last year's challenge was of Sir Roger Bannister. I wanted to do another athletics subject, and thought that this one of a 110m hurdler clearing one of the hurdles might work rather well. I think it's not badly executed at all, and I really like the way that the green blends with the blue and the yellow on the gear the guy is wearing.

23) World War I Tank. I am fascinated by the tragedy of World War I, and read a very interesting book recently about the British tanks - first used in the Battle of the Somme, and their crews. So this is why I chose this. I used monochrome blue because it gives that feeling of age to it for me.

24) Michelangelo's David. I fancied doing another full face, and another piece of sculpture. This encompassed both. Like this.

#30x30DrectWatercolor2019 paintings 4-9

Here we are then: -

4) Horse racing - They're Off. I painted this at Artists' group on Wednesday. Sadly we've gone down to once a fortnight, but at least you can do a decent watercolor like this in about 90 minutes, unlike my acrylic 15 hour marathons. Not a fan of horse racing at all, if I'm totally honest with you, but I just love painting horse racing scenes, be it in acrylic or watercolor.

5) Port Talbot Docks. The scan has not picked out all of the colors, since I went very watery with this. Hence the ship looking as if it has a half white hull - the white part is actually a light rust red which for some reason just has not been picked up.

6) Rafael Nadal. This was inspired by the continuing French Open tennis, when earlier this week Rafa rolled back the years and easily dismissed Roger Federer.

7) Colin Baker as the 6th Doctor. Saturday 8th June was Colin Baker's birthday. I always felt that Colin got a very rough deal as the Doctor. Put simply, most of the scripts he was given weren't really good enough, and there's precious little that any actor can do about that.

8) D-Day Landing. Last week was the 75th anniversary of D Day. I was fortunate enough o accompany a party of school children to Normandy in 1994, which was the 50th anniversary of D Day.

9) Statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. I'm pretty pleased with this. Last year I loved the painting I made of one of Landseer's bronze lions in Trafalgar Square, so this year I decided I'd do another iconic London statue.

30x30 Direct Watercolour - numbers 2 and 3

Number 2 - The Evening gnus

Number 3 - Blue Brando

#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.