A bowl of ripe plums

It has been a fair while, friends.  Particularly if we aren't waving over to each other on Instagram already. 

Still.

Here's a watercolour peace offering for a hot summer's day in Hackney. Started left handed with willow twigs, finished right handed as best as could be given the wily qualities of watercolour , of shifting light and shifting goalposts.

Happiness on a stem

The sun has been a stranger around these parts again. Damnation!

But the daffodils are out. 

Cheap as chips in the shops, and slowly, sleepily beginning to flower in the parks and the churchyard near where I live. 

Happiness on a stem, said a woman also considering the flower stand in Tesco's. 

Yep. That's about right. Might as well buy a couple of bunches at a time.

pottery fragments

I seldom leave anywhere remotely historic without scratching around in the dirt, hoping for a shard of pottery of glass to add to my collection.

I love how these are tiny clues to stories of dinners and teas, arguments and celebrations. I wonder who washed them and who filled them with tea or hot food, lovingly cooked or otherwise. 

Did anyone take comfort and delight in the finely painted leaves embellishing their saucer as much as I loved discovering the remaining piece? 

I found the green leaf shard half buried under a thorn tree near a modest old farm ruin, once very remote, in what is now a rest camp in the Karoo National Park.

What thoughts did the bearer of the red feathery painted cup have over early morning tea in the Welsh mining village situated meters away from a blast furnace and a stinking ironworks? Did the delicacy of the porcelain offend them, or was it a relief to have something pretty in the hand?

I'll never know, but I love finding these fragments and wondering.

A quick drawing done at the kitchen table while I was waiting for lemon and millet muffins to bake. The recipe is super quick, with ingredients that are usually around already. Which means something warm, a bit healthy and lemony crunchy can be ready for tea in half an hour to cheer up a drizzly Monday afternoon. 

Hey, you have to make working from home fun sometimes too, right?

Colourwise,I thought that was deep blue I was stroking out into the shadow areas, but it was Windsor Purple pretending to be French Ultramarine. Heh. It needs replacing!

birch catkins

watercolour and dipping pen

happy easter

 

It's been a lovely, quiet Easter with plenty of time to tinker around the house, as my friend Barbs would say. 

This was a warm up painting to get back into watercolour drawing mode after such a long break. Bit ambitious really, the white flower and the sunlight through the petals and then also the shards of glass that I found back in CT on a tiny beach. Which look more like petals at this stage.

I was tempted by the frilly yellow centre of the daffodil, and the poppy motif on the cup (a wedding gift from the lovely ladies at St Mary's Secret Garden)and didn't give the medium much thought. That's the point of a warm up though right?

summer still life - basil

now sadly in decline, the trusty basil plant grown from seed earlier in the year and painted a few months ago.