10 days away

 

Away for a while, to do a ten day Vipassana sit, ten days enjoying the gift of silence and mindfulness in the peaceful surrounds of Dhamma Dipa in Herefordshire. The daffodils and narcissus will be well and truly over when I'm back in early May, I'm sure the world will be full of other beautiful things to paint anyway. Be happy, as they say on the meditation courses, be happy!

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?

snatches of the karoo, south africa

These were made on the road back from the Kalahari in South Africa, done in the car on the long, beautiful road between Brandvlei and Calvinia on the R27. I've always wondered how it would be to paint those huge landscapes, at least now I have made a start. Such a great way to really see, to notice more of the changing colours and forms and textures of the countryside. The textures out there are something special - the small, dry karoo bushes, the ironstone koppies, the smoothness of mountain ranges far, far in the distance and the fenceposts marching forever towards the horizon. I'm a fan.

away for a while

Here's the front of the card I designed for our wedding invitation. 

The pomegranates were inspired by the garden outside our cottage in Ibiza where we got engaged last autumn. I ate ripe figs and pomegranates every day - how could I not when they were hanging on the trees in the garden all around us? 

Heaven. 

I'm off to Cape Town today, to get married in a few weeks. Back mid March, five whole weeks of sun and celebration.

colour study

Sometimes I start a small warm up painting without knowing where I'm going, just colour, line and sometimes a pattern if something emerges. This small study on lovely thick paper has been knocking around the studio for a bit, and I've grown to love aspects of it. I hope something similar shows up in my more formal, structured illustration work sometime.

for the Tart

 

been scanning some older work for an online food portfolio, and remembered that I haven't put this one up yet. it was made to thank the lovely appletart, for the plates she gave me, one of which is pictured here.

a week of warmup drawings

it's been a slow few weeks in terms of new illustrations, but these are drawings I sometimes do to warm up and to keep the magic of brush and colour flowing onto nobbly paper alive. my lovely mum often sends me wonderful seedpods and things to remind me of home; the pebbles follow me home from the sea. watercolour.

birthday card

And now her mum has seen it, here's the birthday card for baby Olivia's first birthday too.

birthday invitation for Olivia

Hope I made this card a teeny bit as bright and full of fun as the delightful Olivia is. Off to Stockholm to celebrate her Big One this weekend. Happy Birthday, gorgeous girl!

summer holiday wildflowers

Painted one rainy morning in Blekinge, Southern Sweden, in a teeny wooden housie with a red wooden table and chairs, listening to a Beethoven piano concerto on an old skool crackling radio. Oak trees, wildflower meadows and murder slugs just outside the door, the placid Baltic and my sis's summer house a two minute walk away.

broadway market

Sketched one rare sunny day back in May, where the combination of bench in sun and detailed shopfronts was just too good to resist. Two more Hackney street drawings here.

central line to epping

 

Curiously, older people are harder to draw unobserved. Perhaps they aren't so used to the invasions of privacy a younger generation regards as unremarkable - the constant photographing, blogging and sharing images of ourselves on facebook.  I try to be discreet when drawing on the train, and hope that at the very least I'm celebrating people's individuality in a sensitive, if not always conventionally flattering way.

early summer

on the road to taos, new mexico

From our trip to the Southwestern USA, this was a quick stop to have a look at the river,  and drawing spruce trees 101 for me. More drawings made on the road are on my flickr page, here.