Magic Moments

First and foremost, my thoughts and best wishes go out to all my lovely followers and readers in the USA, particularly Joan in Long Island and BJ in Florida. Hope you and your families and friends are all ok over there and keeping safe from Hurricane Irene :)

I know the weather here is incomparable to what is happening across the east coast of the USA at the moment but we have had a few downpours recently and so my plein air activity for the weekend has been scuppered :( However, I have been playing and practicing with watercolour techniques and have managed to do a couple of reasonable small but finished paintings. I use Winsor and Newton pans and tubes for most of my work but I couldn't resist getting a nice big set of Jackson's own brand whole pans with my own choice of pigments. I really like them and, because they are mixed with honey, they are easy to wet and very similar to the Schmincke set I use for plein air.

This is one I did this morning using my new paints. The scene is from a photograph I took on holiday in Swanage three years ago. We had been for a long walk up to Durlston Head and were on our way back into Swanage town, The view of the bay as we walked down from out of the shade of the hiiltop woodland was gorgeous and I just had to get a snap of it. One of those Magic Moments.
 

Swanage Bay, watercolour, 9.5" x 12"

Night flight

One evening, as the light was fading and whilst the rest of the clan were dancing away to a band that were playing along the seafront in Swanage, I took a walk along the beach to get a few photographs of the waves. These two boys were paddling in the low water and I thought they made a nice addition to the composition. This was done in acrylic using a limited palette (I only have a handful of tubes!) on canvas paper.

'Look, I'm a seagull!', acrylic on canvas paper, 9" x 12"