A Horse Of Course...

 I've finally caught up with the commissions I received before Christmas - a bit of a slog, but worth it!  This horse will be going to Greece once we have figured out a way to get him there safely and without enormous customs/tax charges.

This is a larger than usual painting, covers my whole drawing board, and is mixed media - watercolour, Derwent Coloursoft/Drawing pencils, and a touch of acrylic - on watercolour paper.  It was quite an undertaking and I got a bit disheartened at one stage with the amount of face a horse has!  However, it went well and I am very pleased with the completed painting.

I'm now free for a while - next commission doesn't have to be done straight away, so time to do a bity of my own work.

I've also just seen the rough layout for the new Nudinits pattern book - looks very good and some very cheeky designs in there for humans, not puppets!  Watch this space for further updates.

Hope & A Bear...

 As always happens, I think I have so much to do on a painting and then suddenly it is finished.  I completed this yesterday morning, so it is now ready to be packed up and sent to Greece.  This was done in a mixture of watercolour and coloured pencils - I started off with Derwent Drawing Pencils, but ended up using a selection of all the coloured pencils I have in order to get the depth of colour I needed.

So in the afternoon I spent an hour or so on this little watercolour of a polar bear.  I used a photo I'd taken from the Explore.org polar bear cams for inspiration.  This is now for sale in my Etsy shop, cheaper than my usual work - might make a nice Christmas present?

Hope 2

 This one is taking a long time - the horse is very dark and it is difficult to get the richness and depth of colour with just pencils.  I'm getting there - the paper is starting to feel like worked leather with the amount of pigment and hammering it is taking!  Another couple of days should do it.

We have a very small pond at the bottom of our garden - I mean it is tiny, no more than a metre across.  When we cleaned it out earlier this year, we removed 17 frogs!  (We kept them in a bucket and put them all back when we were done.)  While feeding the birds yesterday, I noticed one of them popping up to say hello.  Hello.

Currently on the needles - leafy green scarf

The Things You Can Get Done When Given The Time...

Yesterday I actually had a day to myself.  My daughter tootled off to her Tuesday activity early in the morning, I managed to get all the outstanding housework done in record time (including cutting the grass and going to the supermarket) and was left with about 7 hours of glorious free time.  So I plugged myself in to the MP3 player to drown out the never-ending builders' noise (eight months and still counting...) and got to work.

The result being that this painting is now finished - considering how it was started, I'm very happy with how it has turned out.  There were a lot of 'mistakes' to be corrected from the haphazard way I painted it during the demonstration last week.  I'm usually very methodical, thinking out my strategy before putting pencil or brush to paper, working from the eyes outwards. There was a fair bit of white acrylic paint used on this one to bring back lost edges and cover up unruly paint!  It's very much a mixed media effort, using watercolours, ink, coloured pencils and acrylic, but hey, that's the way it goes sometimes, each painting has it's own methodology. 

Now I am free to get on with some paid work.  Two dog portraits - I love dog portraits!

Then I spent the evening completing this little lot.  The wheat has been crocheted with string.  A word to anyone contemplating crocheting with string - don't!  My fingers are very sore...