Sorry it's been a while:-

- and I would hate you to think that I've given up painting and sketching. I most definitely haven't! For most of August I've been away - almost three weeks in Spain and then this last weekend I spent in Worthing visiting my parents. Much of that time I've been Urban Sketching, and then prior to that I was working with watercolour. Here's a selection of the bits and pieces I've been doing for the last few weeks: -

To date the last watercolour movie icon I painted. Big John was never an actor I really liked - he was the property of my Dad's generation as far as I was concerned - however, you can't argue with box office.

Direct watercolour painted in mighty Kidwelly castle. It was in Kidwelly that I made my first ever ink and wash sketch in 2017. I'd like to think that this is considerably better - oh, who am I kidding - it IS considerably better - mind you, that's not difficult. 

This was another monochrome blue experiment, and I have to say that I was pretty pleased. I made it in an evening at the Artists' group in our last meeting before September.

Then , as I said, I was in Spain. Here's a selection of some of the urban sketches I made in that time:-

In the last week of July I joined a Facebook group called Sketching Every Day. I thought that the daily prompts would help give me ideas for my challenge to make at leas one sketch every day. For more about this challenge you might like to visit my sister blog called South Wales Urban Sketcher - the link is in my links section on the right. I've made a number of ink sketches and watercolours for the site, and here's a few examples:-

Bringing everything bang up to date - I realised this morning that I haven't touched acrylics since my last train painting, and so I resolved to use acrylics for whatever prompt we had this morning. This is the response:-

The Fortune Teller

What I'm pleased about is the depth and richness of colour. Also, it's a wee bit looser than I've managed with acrylic before, which probably accounts for it only taking about 90 minutes from starting to make the sketch on the canvas. Speaking of which, here's a photograph of the sketch: - 

What  I tried to do with the sketch is keep it simple, and not overdo the detail.