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.

Spanish Sketchbook

Last year, during my annual stay with family in the Alicante region I ended up making a couple of Acrylic paintings. By a curious process one of the pictures I made actually led to my discovery of Urban Sketching. This year instead of trying to make acrylics on canvas, I just took my pared down sketching kit - 1 packet of 4 black Faber Castell Pitt Artist pens, 1 new Daler Rowney graduate sketchbook A5 size, 1 half full Daler Rowney graduate sketchbook A4 size, my tiny Daler Rwney sketching paintbox (12 half pans + small brush) - three watercolour brushes - two rounded, one flat- empty water jar with screwtop lid. Actually, that sounds a lot more than it is when I write it out like that. As a result I've been trying to make a couple of sketches for every full day that I'm here. So, without further ado - here's what's in my Spanish sketchbook so far:-

Cerveceria - San Isidro

This is a bar just opposite where the market takes
place on a Wednesday morning in San Isidro. I dare say that the bar itself is nothing special in architectural terms, but I liked it, and thought it was worth trying to paint it.

What I wanted to try to do was look at the different effects caused by sun on the light painted buildings.

I'm quite pleased with the bar under the awning, where the shade is a nice contrast to all the light above it.

En Plein Air

Most of the time I've made paintings so far they have been based on either one photograph, or several different photographs of the same thing. I've been
in Spain since Tuesday evening, and so I decided to try some on the spot painting, which I think is called doing it en plein air - which is French for - well, I'm sure that you can work it out.

This is the old station in the village of San Isidro, outside Alicante. Except it really isn't. Not all of it anyway. This is just a wall and a canopy from it, whish were re-erected about a mile away from the new station, on a quite street which had a blank wall. This is now a lovely public space, where they often hold concerts.