Child Portrait - pencil drawing

I'm also doing child portraits in pencil. They look splendid but are very affordable.

Child Portrait - acrylic paint on card

I'm doing a lot of child portraits for clients at the moment. They make wonderful and inexpensive presents for Grandparents, Aunties and Uncles, and friends. This one includes Freddie, the school bear.

Fishing Girl - acrylic painting on card

I also working on portraiture and the human form at the moment, and I saw this picture on the internet or in a book somewhere and liked it, so changed the lighting and colour and composition slightly and came up with this. I was thinking about painting it in the style of the German Romantics such as Friedrich but I think this it lighter and more cheerful.

Xmas Cactus - acrylic painting on card

I know it's not Christmas but does it matter when the plant is so lovely?

Garden Memory (2) - acrylic painting on card

I tried to be more abstract with these 'memory' paintings and I love the result as much as the more detailed flower pictures. They seem to capture how I remember the colours of the garden.

Peonies - acrylic painting on card

Here's a small group of peonies, all vying to be the best!

Peony - acrylic painting on card

One of my favourite flowers. Such luscious pink hues. This is a single flower close up - what could be more simple yet more beautiful?

Garden Memory (1) - acrylic painting on card

Working in the garden in wonderful. You take away memories that stay with you the rest of the day.

Forget Me Not - acrylic painting on card

Daffodil painting - acrylic paint on card

I've been spending a lot of time in the garden recently. Some of it with my camera and my paints. And I've created a little series of flower paintings. Here's the first one of a daffodil - it's a very common flower really but so complex in form and exquisite to look at.

Art club pencil sketches

I attend a local art club every week. In truth, in-between the chatting, cups of tea, and biscuits and cake there isn't much time left for actual art work! But it's good fun to be amongst other artists and bounce ideas off each other. I tend to use the time to make rough sketches and loose life studies of the other club members. Then when I get home I can build selected ones up into an actual artwork or just keep them as resources for future use. I really do enjoy sketching these simple studies, they are so minimal, without any colour or too much detail and have a lovely purity of form.

Chickens on the bales - acrylic painting for SAA art competition

This is a painting I finished this week for a competition in an art magazine. I don't know why they chose chickens as the subject! I have not painted animals before so I was surprised when this caught my interest for some reason. My end result was much better than I anticipated and I thoroughly enjoyed painting it. I'm pleased with the brushwork and how I worked the acrylic paint.

Narcissus

Spring is supposed to be here but it's hard to see underneath the snow! The spring flowers in my garden are slowly coming through now. I love the colours here and the subtle variations of hue. It just shouts out the new life of spring.

Sunny morning

We have been having some bizarre spring weather here - snow and sunshine on the same day. The sunshine inspired me to cock a snook at the freezing cold and paint a sunny morning landscape. I love the warmth of the sunshine coming in through my studio window, heating the room (and me) whilst all outside it still cold. There's bold brushstrokes and a fluidity of brushwork in this picture and it makes me feel warm just looking at it.

Coffee morning - acrylic paint on art card

I've been doing a lot of portraiture recently, and this is one example I'm particularly pleased with. I've tried to follow the Hayward Veal impressionist mantra of 'paint what you see, not what you know', and tried to be minimal in line and detail whilst capturing the essence of the person. I'm also very pleased with the colouring in this picture.

Tessie O'Shea Portrait

I generally prefer to paint portraits of men - their faces seem to have more 'character', from my artist's eye anyway. But there are exceptions of course. One is Tessie O'Shea. She was a true performer, with her effervescent and infectious character coming through in her face. If you watch an old video of her and turn down the sound, just looking at her face and theatrical posture is a 'show' in itself - big smile, big jewellery, big performance. What a star she was. And she could play a mean uke too!

Like the Formby portrait, I've tried to get a vibrancy in this painting of Tessie. I wanted to resist the temptation to add too much detail and clutter. Hayward Veal had an exercise where he would try to finish a painting within 10 minutes. This painting took longer than 10 minutes but I still tried to do it as quickly as I could as I feel that urgency and immediacy fits perfectly with the gusto of Tessie's performances.

George Formby Colour Portrait

I had a couple of books at Christmas so have been reading up on some of my favourite artists, Rolf Harris and his mentor, the Australian impressionist Hayward Veal, the 'vibrant acrylics' impressionist artist Hashim Akib, and the Austrian painter Voka.

I love impressionism and loose brush work and have been trying to incorporate ideas from all of these artists into my own work, particularly Voka. He describes his style as 'spontaneous realism', and brings 'immediacy, vigour and enthusiasm' into his paintings.

I've attempted to do that in this observation of George Formby, from his performance of 'I Wish I Was Back On The Farm' from the 1940 film 'Spare A Copper', using larger brushes and rich acrylic paint as much as possible.