Rosa Watercolours

Rosa Watercolours

Reading Time: 4 minutesI have been meaning to try out Rosa Watercolours for a while, in my general quest/obsession to try every colour or preparation on the planet. Rosa are a Ukranian brand, with a good reputation. They are also very inexpensive, and lets face it buying Ukranian 

Ice Grey, Snow White

Ice Grey, Snow White

Reading Time: 2 minutesIt’s Christmas, or has been, it’s bloody cold (what a surprise), I have new paper… Christmas always becomes chaotic in our house and it’s sometimes hard to take time out and do al the things I would like to in my time off work. I’ve 

Idyll

Idyll

Reading Time: 2 minutesidyll/ˈɪd(ɪ)l,ˈʌɪd(ɪ)l/nounnoun: idyll; plural noun: idylls;an extremely happy, peaceful, or picturesque period or situation, typically an idealized or unsustainable one. I have been slowly developing a theme in some of my watercolour work. Talking to some of my musical and lyrical conceptualisation of Hiraeth, these are 

Next Level Landscape Tutorials

Next Level Landscape Tutorials

Reading Time: 3 minutesI’ve been following a few of the free tutorials offered by Geoff Kersey, a landscape artist whose work I have found very appealing in some books I have. The painting above is very interesting as it almost seems that it should not work. It’s very 

Snowy scenes

Snowy scenes

Reading Time: < 1 minuteI just thought I would post these as I am quite pleased with them and they are the beginning of a bit of a themed project over winter, These are sketches, based on mini-tutorials on https://watercolourlandscapes.co.uk/ on painting snow and mountains. Then I thought I 

Derwent Graphitint

Derwent Graphitint

Reading Time: 3 minutesWhile down in Norwich the other month, I could not of course resist the lure of Jarrolds art shop again. This is alternatively heaven, or a way to spend all the money you don’t have, if you are like me, with a mixture of high 

Trees on Foraged Grounds

Trees on Foraged Grounds

Reading Time: 2 minutesAs I have mentioned, when making watercolours there’s always some left over in the mortar and I like to use this to prepare grounds for future work. These are some recent earths, on the poundland paper which I use for cheap expreimenting. These were inspired 

Plant Pigment Watercolours

Plant Pigment Watercolours

Reading Time: 2 minutesWe are lucky nowadays to have a massive array of complex pigments and dyes at our disposal, both organic pigments such as Quinocridones, Pyrrols, Perylenes etc, and the increasing inoganic metal pigments still being developed – Sicopal Spinel pigments, Zirconium Vanadium pigments, the miraculous Yinmn 

Avocado Ink

Avocado Ink

Reading Time: 3 minutesPrompted by my continual playing with natural pigments in my paints, I made a batch of Avocado ink the other day. This is perhaps one of the better known vegetable dyes, creating a relatively stable and lightfast dusty pink colour. I’ve brewed up a couple 

Micro Landscapes – The Return

Micro Landscapes – The Return

Reading Time: 2 minutesWhile working on some of my recent watercolours I was trimming my paper to the longer format, and ended up with quite a few offcuts. I hate waste, so I thought what can I do with these…. Practice some more miniature landscapes, that’s what! Working 

Lincoln in Watercolour

Lincoln in Watercolour

Reading Time: 2 minutesOf course, I took the photos from Lincoln, to work from for some watercolours. All of these are from random phone pictures in the end. The end of the weekend we went down to look round the waterfront, as this is close to the station 

A few bitesize tutorials from t’Interwebs

A few bitesize tutorials from t’Interwebs

Reading Time: 3 minutesFacebook knows… Unsuprisingly I have had about a million and a half adverts for dubious watercolour tutorial sites crop up on my facebook recently (if you want an interesting article by the way, have a look at this) and have mostly ignored these as attempts