I started a large acrylic painting today, it will take a few days to finish but posting every day has become such a habit I had to find something else to post. This is a quick sketch that I did at our portrait session last Tuesday after I finished the watercolour. I added some colour at home later.
We had a great session at Poole and East Dorset Art Society last night. Abi Kramer gave a talk on drawing trees with charcoal and Indian ink, she then encouraged us to do our own pictures. This is my attempt. There are some every talented artists in PEDAS, some of the drawings were beautiful.
Here in Poole we are surrounded by very tall pine trees that glow red when the late afternoon sun hits them. I wanted to show how tall they grow so I added the car for scale but the trees still grew off the top of my sketchbook!
I have been trying to work with acrylics and am beginning to get the hang of it. It is nice to be able to correct mistakes easily but I miss the blending that is a big part of watercolours. This is based on a photo I took of the deckchairs on the beach in Beer in Devon.
Today’s portrait sitter at Broadstone Art Society was Ian, an ex army fitness instructor who I knew from some business networking I used to do. He was very still and patient which he attributed to many hours of guard duty in his army days!
I painted Anna from a photo in May 2018 so I thought it would be interesting to do another from the same photo to see if I have improved since then. If I posted my first attempt this afternoon I would say I have gone backwards so here is my second painting along with the original. I think it is an improvement, what do you think?
At gundog training this morning we were teaching the dogs to ignore a thrown dummy unless we instructed them to fetch it. We did this by having one person and their dog in the centre of a circle while the other seven threw a dummy towards them, the person in the centre then picked up all the dummies and threw them back over the dog’s head, all to be done off lead if possible. Fletcher managed to keep still for the exercise so I was proud of him. Following this I was in the advanced class with my other dog Nuala who played up as much as she could, running off with dummies and refusing to bring them back, I was on the point of bringing her home when she did two perfect retrieves, the second was a blind retrieve from heavy cover so she redeemed herself in the end. Now they are snoring gently on their beds.
