Mixed media painting of horses at water trough

A watercolour and gouache painting of horses and foal, queueing up at the watertrough. I hope to do this scene in oil, as the composition and light makes it an interesting picture.

Painting of rural landscape and terrier dog

A winter scene on neighbouring farmland late in the afternoon. I used a photo for the composition, and used the  'Paintbox' app on my iphone to record the tones and values, particularly the greens, blues and orange-brown on site. This worked well, and much better than relying on the colours in the photo.  I studied several of Constable's paintings using the very useful 'zoom' facility on the National Gallery website, to see how he painted the bare trees. No shortcuts unfortunately, just painstaking painting each branch, receding in value towards the ends. The terrier is 'Bess', who made a living trying to torment rabbits, without much success.

Terrier hunting!

Mixed media painting of light beam

This painting started off as a watercolour of a photo I had taken  recently in the early evening. I had over cooked the colour of the foreground and clouds, and the composition was poor, with a large foreground and nothing in  it. I don't like to give up on a painting, so I attempted to rescue it by adding the figure in pastel, general pastel highlights and some detail with fine tipped coloured pens. The photo looks better than the original, but the light is good I think.

                                                     'Light beam' - 2012            
                                                       Mixed media