Plant

I've just started this course in 'Pet Portraits' and this is one of the first exercises I had to do. It took ages!
Sorry about the darkness of the image but my scanner is not currently working and I can't seem to get a good photo of a pencil drawing.
I've just realised how odd it sounds that the exercise I had to do for my pet portrait course was to draw a plant! It's just drawing practice really.

Rusky

I know I've been remiss in not posting this week but I haven't been lazy! I've been painting this lovely fellow, and just finished him today. He is a little dog called Rusky that we met in Crete, who happens to live with D's sister there. He really belongs to the Greek man that they are renting from, and when they arrived there he was sleeping in a leaky oildrum. Les made him a lovely little kennel, with blankets inside, and he's a very happy boy now. He is a wonderful little character.
I've been painting him because I'm trying to get back into doing what I used to do for a while, animal portraits. I need a bit of practice before I get going again.

Twilight View

I did this from a sketch I did of the view out of my office window at night. I'm not sure if it works - I didn't enjoy painting it that much - maybe because of the dark colours.

Pleasant view

The view from my office/studio window.

Morning light

It's just about impossible to paint this sort of light effect from life and photos dont' work so I did a quick tonal sketch as preparation for this one. I've got a value measurement thingy that I made as a result of reading 'Color' by Betty Edwards and used that to measure the tones. My colour and value wheels are a huge help when painting.

Chinese Bowl with oranges

I've been doing this 8x6 still life for a few days now, but have to stop today as the oranges are just 'on the turn'.

Maria

I saw an advert for a life drawing session in my local artshop. It turned out to be an artist who lives in the next road to me, who wants people to join him and share the cost of the model. He was starting the weekly sessions today so I went there and really enjoyed it. It's nice to draw with like-minded people who want to do long poses rather than 5 or 10 minute ones. We did two one and a half hour drawings - my first was rubbish because I was a bit nervous. This one was better as I had warmed up a bit.