Category: Paintings

These tulips were in a pot in my garden. The colour is stunning and I just had to paint them.

Common Vetch is a member of the pea family which has 13000 species. It is found on grassland, farmland and waste ground. Bitter vetch was one of the first domesticated crops grown by Neolithic people and Common Vetch is still used as livestock fodder today.
This is a painting I started a year ago but never quite finished. I have now tidied it up and added a little bee to fill the gap in the left hand corner.

Hundreds of these amazing flowers were growing at West Dean gardens at the end of March. They are part of the lily family. The flower heads are complex to paint but worth the effort.

I have been painting some small illustrations of spring flowers to be mounted onto cards to be sold as original paintings which were very popular last years at craft fairs.

Spring at last and a painting of some miniature iris’ to celebrate.

Last weekend I attended another course at West Dean College entitled Structure Form and Texture with Amber Halsall, a well known botanical artist. I chose the course because it included some natural history subjects that I was keen to paint.
It was a glorious weekend with the gardens full of spring flowers.
I chose to paint shells which I discovered were as complex to paint as botanical subjects!
I have include a page from my sketch book as it shows the exercises in illustrating texture (willow), form (shell and quails egg) and structure (scales from a cone).
Below this is the finished shell painting.

In November we went on a guided mushroom walk at Polesden Lacey led by a fungi expert and identified many mushrooms in the ancient woodland there. The walk inspired me to draw some of the mushrooms in pen and ink. An artist I follow makes handmade books and I decided to mount the drawings along with illustrations of other autumn subjects in my own handmade book. The project took almost 3 months to complete. The book is made from thin card and the drawings are mounted on thick Lokta paper which is made from the bark of the Lokta bush in the Himalayas and gives a textured autumnal background to the drawings. The colourful leaves were painted and cut out from thinner lokta paper which gives them a natural quality. The cover is made from oil board.
The book can be opened like a concertina to display all the images together or used as a traditional book.

I hope you enjoy watching the video of the book: please click on this link.

A painting from earlier in the year. Bulbs left to right: daffodil, hyacinth, tulip . The hyacinth was very interesting to paint as it had so many different textures.