It's Arrived!

Enjoying the return of spring🌱and a bit of coloured pencil chat, plus what I'm watching and listening to at the moment.

Floral sketchbook spread in acrylic gouache.

We’ve had a mild winter here, wet yes🤷‍♀️ but not particularly cold. However I’ve been longing to see more colour outside in nature so to make up for it I’ve found myself painting flowers like nobodies business!

Now I don’t need to wait any longer because flowers and buds are everywhere. A few days ago we went for a walk in the Somerset countryside and saw some beautiful things.😍🌱

A beautiful sunny day enjoying the spring.

How lovely to see new growth coming back. Even the bare trees looked beautiful against the blue sky.

New Pencils

My new purchase.

On holiday many years ago I bought my first ever set of artist coloured pencils and they were Prismacolors. In those days I knew nothing about pencils like I do now.

Since that time I’ve collected everything from Derwent, to Caran D’ache, Holbein and Faber Castell. My favourite are the Caran D’ache Luminance but I love them all really.

I still have a couple of the Prismacolors from the original set that I bought right at the beginning but the ones that are left are tiny little stubs, almost gone.

Then by chance one day when looking online for a particular colour I saw these.

I bought them!

What I love about the Prismacolors is not only their creaminess but also the range of colours they do that I haven’t been able to find in other brands. Ok they’re very brittle and break easily but that’s reflected in their price. It’s one of the things that stopped me from buying them again …but the colours, the colours!

It had to be flower swatches didn’t it?😉 One of them is called ‘non-photo blue’ but it seems to have photographed ok so I’ve no idea why it’s called that!

What I’m watching/listening to.

Have you seen Man On The Run on Prime? It’s about the life of Paul McCartney after he left the Beatles and has lovely footage of his young family along with music from Wings. It brought back memories of the 70s when I had a cassette tape of Band On The Run that I’d recorded from my friend’s album that I’d play again and again. I’d forgotten how much I loved it so it was great to hear all those songs again.

I often listen to podcasts while I’m painting and one I’m enjoying at the moment is Strangers On A Bench. Each episode Tom Rosenthal (a singer/songwriter) approaches a member of the public and asks them questions about themselves. Their answers are varied because the person being interviewed is completely anonymous the answers are always interesting, sometimes funny, sometimes sad.

I’m off now to give my new pencils a proper workout. See you next time!