Yeap, I wasn’t totally happy with this watercolour so I was forced to chop it up so that I could enjoy it. I’m a happy butcher now. It’s best to love a whole painting of course but sometimes one has to be brutal.
Click the thumbnail below to see the full sized image.
I visit Northern Ireland twice a year usually, my family live there in Bangor not far from Belfast. I grew up in the South so I have no connection except my family. I enjoy taking the coast road from Bangor through Groomsport and ending up in Donaghadee, a lovely harbour which used to be the main port for the voyage to Scotland many years ago. Map: https://goo.gl/maps/eDVfUXbGwwEKaUpt5
This watercolour is 26 x 36 cm and is titled, Donaghadee Sunset.
Click the thumbnail below for a full sized image.
I have a friend who loves to sail. I gave her this watercolour birthday card, it is a memory of her sailing much faster than I to Åland last year.
Quick portraits
As far as a good likeness is concerned, I failed.
Maybe I captured her spirit instead, I guess I’ll never know.
I had to had forgotten my watercolours at home but luckily a friend had a spare set. They were very bright colours, Russian I believe. It was fun, I was out of my comfort zone.
One of my many New Year Resolutions was to improve my figures in my watercolour paintings. We all basically always look at the head first and so it’s not very good if the face feels amateurish. This is why I am going to portrait classes every Tuesday now, I wan’t to improve and I don’t want my paintings to look amateurish!!!!!!! 🙂
These watercolours are about A5 in size.
I needed to send 5 watercolours to the Water Colour Society of Ireland by the end of January and I did. I am now waiting to see if I will be accepted into the society or not. I wanted to paint a bunch of Irish scenes for the application but I have been frustratingly ill the whole winter. I finished this watercolour of a Galway Hooker this morning. It’s a few days past the deadline and I am okay with that, it has been great just to get painting again so that’s good enough for me. I did a preliminary sketch of this Hooker in an earlier post if you would like to see that.
This painting is for sale. If you are intersested please visit my original art shop.
One of the schools I attend to sketch life drawing has started a class where one can paint portraits of a model live. There are 3 poses each evening and the length is 35 minutes which is perfect for my rather short attention span. I really want to improve when it comes to doing portraits so I’m really happy this class has started.
Here is a link to the class. (In Swedish) The watercolours are about A5 in size.
A Hooker, I just love the name of these old working boats. This sketch of is of a Galway Hooker off the coast of Ballycastle, Northern Ireland. I’m working on a final painting in the studio today. At the moment the sketch seems to be better than the final watercolour which is kind of annoying.
I have been wanting to paint Irish scenes for a while. It takes several sketches to get the feeling for a country one visits. This could be Spain, Ireland or even India which I will be visiting in March. I’m looking forward to that. You would think I would feel at home in Ireland as I was born there, but the fact is I moved away 35 years ago. I’m almost a stranger these days. It would be so nice to spend some time getting to know the island again, travelling around and painting, yeah, I’d like that.
