In late 2018, after some time not doing any artwork, I really wanted to get back into it. I fancied doing something different and invested in some soft pastels. This was my first go with them and it was a hell of a learning curve about how they adhere to the paper, and how they blend. I'm not really sure the pastels I was using were soft enough for the look I wanted, but I like how loose this one turned out.
One of my early oils from 2017. I was still getting used to the medium. I liked how the oils worked well for the misty distant hills, and I used glazing for the first time on the clouds.
I got a pack of loose watercolour paper from eBay in 2018. The side this was painted on had a really strange pitted texture on it. I thought it might be interesting but I didn't like the way the paint gathered in the pits. I just use it for sketching and testing colours these days.
Daler Rowney and Winsor Newton do a watercolour called Sepia. I absolutely love the tone of the Rowney one and had a play with it here. I'd really like to do a proper sepia painting some day.
My first foray into oil paints in 2017. This one is inspired by the view from the mountain pass (a road featured several times on Top Gear). Being new to the medium, I had a lot to learn about how it worked. I'm still not sure whether I'm happy with it or not, but I think it would be worth doing again now a few years down the line.
Cefan Sidan is an immense sandy beach in Carmarthenshire. The site of several shipwrecks, with some to still be found in the sands, the beach stretches for miles. This view is in winter looking towards the Gower.
The reference for this painting was a quick snap I took at the roadside on a trip up to Angelsey. Didn't really manage to capture the scale or the atmosphere.
I know it looks a little sunny, but the reference photo for this one was a winter shot. It's the countryside in the hills surrounding Carreg Cennen castle, Carmarthenshire, Wales
In 2017, I had a short run of finishing acrylic paintings after not painting for many years. Here I was pushing towards a more realistic style despite the very cheap and thin paints.
My first foray into acrylics from 2017. At the time, I wasn't that happy with it, but it sold within a day of posting it on social media. Looking at it now, I like how loose it was.
This is more of a test than anything, but I thought this would be go a good one to test uploading with. I basically just created this character from my head. If you're interested in the materials I used, I created it with a basic watercolor set using a wet on wet technique for the background, A sharpie outline, and the color on the character was created by using Prismacolor colored pencils.
