Queen's Wood

Queen's Wood in north London is an ancient remnant of the Forest of Middlesex, which once covered what is now the north of Greater London. The forest passed into private ownership in the 13th Century, and was gradually deforested. A few small isolated pockets remain.

You can feel the age in the looming oak and hornbeam trees. It has that deep fairy-tale forest feel despite never being more than a big stone lob from roads and houses. The diverse and aged canopy supports a wide range of avifauna too- nuthatch, sparrowhawks, jays, parakeet, goldcrest and all three British woodpecker species.

With the sudden burst of foliage in the past few weeks, the wood is now rich with the smells and saturated greens of spring. Gorgeous in the dappled sunlight, though it's harder to see the birds.

Queen's Wood

Forest of Middlesex 

Advent 11th- Lake

Fancied some more ink this evening.

Advent, Day 9- Treasure Hunt

Have a guess!

I'll tell you tomorrow.

Sketchy Sketches

More Lakes

A few more sketches from Cumbria.

 

Lakes

Some sketches from my girlfriend and I's trip up to the Lake District last month. First bit of watercolouring for a good while. 

I've got a few more of these, but unfortunately I'm having to use a different scanner, which seems to be incapable of producing a decent image.

Something

I've been very slack with the posting this past few weeks, so apologies for that. This is partly due to me wanting to keep some new work in reserve for when I launch my new website, and partly due to me being busy making that site and working on a few promotional bits. The site's almost finished though and will be live quite soon. In the meantime, a few sketchbook sketches.

Painting Day

On friday I spent the day at my illustrator buddy Joe's house for a bit of painting. We started off by braving the October drizzle to paint cows and small landscape sketches in the valley below his house, taking inspiration from the American artist Nathan Fowkes in trying out the use of warm, complimentary underwashes as a base for the rural scenes. It was great to get back outside painting again for the first time in a while, and I'd forgotten how enjoyable it can be to work alongside another person rather than in the isolation that is imposed by much of my work.

Eventually driven inside by the rain, we had a crack at some still life, something Joe practices with admirable frequency but which I've neglected almost entirely over the past couple of years, at least as far as paint is concerned. As Joe switched from watercolours to oils, I pressed on with my acrylics and we set to work on an old feathered hat. Tricky translucent reflective shadowy feathers! I was quite pleased with that (at least with the feathers themselves), and I finished the day on a few smaller objects plundered from a bowl of dried fruit and pine cones (I'm sure there's a name for that stuff).

There really is no substitute for painting from life in terms of furthering one's understanding of structure, material and most vitally how light interacts with objects. Obvious really, but it's something that, aside from life drawing, I kind of just neglected as I moved towards the end of uni, concentrating purely on completing projects.

I've most definitely got the painting buzz back, the sheer enjoyment of using paint just for its own sake, just to try to capture that essence of a subject. My girlfriend has sent me a gorgeous bunch of white roses and eucalyptus for my birthday, and I'm going to have to have a go at painting those before they go over...