
Halcyon days
Blue blur
Fish snatched
From branch
To stream
Then back up!
Electric blue
Just flew!
New paintings and regular art updates.

Halcyon days
Blue blur
Fish snatched
From branch
To stream
Then back up!
Electric blue
Just flew!

This Saturday, around eight artists will be exhibiting at the Whitfield Community Centre, Whitfield Avenue, Newcastle under Lyme, Staffordshire. Eleven till Four.
It should be good. Crafts and jewellery as well as paintings and drawings will be for sale. It will be interesting to see how many people come out. Hope the weather is fine. I will be wearing a mask, hope no one minds!

I’ve finished a couple of paintings today. Pretty much as soon as I finished my MA work I picked up a paintbrush again. I’m part of a group exhibition on Saturday and I wanted to finish some new work. Dragons have crept into a couple of the paintings. The one on the left is ‘dragon saucer’ and the right is ‘ulysses’. Illustration has seeped into my veins!

They pop up everywhere! These (there were two of them) were on either side of the gazebo at Betley Court. They had heraldic sheilds with initials carved into them. Such handsome little dragons. I wish I had sern them before I handed in my MA report, I would have added pictures of them to it. Anyway, three weeks to results day. I’m waiting and hoping I do OK.

A sea of bluebells
Rippling in the wind
Surrounding an old Court
Like a moat.
Heads nodding on one side
Slim leaves
Shiny and dark green.
The Spring tide comes in
Then fades again.
Year on year
The tides of time
Turn.

We visited Betley Court and walked around the bluebell woods. It’s a private property so it only opens twelve times a year so we were really lucky to get in today. We will go back! It’s on the road from Keele in Newcastle under Lyme towards Nantwich I think. Its in Staffordshire I think (but its really near Cheshire). Its a lovely place. I really love this Spring abundance.

Today the #bandofsketchers prompt was fruity. Its a bit ‘sketchy’ because I was trying to draw in a dark room and it was hard to get the colours right. The fruit were real but I made the bowl up. It’s meant to be oranges and lemons in a cornish blue and white bowl.

Series of digital finger paintings and photo edit to show how I created the eye drawing in my last post. I used artrage oils to start, then a flood fill in rainbow colours and a black pen and black flood fill in my sketch app. Finally added the texture with a style then grime option in Photodirector.

Eye don’t know
Is it me?
Colours coruscate
Light flickers
Only one eye
Staring back at me?
Knowing nothing
Losing thoughts
I don’t know if it’s me.
Maybe?

I was just stopped in the street by a woman who said ‘you know there’s no one around?’ I looked about me and said ‘yes I can see that’. Then she said ‘so you don’t need a mask’ I looked at her. Why tell me this when I had just forgotten to take it off, but why did it matter to her? Then she said ‘it might make it difficult for you to breathe with carbon Dioxide building up behind it.’
Oh I really wanted to say something, like ‘oh dear, so many people collapsing after wearing a mask for more than five minutes!’ or ‘ they are permiable to air, they just stop viruses’. But I bit my lip under my mask and said ‘no I’m OK. I’m used to wearing a mask at night, I have sleep aponea’. ‘Oh that OK then’ she said. I said ‘goodnight’ and walked off. But then called back ‘I’m still cautious about covid’. Perhaps people belive it’s over? But it’s my choice to wear a mask.