Cambridgeshire

This is a watercolour house portrait of a house in Cambridgeshire. I remember walking up to the house during my visit and thinking that the sun was in the perfect place to cast those shadows from the porch across the front of the house. It was lit up perfectly ... about 10.30 am was the time I took the photo and then worked on the painting from my studio.

This is what the home owner said upon seeing the finished painting:

We met Pete when he rang our doorbell some
time back and asked if we would like a watercolour
of our house. He was so personable that we agreed
and he took some photos. We suggested one or 2
bits of "artistic licence" the most important of which
was to include our recently deceased black cat, Wendy,
in the kitchen window.
He executed the brief perfectly.

Harvesting Photos

These photographs were taken on Saturday 11th August in the afternoon. Stebbing in Essex. It's the time of year when the farmers are working to get the harvest in, which is proving to be very difficult at the moment because it's never dry enough. My visit coincided with a warm spell of weather so the combine harvesters were working around the clock.

The way the machinery throws up all that dust on a backdrop of a wide open landscape with the tracks going through the crops makes for a stunning photo - I'd like to work a couple of these up to a watercolour painting at some point.

Starting out in Essex

Yesterday I gave my talk 'Adventures of the Roving Artist' to the Cambridge Rutherford Rotary Club. They meet on a weekly basis in Queens College - a stunning location. It went down very well with plenty of the gentlemen enquiring about possible commissions.

At the end of the day, I found a B&b on an arable farm in Duddenhoe End. When I came for my breakfast this morning, I asked for a bacon sandwich. The Dutch lady who was serving me looked at me strangely and said 'in 25 years of doing B&b no one has ever asked for such a thing as a bacon sandwich!' I wondered what they had been asking for? The way she said it made me think that I'd asked for a trough of baked beans, garnished with a couple of dead dogs!

Halifax

I took this photo this morning touring around a part of Halifax that I had not visited before. It's just above a pub called the Shibden Mill Inn. Fantastic how the sun catches some of the trees. I'll have to paint this scene one day. In fact, a dozen or so watercolours of landscapes in west Yorkshire would make for a very special exhibition...