Marble Hill House
​Oil on panel 5x7"
(sold)

I've always loved paintings of buildings, and I especially love painting rooftops and chimneys - I really enjoy the way they catch the light.
I'm lucky enough to live just down the road from this beautiful English Heritage site. The house was built in the 18th Century for Henrietta Howard, who was the mistress of King George II.  Its set in a beautiful park and is definitely worth a visit if you're ever in Twickenham. 

Three Poplars
​Oil on panel 10x8"
Available from Newbloodart online gallery

I painted this in Marble Hill Park on a beautiful April evening.  The golden light was shining right through the newly opening leaves of the Poplar trees and casting long shadows on the grass. I might make a larger studio painting based on this someday.

Oil painting on panel 5x7". Available from Newbloodart online gallery

If you're already following me on Instagram then you may have seen this painting there, which I painted back in March.  I was fooled by looking out at  the strong sunshine into thinking it would be warm, but there was a bitter easterly breeze which really froze my fingers by the end of it.

Last time I painted this subject in Orleans House Woods, was in January, and I was painting with the sun behind me. I opted to paint into the sun this time as I loved the light streaming through the green foliage on the ground.
Now - surely you can't paint spring without a fair amount of bright green,  I actually went crazy and used a bit of pthalo green for this painting (for those of you who haven't used it it's  a scarily highly pigmented green which can easily contaminate all your colours if you leave just a tiny bit on your brush!). 

Painting trees is time consuming, and I ran out of time to complete this outdoors, so finished off the left hand trees at home from memory. 

White Ranunculus 
Oil painting on panel 5x7"
​(sold)

If you've been reading my blog already, you'll know that on the first of January I set myself the challenge of producing a painting every day this year.  Since then I've produced a lot of small paintings, and although I've been updating my instagram account @rlpaintings, I haven't managed to keep up to blogging about them. 
It was proving to be too time consuming to write a post for each painting, and also I'm not keen on putting up iphone snaps here.  I prefer to take a good photo with my digital SLR and that takes a little more time than I've got on a daily basis.
So now i'm just going to be updating my blog and facebook with the best of the daily paintings, and also the larger works once completed.

The white ranunculus flowers were lovely to paint - such nice rounded forms.  I definitely want to paint some again when I get the chance!

Oil painting on primed card 5x4"

Time to get back into the swing of daily painting!
I've a whole load of objects in my shadow box, waiting to make an appearance ( I do find something very theatrical about the set up)
Here are a couple of books I found in a charity shop: Lieutenant Hornblower, and The Art of Thinking. I've not read them - I'm afraid I only bought them because they look beautiful - I love the faded, loose covers. I wonder whose they were and if they enjoyed reading them. 
A rather peculiar composition, but these studies I'm doing are designed as experiments rather than finished pieces. 
Its nice to finally feel like I've got the hang of technique to the point where I can play around a bit.
​I feel like I'll be using these books in a larger painting soon.

Oil painting on primed card 6x4"

Another little compositional study completed on Wednesday- two sick children to look after now - hence the lack of paintings! I’ll be back soon...

Oil painting on panel 5x7"

I've got an ill child again unfortunately - just a virus, poor little thing, but she's been ill for a few days now so I'm back to trying to paint and write late into the evening.  
I made this little study last night, the objects have crept round to the other side of the shadow box where the light is a little different again.  I like the strong diagonal shadows on the objects, but am not happy about how close they are to the drapes at the back.  I was thinking of painting the backgound entirely black but I think ill leave it as it is and try something different next time. 
I painted this pretty quickly, and only with sable brushes just so that I could try out the composition.  Ill be doing a few more quick studies like this as I'm planning on trying some larger still life pieces.

Not going to attempt to paint tonight as I finished this one so late  night last and got woken up a few times as well.  I feel a bit odd not painting on the days I can't paint, like something really important is missing.

So far I've managed 43 out of 64 days which isn't bad considering how little time I get.  Its definitely improved my painting a lot.

Oil painting on panel 5x7"

Oil painting on panel 5x7"

Another bright frosty morning had me setting up my easel by the banks of the river Thames again.  This group of trees is becoming a recurring motif in my paintings. You can find it in Orleans Gardens, looking over towards the Ham side of the river.
There was a lot of haze in the air which really increased the atmospheric perspective.  Its only a couple of weeks since the last frosty painting  but the light seems very different already as the sun is now higher and the light  stronger.
Maybe because of the smaller panel size, I didn't feel in such a rush this morning.  I remembered to step back and consider the overall effect a lot more.  I've been thinking about how to create colour harmony and researching this in Edgar Payne's book, Composition of Outdoor painting. I used a lot of blue and yellow today, it seems to tie the piece together quite well.

Oil painting on panel 8x8"

One of the positives to come out of my daily painting practice has been trying out new subjects.  I've really got into painting flowers, and have decided to make a series of flower paintings.  I think most of these are going to take me two sessions rather than one (remember I only have a couple of hours per day to create my daily painting - not a whole day) so while I'm doing these I will be posting every other day.
I'll still do other smaller daily paintings on the days I'm not working on this series.

These primroses were really hard to paint! The petals are almost flat and as a result had the very subtlest changes in value across them.  The folds in the petals were quite crisp and deep, hard to suggest without overdoing and creating very hard edges. I think I spent a large amount of time making adjustments to those creases and getting very frustrated with the results.  Its one of those paintings I like better now I can't see it compared to the subject!  
It seems to work ok as a painting but really I didn't feel that I'd done the primroses justice at all at the time.

I've included some process shots below.  I started with the pot and foliage but could equally have started with the flowers, in fact I think that would probably have made more sense as the flowers are likely to change much more. I'm starting with the flowers in my latest painting of some daffodils and will do a blog post about it tomorrow.

I hope the process photos are interesting, and maybe even useful if you are learning to paint.  If you have any questions, please leave a comment, I'd be glad to help.

Oil painting on primed card 6x4”

The shiny red skin of this apple makes it an irresistible subject to paint - however high chroma objects like this are quite difficult to render. It’s impossible to match the chroma in the lighter values, so I add in a little cadmium yellow medium which takes the hue around towards orange but keeps the chroma quite high. The values in the mid tones and lights are pretty compressed as well. I’d love to hear from other artists how they get around the high value, high chroma problem in their paintings.