Today is the first day of Wimbledon, so I decided to honour that and paint a picture of Andy Murray.  The medium was acrylic paints: I’m very pleased with that.  Will said he thought it was my best work yet :-) This was what I was working from (the front cover of the Radio Times).  […]

This week was acrylics.  Although I’d done this before Will recommended doing the colour mixing exercises. I’m not going to bother reproducing them here, but I was pretty pleased with my grey (made from red, blue and yellow).  It’s actually really hard to make the complete absence of colour from three primary colours! Then in […]

This week was watercolours.  I’ve done Will’s class before, so I skipped the watercolour exercises and went straight onto a ‘wet on wet’ portrait (over a charcoal sketch): Not perfect, but so much better than my last attempt of this technique! This was what I was working from: I still had a few minutes left […]

Back to pastels this week – possibly my favourite medium. This one falls into the camp of ‘Wow – that’s good – who’s it supposed to be?  Oh.  Really?’ Yup, it seems I’m good at drawing, just not at drawing what it’s supposed to look like! Here’s this week’s piece: Not bad, huh?  But who […]

I had to be a bit secretive about this week’s piece, and delay blogging about it, as it was to be a present for my mum’s 75th birthday. My aim was to do a pencil sketch of my nephew Thomas based on this photo I took last year (aged 9): After the 2 hour class […]

After a too-long 5 week break, Will’s art class started up again this week. Since this is the start of another term, Will is repeating the syllabus, and I can choose to follow along if I think it would be useful, or do my own thing with the materials provided. I asked Will’s advice, and […]

On Easter Sunday I went to Clevedon with friends.  It felt like the first sunny day of the year, and was warm enough to sit outside to eat our lunch.  Although I did leave my coat, scarf and hat on. Walking along the sea front I saw a gorgeous tree, swept back from years of […]

In the gap between terms of the Paint and Draw art classes with Will Stevens, I got withdrawal symptoms. My friend Dani had posted an image on Facebook of an abstract tree by Louise Mead.  I decided to use it as inspiration and try to paint something similar on my iPad. I used the Procreate […]

Last week of the term :-( So, another week of mistakes, and learning from them! This week was acrylics again, this time doing a full picture.  I messed up the assignment slightly, as I think Will intended for us to practice blending colours in our pictures, but I’d picked a picture to copy that was […]

Today was our first experience with acrylic paints. Will did quite a long lesson in how to mix colours, which was very interesting.  Then the rest of the lesson was exercises in mixing palettes ourselves. First we had to do some natural progressions from one colour to another (kind of like a colour wheel).  Then […]