The start of the new year has done the trick and I seem to be falling over myself finding new subjects that inspire at the moment. It is weird how this happens and I think the longer your fallow period has been, the more of an avalanche you experience when you get back to it. Ideas seem to be popping up all over.
A trip to Attenborough (which is a nature reserve on the River Trent close by us in Nottingham) on Sunday was a nice interlude. Strange weather with bright sunshine one minute and then a thick mist the next making the scene eerily quiet and almost spooky.
Eerie mist at Attenborough
But it all helped with the inspiration I think.
Home and straight into the studio to get on with my Irises composition. A new composition is complete and transferred to watercolour paper.
New Irises composition
It is a very large composition and I'm a bit scared of it! Very detailed drawing, difficult not to do that with irises, but I want to paint it in a looser way. And what about the background? the jury is still out about that. Will it be an actual scene in the background, ie my garden and hedge, or will it be loose and indeterminate?
In the meantime I am taken by the daffodils by a sunny window that I did as a tonal sketch the other day. The sketch has shown me that it could work as a watercolour. So I have been transferring the sketch on to transfer paper to put on to my watercolour sheet.
I'm keeping up with the #sketchjanuary activity on Twitter as well and decided to do this sketch of some irises while watching TV!
Just before that I spent an hour or so doing a watercolour sketch that I've been meaning to do for a long time of the ancient groynes that we can see out of the window on the beach at Sovereign Harbour. I took a close up photo and loved the rusty nuts and bolts, thinking that I could interpret them with wet in wet washes.
I slept well last night!