Mistletoe sunset

Just been back to Vienna for a few days. In autumn and winter the mistletoe is so obvious silhouetted amongst the stark branches. It looks like baubles, or big round birds nests. This watercolour is looking across the Alte Donau as the sun sets.

High altitude rainforest illustration, in progress

Work in progress. The illustration is to show the rare indri, the largest lemurs in Madagascar, in their mountain rainforest. They look like giant black and white teddy bears with crazy green saucer eyes. Every morning indri families get together and sing. This sounds charming but in fact their singing is more like a siren, and the sound travels for miles.
The illustration will be used on the sixth and final poster for the Ako Project environmental conservation campaign, http://www.lemurreserve.org/akoproject.html. The posters are used in schools all over Madagascar.
I'll update this post as the illustration progresses.

Masoala illustration finished...yay

I had to make a couple of changes, if you compare it with the earlier versions (see a few posts down) I've changed the pool in the foreground to an inlet of the sea. As was pointed out to me, there isn't much point in keeping your dugout canoe on a pond when there's the Indian Ocean just round the corner...
It also makes more sense like this in terms of perspective and colour, I think.
Next I need to scan it, but that's a big job, because it has to be done in two bits and stitched together.

Right now I'm off to pack for a weekend in Devon : ) great, except for the awful drive down. Was thinking about when we were living in Vienna, if you drove 7 or 8 hours in any direction you'd get into at least one other country. Here, we get to pass Birmingham at just about rush hour.

Recent oil landscape

I recently completed this oil landscape for my friend Giselle. She used to live near Galgate and wanted a picture which would remind her of the area. I cycled and walked around a lot looking and photographing, with enjoyment but little inspiration, until one morning I found this wall curving over the fields, and used it as my starting point. The painting is a sort of composite image of the upper valley of the river Conder, which downstream, flows right past Giselle's old house.

It's painted mainly using palette knives, which I love. The tone of the painting is deliberately quite flat, my main interest being in the shapes and colours of the fields.

Harvest Moon

The full moon last Thursday (23rd) was lovely. Around the equinox you do seem to see the best moons, I'm not really sure why.

Cartmel Peninsula/Autumn

A sketch I made yesterday from Warton Crag looking north/ north west across the Cartmel Peninsula towards the higher hills of the Lake District. I drew in white pastel, on a base of acrylic - if I ever have left over paint I just cover a page of my sketch book. It was amazing light; the hills were lit in parts by glimpses of sun which had escaped the dark clouds, creating small golden fringes and pools of light which contrasted with the darkness of the hills. Dark, because unlike most of Lancashire, or the UK for that matter, north west Lancashire and south Cumbria is still largely covered by woodland - hazel, birch, holly, ash, yew, rowan, elder, lots of berries looking beautiful at the moment. Today it's cold and wet, the heating is back on for the first time, Autumn has definitely arrived.

Illustration in progress...

I decided that it might help me reduce procrastination time if I published work in progress; my 8 followers will be so breathless with anticipation that I will work faster. It's the central image for a poster about Masoala Rainforest in the north east of Madagascar. I'm painting it in acrylic, because I like the way it allows you to build layers on top of one another.