Too many ideas, too little time

I just realised it's ten days since my last post. So much about my resolution to write and post regularly on this blog (at least about three times a week is my current goal)! I've spent a short holiday/long weekend in England last weekend, with two trips to London to visit my favourite shops and stocking up on various art supplies and stuff (more about this later ) and to see two excellent plays at the Haymarket (The Tempest - oh I loved Ariel!) and the Wyndham Theatre (Driving Miss Daisy), and three days of spending the day strolling through country houses and their parks and gardens, among them my favourite place, Anglesey Abbey (never get tired of visiting this place!). And then there's work, there's the Blogging Your Way e-course I'm spending quite some time on, filling my notebook like mad, and all the new paints and things to try out. Not to speak of the hundreds of pictures I took in England that are waiting to be sorted through, looked at and post processed.

So I'm posting this post today, which I meant to post last week, before my trip. I spent the weekend two weeks ago with my watercolours - the bad weather was a perfect excuse to stay at home and paint.

I love blueberries, and an old photo I posted on Flickr last year was perfect to copy.

I really love the layering possibilities of watercolours. I know I've mentioned before that it is rather different than painting with acrylics, but I still find it very fascinating. And I'm still loving my squirrel brush. (Btw, Nigel, to answer a question I meant to answer ages ago: the other animal hair famously used for the finest watercolour brushes is that of the Siberian weasel, or kolinsky, known as Kolinsky sable-hair brushes, or simply just as pure Kolinsky. They're made by using hair of the winter fur of male animals).

But it always takes quite some time for them to dry, and it does require patience. Much more than acrylics, where you can just use a hair dryer to speed up the process. But it's not really such a bad thing.

The most difficult part of all, though, is to take pictures (or scans) that reproduce the colours accurately. I really find that quite impossible. Even more so as I do a lot of my painting in the evenings, after work, with no natural light.

Some finishing touches, and they're ready to go into a frame and up on the kitchen wall. Or more likely into the portfolio, together with all the other ones... I really enjoyed doing this, so much that I decided to use it as my blog header for the moment (I'm working on a new one, but it may take some time).

My head is full of ideas right now, for paintings I want to do, sketches to try out, colour charts to put together, art journaling pages to be filled, pictures to process, pictures to take, blog posts to write, and most of all, with ideas for improving and (re-)designing my blog. But I'll have another busy weekend before me - I'll have to work on Sunday :( - so I'll still be needing some time to catch up with everything - both with working on my own blog and with staying in touch with other bloggers. I'm still here, I'm still visiting and enjoying all the wonderful work out there, and I'll be in touch again more actively soon. It's a promise!