Tom. A2 pastel portrait.

Be stronger. Be braver. It was a great choice of subject. I want to do more portraits with subjects just like this. I love the wacky underpainting and background. Going to keep doing more of that. Get the lines right before you ever start. Check. Measure. Check again. I like using wacky colours even for stuff like skin and hair, as long as the value and the temperature of the colour is correct then it's more fun and more effective than doing the skin with pink, the hair with brown. Paint what you love.

Pastel study of a view near my house. The first image is the whole landscape as I drew it. Then I have cropped it a number of different ways to get different effects. The drawing is A3 size.

Dilapidated shed behind my house. In thick, medium and fine willow charcoal sticks on A2 fine-grain heavyweight paper. It's about tones and textures rather than lines. No-one is going to want thins hanging on their wall, or anything else I have produced yet, but they are steps on a journey that will end somewhere else.

I enojyed drawing the trees in charcoal this morning. I like working big, I like the soft textures of the charcoal and I like using my fingers to blend areas of tone, and using a putty rubber to lift tone off - it's all fun. So this afternoon I took the easel and the charcoal sticks outside and did another couple of drawings.

Two trees visible from my kitchen window, which I always think of as "Laurel and Hardy". Thick, medium and fine willow charcoal sticks on A2 fine-grain heavyweight paper.

I produced this in a different way than I have ever worked before (in my long career as an artist....), by looking at areas of different tone and blocking in the tone on the paper before working on any detail. I have no great regard for it as a finished work of art but I enjoyed doing it and I learned a great deal.

Butterfly. Work in progress. The idea was to sketch an outline then fill areas of colour wth watercolour, then overwork with coloured pencils to build up depth of colour. But the paper is wrong for this approach, it is too textured. The close-up image shows what I mean. So I intend to apply water over the coloured pencils, which are watercolour pencils after all, and complete it as a watercolour painting.

Ellie's Teddy. In 3B pencil on A5 NOT cold pressed fine grain watercolour paper. Like Ernest H. Shepherd on an "off" day.