Garlic Bulb

Coloured-pencil sketch on Ingres paper.

Orange Chillies

A parcel arrived in the post the other day, packed with dried chillies of all shapes and sizes, colours ranging from palest yellow through burnt orange and garnet red to dark brown. All the way from Devon. Now shipping chillies from England to the south of France sounds a bit like carrying coals to Newcastle... but here in the foothills of the Pyrenees they are a rarity. And apart from liking spicy food, I've found that they are a perfect still life subject.

Here are my first two line and wash drawings of one of the varieties.

Dried Chillies

A quick watercolour sketch of some papery, shrivelled up chillies, last year's crop left to dry out on the plant.

Pink Garlic

I realised it was almost a year since my last post. Just to show I haven't been completely idle in the art department, here is a drawing I did in February. Pen and ink and coloured pencil on Ingres paper.

Aquilegia Alpina

This was painted specially for a friend's birthday. While working on it I was overanxious about capturing the exquisite blue and delicacy of the petals and to my mind this is reflected in a slight woodenness in the flower. My favourite part is the buds against the dark background.

La Maison Jaune

Shadows cast on French houses are an obsession of mine and this might be the beginning of a series. There are a few technical slip-ups in this painting and it's not as loose as I would have liked, but overall I feel as if I'm making progress in handling the medium and developing my own style.

Tyres & Tiles

In my wanderings round the village one afternoon, I came upon this heap of 'junk' - discarded tyres propped up against a wall, ragged bits of doors and shutters, broken canal tiles neatly stacked in front, and the whole thing overgrown with ivy. The perfect outdoor still-life arrangement. Working from a photograph, my aim was to stay loose with both the initial pencil drawing and the paint.