Red Coat

Acrylic on canvas

An experiment of painting on canvas wth acrylic paints. It was very quick, approx A3 in size and just playing with some old paints and brushes. It is just a possible starting point as I want the characters to be much more interesting and quirky. Need to get a technique right first.

Portrait

Cafe portrait.

A Useful Thing

Of all the things I have done in the past few days, the one I am perhaps most pleased with is adding this little wooden shelf to the pergoda in the vegetable patch. After all, one needs to have somewhere on which to place a coffee mug when admiring one's handiwork. The little bird house is an ornament from Poundland.

New Path

The back of the garden has always been a problem area. When we moved in a few years ago I cut down some leylandii and had been left with quite a few stumps to await removal one day. A couple of days ago I managed to dig up four stumps and then level out the ground a little. The job was made more interesting by the discovery of yet more concrete path buried under the surface. This I dug up and added to my annoyingly growing pile of yet more unwanted hardcore. The more I take to the dump, the more I seem to keep digging up! This time I decided to resort to my old trick of burying it as a base to a new path. So, in pouring rain, this is what I did. The soil dug up was used to level off the ground on the right and this was then sown with grass seed. The resultant trench was filled with all the unwanted hardcore and this was then covered with woodchip acquired from a local patch of waste ground where some overgrowth had been chipped. The path leads from the lawn to a wood pile and behind that is my compost heap. Ideally the path could do with some edging but I'm not too bothered at the moment as it is not in a prominant part of the garden. At last I have tidied up this area.

Bayleaf Planter

Made this planter today for a bayleaf plant on our patio that had outgrown its pot. The wood was salvaged from various places and the paint was left over from a project several years ago. The wooden hearts came from some Cristmas decorations and the planter was lined with thick polythene. Just had to buy a bag of compost.

The white table was rescued from my local dump and will probably be repainted sometime. The bench to the left was probably a temporary builders workbench which was found in a local skip.

Reading

Had longer to work on this sketch than expected and it went in various directions before I settled down on this. I'm not totally pleased with but it kept me quiet for a while.