Tag: landscape-painting

Mevagissey #art

I painted this little watercolour picture of Mevagissey harbour back in June. I was looking to paint a picture to use for a birthday card for the son of one of my wife’s best friends, and brother to one of my elder daughter’s closest friends (by which I mean that the son was also the brother!). As it happened, a couple of months previously, his mum had seen some of my pictures when visiting our home, we got talking about art, and along the way she told us how he had surprised her by saying that when he finally got his own place to live (he’s in his mid/late 20s) he wanted to have pictures of two places that were special to him – Pew Tor on Dartmoor, close to their home in Tavistock, and Mevagissey in Cornwall.

As the date of the birthday approached I started to think of painting one of my ‘special place’ pictures for his card. The trouble was, I was faced with a choice, and anyone who knows me well will know that one thing I am not good at dealing with is choice. It’s tempting to think that choice is a good thing, and I am sure that I would say that I’d prefer to always have a choice than not, but in many ways I’d find life a lot easier if there was a little creature sitting on my shoulder, or tucked into my sleeve, whispering to tell me what to do all of the time.

Should I paint Pew Tor or should I paint Mevagissey?

I’d painted a larger picture of Pew Tor back in early March and knew that I could produce something smaller but similar that would work as a birthday card. I’d also painted various places in Cornwall as part of my Cornwall Landmarks Miniature Watercolours Series. But I’d never tackled Mevagissey… So, one morning I took a small piece of watercolour paper, performed a quick Google search for a suitable photograph, and set to work.

I like the results of my effort – the painting that introduces this post. The picture I chose was a fairly busy scene, with the quayside at Mevagissey backed by all kinds of interestingly shaped and coloured buildings, a host of colourful boats moored at the water’s edge, a pair of rather striking light-blue benches towards the right of the scene, and the bright yellow fishing boat pulling out confidently towards open waters. It was a picture that provided lots of splashes of colour that give the painting a nice sense of aliveness I think.

But, in the end, it was Pew Tor that won the mental tug-of-war that was taking place inside my head. I put my little Mevagissey picture, really just a test piece, to one side, and opted instead for the Dartmoor ‘special place’ rather than the Cornish one. If you are reading this soon after it was originally posted (on 9th September 2025) and want to see the Pew Tor picture that I ended up using, then you’ll just have to visit this site again in a few days time… because if all goes to plan I will post it here soon. For now, you’ll just have to enjoy a quick trip to Mevagissey – a perfect example of the many picturesque little harbour towns that line the southern Cornish coastline.

Dartmoor Scenes #art

At the beginning of last month (March 2025) I decided that I wanted to try to embed a more regular art practice into my life. So, one evening, I sliced a piece of watercolour paper into a series of 5 cm squares with the intention of painting some kind of miniature picture each morning. I didn’t know what I would paint, just that I would try to paint something, as often as I could.

It was interesting, then, to wake up the next day and find myself sitting down at my painting table at 7:30 am, before I had even eaten breakfast, painting a little scene of a tor and some scattered rocks, a scene that is typical of Dartmoor, the National Park just north of Plymouth where I live. Because I was working on such a small piece of paper, and because I was trying to work quickly, before I got fully enmeshed in the day’s activities, I found myself adopting a simpler style than usual, with fewer, and bolder, colours and some use of cross-hatching to show shadows and darker areas. I liked what emerged.

After that first painting (the one at the top-left of the composite picture at the top of this post) I still didn’t know what would happen next, but at some point, perhaps after two or three days, I came to realise that I was creating a series of miniature pictures that I labelled Dartmoor Scenes. Initially, it was my intention to paint five pictures, one on each weekday, but having successfully reached that number I decided to push on to nine. This seemed to me to be a good number for a series of little square pictures, neatly forming a 3 x 3 grid.

As I approached what I thought would be the final picture, I received a comment on my Bluesky (social media) account on which where I was posting my new picture each day, suggesting that the pictures would make a nice calendar. It was an idea that I liked, a lot, but of course a calendar needs 12 pictures, one for each month… and so my miniature watercolour Dartmoor Scenes series had to become a collection of 12 pictures in total.

I really enjoyed producing these little pictures (and have since gone on to produce two more sets of 12 similarly-sized pictures on different themes – watch this space for details!). I enjoyed being forced to keep things simple and was really happy with the results (more in some cases than in others). I particularly like the stone row and stone circle pictures on the top row (second-left and top-right), and the tree and wall scene (third-left, bottom row). I also really like the way that they look when placed together.

Although it was already almost the end of March by the time I received it, I got a desk calendar printed up as a kind of test run to see how well it worked… and it worked very well indeed, the pictures coping with being expanded to almost double their original size. Subsequently, I have also had each picture printed as a 10 cm square card and had some copies of a larger card printed with a 3 x 3 composite of the nine pictures that I think are the best of the selection. At some point I hope to get more of these cards printed so that I can have a go at trying to sell some of my artwork. It will be interesting to see what happens if and when I do!

As an experiment in trying to be more regular with my artistic endeavours, this activity has worked really well, and although I have now moved on from Dartmoor Scenes, I suspect that I will return to this theme again at some point and complete another set (at least another four to get to a 4 x 4 grid, but who knows, maybe I have another 13, 24 or even 37 Dartmoor Scenes still in me!)

If you like these pictures, I’d love it if you added a quick comment to this post. It would be fun to know which one(s) you like best.

Ronda, Spain #art

As I noted in another recent ‘art’ post (Home Park, Plymouth Argyle), it seems to have become a ‘thing’ that I create handmade cards for birthdays and special occasions associated with family and friends. For these cards, I generally paint a small watercolour picture of a scene that has a special connection to the person or event being celebrated or one that just shows a place that they really like. I usually use some small (roughly 10cm x 15cm) rough-edged raggy paper, for the painting and then I tape this to a simple brown card. This gives an interesting and attractive, rather rustic, feel to the cards which I think is appropriate given their handmade nature.

I painted the picture above, of Ronda in southern Spain, at the start of last month to use on a birthday card for my elder daughter’s husband. They travelled to Ronda to attend the wedding of one of my her workmates just a month or two before their own wedding last June and he liked it so much that my daughter was quick to suggest it as the subject for his card. To be completely honest, the other alternative was for me to try to paint a picture of Stamford Bridge, home to Chelsea F.C. (his team sadly) and apart from me not wanting to have to paint a scene that had lots of people in it, it was quite difficult to find a suitable picture to base a painting on. So, Ronda it was…

Funnily enough, despite being an incredibly scenic and much photographed location, with its deep gorge and steep cliff faces, Ronda was also a difficult subject to find a suitable picture to recreate as a painting. Most of the photographs of the town that I could find online were either taken from a distant vantage point designed to show the full majesty of the cliff-top location (which then made all of the interesting details of the buildings etc. shrink to an unworkable size) or were focused on a single ornate building or just the bridge that spans the gorge (and so did not really capture anything about the setting). In the end I opted for this shot of the bridge with a decent chunk of the cliff faces visible and some suitably Spanish-looking buildings. I tried to capture some of the drama in the scene as the setting sun creates its own lightshow between the pillars of the bridge. The picture/card was certainly appreciated, so I can’t have done too bad of job!