I like to try to spend a little time painting on as many days as I can, and for obvious reasons, the key to this is to keep my pictures small. One of my favourite formats seems to be 5cm square pictures painted in a fairly loose style, with not too much detail and a fairly limited colour palette. Each picture starts with a few pencil marks that serve as guide lines for the pen work, mostly outlining key features and providing various forms of shading. Once the ink has dried, which only takes a few seconds, I start to apply the watercolour paint, usually colouring the sky and any large blocks of vegetation first, before moving on to fill in any details. The whole process generally takes less than 30 minutes and my preference is to spend time of this as pretty much the first thing I do in the morning. When I completed my first small picture, I didn’t have any particular plans for further pictures on the same theme, but one picture led to another, and it seems that I end up producing these miniature watercolours as part of a series, first Dartmoor Scenes and then House Plants, Capital City Landmarks, and a series of slightly larger Mysterious Britain pictures. Most recently, returning closer to home, I completed this set of pictures showing various landmarks in our neighbouring county, Cornwall.
The pictures weren’t painted in this order, but the subjects of my Cornwall Landmarks series are (from top-left working across the rows and down the columns in the composite picture above) The Roundhouse Gallery, Sennen Cove, The Eden Project near St Austell, Bedruthan Steps, Men-An-Tol stone ring, St Michael’s Mount near Penzance, a classic coastal tin mine pumping station, the Minac Theatre, Tintagel Castle and Restormel Castle near Lostwithiel. If I had to choose favourites then I think I would go for the pictures of The Roundhouse Gallery, Bedruthan Steps and Restormel Castle, although I might well make different selections the next time I look at them!
As with each of my other miniature watercolour series, I plan to get some copies of the 3 x 3 composite picture printed as greetings cards to sell at some point, and I will probably try out some of them as individual framed versions too.
I guess the obvious question for me now is where I will go next with this kind of miniature watercolour picture. This morning I painted a view from a photograph I took last week while staying in Exmoor, and so I guess that it is likely that I will end up doing some more from that beautiful part of the world. But whether I will end up with enough for a full series, so that I can make another 3 x 3 composite, only time will tell!
Tim O'Hare 