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Artists using cutting-edge technology and forensic analysis have reconstructed a series of lost masterpieces, including versions of Monet’s Water Lilies and Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.

The re-creations are the work of Factum Arte, a group of artists and technicians whose projects have included an exact reproduction of the burial chamber of Tutankhamun. The Concert, a 17th-century work by Vermeer which was stolen in 1990 in the biggest art heist of modern times, has also been re-created, along with a 1954 portrait of Winston Churchill by Graham Sutherland, which the wartime leader’s wife, Clementine, destroyed in disgust.

Factum Arte uses 3D scanners originally developed for medical purposes to record the surface of a painting or an object down to the finest brush-mark or crack. It detects details that the naked eye cannot, recording surface not colour. “By removing the colour from the surface, you can see things completely differently,” said Adam Lowe, director and founder of Factum Arte. Other tools include 3D scanners to record shape.

One of Monet’s smaller Water Lilies canvases was hanging in the Museum of Modern Art in New York until 1958, when it fell victim to a catastrophic fire. Despite bad smoke damage, forensic analysis extracted crucial details of its colour and surface, allowing the painting’s rendering of the movement of light on water to be re-created.

“It’s absolutely breathtaking,” said Lowe. “I think Monet would believe it was his painting.”

Van Gogh’s lost Sunflowers picture was one of seven painted in 1888, and was bought by a Japanese collector. It was destroyed during the US bombing of the city of Ashiya in 1945.

The National Gallery allowed Lowe’s team to scan its Sunflowers painting, enabling them to reconstruct the artist’s brushstrokes in painting at speed.

Lowe said: “We had a very poor colour photograph and some other reference material, but we were able to identify the position of the brush-strokes and distort the individual strokes from the National Gallery painting to fit the lost painting. We relied on knowledge of Van Gogh’s palette and the paints he was using at the time to reconstruct the colour. Van Gogh would be very happy.”

Lowe is particularly excited by the Vermeer reconstruction, as the original could still surface one day: “I hope we’ll be able to see how close our ‘performance’ was.”

The Concert tops the list of the worldʼs most-wanted paintings. Valued at $200m, it was among 13 works stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the US city of Boston. Relying on a couple of poor photographs, Lowe’s team was also able to scan a Vermeer from the same period in the Royal Collection.

The Churchills thought they had seen the last of Sutherland’s portrait. Commissioned by parliament for Churchill’s 80th birthday, it was loathed by its subject, who said it made him look “half-witted”. Clementine had the painting burned, which Sutherland condemned as an “act of vandalism”.

Asked how the Churchills would feel about the reconstruction, Lowe said: “They would be horrified because it has come back from the grave. They were completely wrong to destroy it. It wasn’t theirs to destroy. It was painted to hang in Parliament. It’s a very powerful, tender portrait.”

The replica has been made possible partly through a high-resolution photograph never released before. It was taken by Larry Burrows, the great war photographer. Lowe said: “Burrows followed Churchill and had taken a good photograph of the painting. It’s never been seen.”

Other reconstructions include Klimt’s vast Allegory of Medicine, which was seized by the Nazis and taken to an Austrian castle where, in 1945, a retreating SS unit destroyed the castle with the Klimt inside.

“It’s a very dramatic tale,” Lowe said. Using one black-and-white photograph and a coloured detail, his team remade the entire work.

The re-created masterpieces will feature in a series, Mystery of the Lost Paintings, on Sky Arts from 2 May. Philip Edgar-Jones, director of Sky Arts, said the project was unprecedented: “The stories of how such colossal masterpieces were lost, stolen or destroyed are as compelling as any detective series. The process of bringing them back to life gets deep under the skin of the artists’ craft.”

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INNOVATION February 19th
Picasso masterpiece reveals lost painting, hidden details
By James Rogers | Fox News
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Picasso mystery: Hidden artwork discovered beneath painting
Researchers at Northwestern University have revealed a hidden landscape painting beneath Pablo Picasso's famous La Misereuse Accroupie (The Crouching Beggar).

Scientists have harnessed sophisticated X-ray and imaging technology to reveal a lost painting and other details hidden in a Picasso masterpiece.

The painting, “La Miséreuse accroupie” (The Crouching Woman), is a major work from Picasso’s Blue Period. High-tech analysis of the 1902 painting, however, has revealed how Picasso painted over a landscape by another painter. Buried images linked to other works by Picasso have also been found.

Owned by the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto, the painting of the crouching and cloaked woman was analyzed by an international team of experts.

SECRET GHOSTLY PORTRAIT OF MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS, DISCOVERED BENEATH 16TH-CENTURY PAINTING

In addition to researchers from the AGO, the Northwestern University/Art Institute of Chicago Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts (NU-ACCESS) and the National Gallery of Art in Washington worked to unravel the painting’s secrets.

Picasso3
Analysis shows the pigments present in the different paint layers of "La Miséreuse accroupie" (© Northwestern University/Art Institute of Chicago Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts [NU-ACCESS])

The identity of the landscape artist is unknown, although experts believe that the work was likely created by another painter in Barcelona, where Picasso spent part of his early life.

Picasso painted over the landscape after rotating it 90 degrees to the right and also incorporated some of the features into “La Miséreuse accroupie,” according to the researchers. Some of the lines from the cliff edge were incorporated into the woman’s back, they noted.

VAN GOGH DISCOVERY: PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN DRAWINGS BY DUTCH MASTER IDENTIFIED

“Picasso had no qualms about changing things during the painting process,” explained Marc Walton, a research professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University, in a statement. “Our international team – consisting of scientists, a curator and a conservator – has begun to tease apart the complexity of ‘La Miséreuse accroupie,’ uncovering subtle changes made by Picasso as he worked toward his final vision.”

NU-ACCESS research trip to Art Gallery of Ontario
X-ray fluorescence instrument set up for the scan of "La Miséreuse accroupie." (© Art Gallery of Ontario )

Scientists, for example, identified a compositional change in the painting – Picasso had initially painted the woman holding a disk in her right hand. However, these features, along with her right arm, were painted over with a cloak in the completed version of “La Miséreuse accroupie.”

Experts note that the hidden arm is similar to a woman’s right arm in “Femme assise, robe bleue,” (Seated woman, blue dress), a 1902 Picasso watercolor, that was sold at auction for $45 million last year.

GEORGE WASHINGTON'S FAMOUS REVOLUTIONARY WAR TENT FOUND IN NEWLY-DISCOVERED PAINTING

While previous X-rays had already identified an underlying landscape beneath “La Miséreuse accroupie,” the latest research has given a much clearer insight into the artwork’s secrets. John Delaney, senior imaging scientist at the National Gallery of Art, used infrared reflectance hyperspectral imaging, which identifies underlying images based on the relative transparency of their paint layers, to reveal the painted-over arm and disk.

Picasso1
Pablo Picasso's 1902 painting "La Miséreuse accroupie" ( © Picasso Estate/Art Gallery of Ontario)

NU-ACCESS scientists then garnered additional detail by scanning the painting with an X-ray fluorescence scanner.

“We now are able to develop a chronology within the painting structure to tell a story about the artist’s developing style and possible influences,” said Sandra Webster-Cook, AGO’s senior conservator of paintings, in a statement.

LEONARDO DA VINCI'S $450 MILLION 'SALVATOR MUNDI' PAINTING HEADS TO THE LOUVRE ABU DHABI

Scientists revealed their findings Saturday during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Austin.

Picasso2
X-ray radiography of La Miséreuse accroupie reveals a landscape hidden beneath the visible surface (© Art Gallery of Ontario)

In a separate project, experts from the Musée national Picasso-Paris and NU-ACCESS also performed high-tech analysis of 39 bronzes and 11 painted sheet metal sculptures by Picasso. The sculptures were studied using X-ray fluorescence spectrometry and an extensive database of alloy “fingerprints” from other early 20th-century bronzes.

Alloy analysis revealed that five of the bronzes were cast during 1941 and 1942 in a Paris foundry owned by Émile Robecchi, a relatively little-known collaborator of Picasso. Silver was also found in the facial features of one of the sheet metal sculptures. The research findings were also revealed Saturday at the AAAS meeting.

LONG-LOST 'NIGERIAN MONA LISA,' VALUED AT OVER $280G, FOUND IN 'MODEST' NORTH LONDON APARTMENT

Other artworks have also been revealing their secrets. Last month, for example, experts in the Netherlands identified two previously unknown drawings as works by Vincent van Gogh.

In 2017, a secret portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots that had been hidden for centuries beneath another painting was discovered.

Last year it also emerged that a recently discovered 235-year-old panoramic painting has the only known wartime depiction of George Washington’s Revolutionary War field tent.

Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers

Hello Everyone

This weekend was spent painting one of the garden scenes I have  been talking about over the last three weeks.  I concentrated on painting in the foreground using lemon yellow, titanium white, cobalt blue, ultramarine blue and cadmium red to paint in all the different types  of flowers in their various colours.  I painted some from memory and some from the pics i took around the Berkshire countryside, as Dinton Pastures did not have the variety of flowers I needed.  The day went pretty smooth my head was clear for a change, sometimes my thinking is clouded by too many tasks on the to do list and other things going on  in my life.  I finished the trees in the background and added in the sunshine on them and the lawn, I do need to finish the archway and tweak the trees in the background as they look one dimensional at the moment.  I did intend to do that today, which is Sunday but I did not sleep well last night and I woke up at 10.30am so half the morning and good light was gone.  It will be on the top of the list to complete the painting next weekend.

I have had a change of heart about the other four half finished, paintings, I don't like the way some of them have turned out so far, I couldn't get the colours right and the more paint I added the worse it got, urgh! it's time to let go,and as the bluebell scene I did last year is really popular I am going to create more bluebell scenes, and I can't wait to start them I am really excited to make them beautiful scenes.

Thank you for reading , don't forget to follow me for more blogs every Tuesday at 10:00am.  Like subscribe and follow me across my social me across my social media channels, until next time.

pinterest username: caravaggio2

twitter: @berkshirescenes

Instagram: berkshirescenes

website: http://www.joannesberkshirescenes.com/gallery.aspx

Hello Everyone

Just a quick update on how  my five new paintings are progressing.  Before I began painting this set of new scenes I decided to only paint at the weekends and do all the business stuff during the week. It's Monday today, blog day and a chance to reflect on how the painting went  this weekend.  I concentrated on the garden scene with the arch trellis because i felt more inspiration toward it due to a dream I had, and it is typical of how I operate.  I always have intentions to work on all five paintings from start to finish but I end up feeling more inspiration for a particular painting than the others, and once that one is nearly finished, or finished I then have more of a pull toward one of the others and I work on that one in the same way.   The reason I feel a rush of inspiration for this painting is down to a dream I had about it. I dreamed a curator of a top art gallery saw the five paintings in their half finished state and said they were really good but a bit flat and I had to work on my chiaroscuro.  I took that as my subconscious  giving me hints on how to make my work more beautiful, and I know what I am going to do next to make it a reality  but I won't share with you just yet, you will have to wait and see.

I painted in the sky and trees on the right hand side of the painting, I know the over all scene looks really green but that is mainly down to the camera I used.  What you are seeing at the moment is the basic colours that  have been put down and I will build it up from here.  I have lots of ideas of what flowers and plants I would like to see at the sides of the painting, but I am having trouble whittling them down to about three or four different types.  The painting of the foreground went a bit wrong, I used too much water in the paint mix and on the brush, and it took off the existing paint as I applied a second layer.  After it was dry I applied another layer of paint using a dry brush and it sorted out the problem.  I painted the trees in with ease and the first application of the grass on the right went down easily, I am looking forward to putting more detail on top of it.

Thank you for reading don't forget to subscribe to my blogs, tv channel and follow me on social media, the links are below, until next time every Tuesday at 10.00am

pinterest: caravaggio2

twitter: @berkshirescenes

Instagram: berkshirescenes

website: http://www.joannesberkshirescenes.com/gallery.aspx

Hello Everyone

Two weeks ago I went back to Dinton Pastures, which is a short drive from where I live. There have been a lot of developments to the park over the last few years such as a new play area for children has been built, and art exhibitions now take place in the fields behind the park. These latest developments have contributed to the increased traffic to the park and it was challenging finding a free parking space. I managed to park in the last free space, i reckon it is was artist's luck.
This time I am creating a combination of quintessentially English garden scenes and pretty landscapes. I gained my inspiration from a physcological thriller I was reading. In a particular chapter an English garden was described and the book also described the main character sketching and someone she knew painted beach scenes. All of this descriptive narrative was too much for my imagination and I added a book mark to the page I was currently reading and drove to Dinton Pastures to snap several different types of scenes and objects to create my own English Gardens and landscapes.  So far I have drawn out 5 different scenes and the half finished one attached is of my first English garden. I am pleased with it so far, it is becoming a beautiful and tranquil garden that you will be able to relax to. The colours I am using are cadmium yellow, titanium white, cobalt blue, cadmium red, ultramarine blue. I mixed my own different shades of green which i will use on the entire painting over using more shades of green which will unbalance the finished painting. Follow me on pinterest my user name is caravaggio2 to receive pic updates of the progression of this scene and the other scenes I am creating. There are pics of the other scenes for you to look at now, head on over.
Thank you for reading until the end, until next time

This undated photo provided by Australian Synchrotron and the National Gallery of Victoria shows an image appears, with X-ray fluorescence microscopy, beneath Edgar Degas' Portrait of a Woman. Staff at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, asked scientists from Australian Synchrotron to scan the painting with a high-definition X-ray beam produced by a particle accelerator called a synchrotron to unveil the image. (Australian Synchrotron and the National Gallery of Victoria via AP)
Hello Everyone

Today I want to share with you about how I keep up my motivation as an artist and business owner when I am going through slow and challenging times. I find it easy to keep motivated most of the time but when things are slow or go wrong I don�t feel like throwing in the towel and that is because art is my true love, my passion, my all, there is no other work for me out there, I should know I have done everything else and hated it, apart from being a nurse, surgeon, policewoman, judge, solicitor, doctor and prison officer. When things don�t work out how I expect them to i get angry, frustrated and for a few hours or days I have a rest and go out and do something else, and when I feel refreshed I go back to my work. I do find my inspiration and new found energy is naturally cyclical. Being able to sit and paint is so exhilirating like it is for adrenalin junkies to dive off the tallest building or mountain edge. It is part of me, the way I think and see the world and these emotions and mindset are stronger than the emotion of quitting. I read other artist�s struggles and tales of woe and it is encouraging to know other people go through similar struggles and down times. I have decided this year is the biggest breakthrough year for my art business, where I make the most money to date and take it to a new level and I can�t wait to get started after the New Year, I already have something in place ready to start the first week in January. I hope whoever is reading this takes something away from it and if you are an artist, I hope you feel relieved it is not only you in the world who experiences challenges, and no the featured image is not me, and if it was well, I preserved well didn�t I?

Happy New Year and I hope 2017 is a prosperous year for you all, thank you for subscribing and supporting me over the last three years, and long may it last.

Don�t forget to subscribe if you haven�t already for more content, it is posted every Tuesday at 10.00m.

Joanne

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Sometimes people think they are getting an original painting and they end up getting a print. To avoid confusion, it is becoming important to know how to distinguish a print from an original painting.
Art Prints
are multiples of the same piece, created through a printmaking technique. One of the most common types of prints is the one produced by a photo-mechanical process. The image is photographically transferred from an original source and is mass reproduced. Do not confuse this with original prints.
Original Prints
are artwork from a matrix, which is generally a single metal plate; stone block, wooden block or screen that is hand-made by the artist. Each impression is done by the artist or artisan and the matrix is later destroyed. The prints are traditionally signed and numbered in pencil by the artist and generally called �Limited Edition Prints�. The numbering is done in this format: 149/300. Original prints can also be considered investments and bring with them the level of status that mass reproductions do not.
Before you ask a museum curator, art collector, appraiser or other art expert, these tips can help you differentiate a Print from an Original Painting:
An Original Painting has textured brush strokes. Watercolor or gouache original paintings will typically be in a rough paper with a distinctive grain.
A Print is usually flat and has a dot matrix pattern, the same pattern you find in magazines or book images.
An Original Painting has irregular and uneven paint on the edges of the stretched canvas.
A Print usually has sharp, even and clean edges; where the buyer typically does not look.
An Original Painting examined under a strong light might show pencil lines from the artist�s original sketch and changes made by the artist while painting.
A Print frequently has a number of identification and a copyright logo printed in small letters.
An Original Painting has rich and vibrant colors, and overall, looks, feels and smells like an original.

Having original art in the home is vital to your well being. Art is a key piece of furniture for many reasons and yet it is sometimes put on the back burner in comparison to other home objects. This list is dedicated to the understanding of importance of art from perspectives of interior design, well being, social atmosphere, creating a mood in the home, and more. One quote that stands out about the importance of original art is the following, �You would never put fake books on your bookshelf, so why would you put fake art on your walls?�

1. Creates Mood

Brain scans have revealed that looking at works of art trigger a surge of dopamine into the same area of the brain that registers desire, pleasure, and romantic love Click here for more info. Romantic, sublime landscapes provoke contemplation of nature and purity. Such works then create a mood of peace and are good for relaxation rooms such as the bedroom.
2. Adds Personal Character to the Home
We all love to express ourselves, be it through clothing, accessories, social media � the list goes on! Original art in the home is a perfect way to express your artistic and aesthetic interests in a way different from most, for original artworks are one of a kind.

3. Makes Memories

Buying an original work of art is an experience. For whatever reason, you were drawn to a specific piece (or multiple). You may have seen it at a show opening, had a nice trip to the ice cream shop before hand. Whatever happened leading up to/during/after the purchase of a meaningful original work will be remembered every time you see it. This will not happen with a poster from Ikea.

4. Provides a Colour Palette
When rooms have a lot of colours, or many shades of the same colour, it can become overwhelming. An original work of art is a beautiful, meaningful way to tie everything together and create a general focal point.

5. Makes a Room Feel Finished
When walls are empty, a room does not necessarily look bad, but by no means does it look finished. Rooms with empty walls are functional rooms in a house. Rooms with original art work are comfortable rooms in a home.

6. Inspires and Fosters Creativity
This one is simple � in rooms with no art, artistic expression is lacking and therefore the need and want for creativity is not very prominent. On the opposite end of the spectrum, original artworks foster creativity, expression, artistic inspiration. This is particularly important in homes with children as being surrounded by artwork will allow creative thinking. This idea is expanded on in reason 11.

7. Conversation Starter
As mentioned in reason 2, hanging original art in your home is a way of expressing oneself. That being said, guests will always be curious about the choice of artwork, the story, have questions about the artist, etc. It is a way to show off your art collection while having passionate conversations with house guests.

8. Supports Artists
One of the most important things about buying original artwork is that you are supporting an artist�s career. Each time you have a look at a work in your home, it provides a feel-good emotion that you are assisting an artist in achieving the success and recognition they deserve.

9. It is an Investment
Building off of reason 8, not only does owning original work in the home allow you to support artists� careers, but it is also an investment. These artworks can be passed down through family and friends, be shared with loved ones for many years all while increasing in worth. This is never something that will be achieved with a $12 print from Walmart.

10. Creates a Livable Environment
Art can make rooms that are not necessarily �home-y� become comfortable working and living environments. A home office, for example, can transform from a place of work and business to one of relaxation and productivity all the with addition of an original work of art. Attached is an article explaining how artwork in office spaces improves employee productivity

11. Keeps the Brain Active
Art is very conceptual, artists use it as a medium to express personal thought, political or social issues, and to make us as viewers think. Some people do quizzes or crossword puzzles to keep their brain active, but another way to do so is to own original artwork in the home, to just sit, look, and think.

12. Relaxation
In a busy, fast-paced world that demands speed and productivity, home should be a place of relaxation. Coming home from a busy day at work to sit on your couch and stare at a TV or a blank wall is not as recharging or relaxing as enjoying an
artwork purchased with the means to create a positive mood.

13. Curating Your Own Gallery is Fun!
Last but certainly not least, curating a gallery is fun! Attending show openings, going to galleries, chatting with artists even, it is a fun experience! After a while you will start to notice a theme, in subject matter, colour, concept, etc. Playing with moods, composition, placement in the home, of all these reasons why to have art in the home, let�s not forget the fact that it is simply something fun to do.

Tips On Buying Art Directly From The Artist

Buying art from an artist can be much more casual (and, often, complicated) than buying artwork from a gallery or at an auction. Each artist may handle the transaction differently, and may include different things in the sale. To make the process simpler and ensure that you aren't missing out on anything important, you should enter the situation with a few key things in mind:

1. You don't need to buy the art right away. Typically when purchasing art, you have the luxury of time. Take a photo, bring it home, take measurements of the space where the work would go. It is rare that you would have to buy the artwork right then and there. There are some exceptions to this rule. If you are at a temporary event, like an art fair or an auction, or if you know that there is somebody else also considering purchasing this piece, you may need to expedite your decision �making process. That's why it's a great idea to get the contact information from the artist and find out how long this work will be available.

2. Always get the facts. Whether you're purchasing the artwork on the spot, or taking time to think about it, there is vital information you should get from the artist.
Name
Website
Contact Information
Price Information
Obviously, the course of the conversation will naturally allow you to discover certain other important elements � like their motivation, the stories behind their artwork, and their artistic history. All of these will help you form a deeper emotional connection to the piece in question. However, if you do not receive the artist's personal information, it may all be for nothing, as you may miss out on the opportunity to buy their work.

3. Artists are often willing to negotiate. If you see a work that is above your budget, be sure to inquire about the possibility of a discount. Tell the artist what about the work speaks to you, why you want it, and where you'll hang it. For artists, knowing that their work is going to be appreciated can make all the difference.

4. Obtain a signature and documentation. Even if you are not planning on selling the work later on, it is important that you make sure the artwork is signed and that you have the appropriate documentation. You should have a proof of purchase and a certificate of authenticity. Make sure that these have the artist's signature, date, and the amount of money that you purchased the work for. This will be valuable in the future, whether you end up re�selling the work or if you want to buy insurance for it.

5. Inquire about materials and care tips. Some works, especially sculpture and mixed media, need special care instructions. Even for common media like paintings or photography, the artist may have some special instructions for the works. By taking the extra measure and asking early, you may end up extending the life of the artwork.

6. Stay connected. There are many advantages to staying connected with an artist after the purchase. For one, they may come out with more works in the future that will be of interest to you. Having multiple pieces by the same artist can unify a space and give it a great voice.
Additionally, when you stay in contact, you'll be the first to know if this artist begins to receive international success. There are several ways to stay connected with an artist these days. Follow them on social media. Set up a Google Alert for their name. Some artists will have a newsletter that you can subscribe to-just ask, or you'll never know!
Once you buy your artwork...
Enjoy it! Store the sales documentation somewhere safe, hang the work somewhere it will be appreciated, and relax.

Hello Everyone

I cannot believe we are a few weeks away from being at the end of 2016, this year has gone by so fast and I am already planning my business goals for next year. before the years starts I always look back at my achievements in my art business, and sometimes personal ones too, and this time I thought I would share them all with you.

At the beginning of the year I struggled with my health, it started 7 years ago after catching a viral cold and I was left with terrible nerve pain in my face, neck and head and a heaviness in the top right of my back which triggered my neck to swell and I would feel dizzy and sometimes get vertigo, this in turn gave me peculiar sensations in my stomach and entire body which resulted in not being able to eat properly. I was determined to find a cure, or some type of treatment which would give me better relief than just taking pills at night. I came across a local acupuncturist who over a period of 4 months restored me back to normality and I am able to eat well and function normally, I count this as a massive achievement. I applied to be a volunteer at an animal charity, a dream I have always wanted and never found the opportunity to do until February this year, it has brought me so much joy and fulfillment having direct contact with all farm and domestic animals I help look after, and in all weathers, later on this year I organised my own art exhibition in the barn of the charity to bring more awareness of the charity and raise funds for it, the Councillor of West Berkshire opened it and bought a painting. The exhibition was advertised in my local paper and three days later my local radio station rang me up and asked me in for an interview, of course I obliged, it was a very proud moment, as a result of the press I have sold more prints and original paintings, and it has inspired me to create more work which I finished in November. It has been a fantastic year for reaching major goals and I am so excited for next year to achieve even greater goals in my business and personal life.

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and see you next week

Joanne

Hello Everyone

Christmas is only a month away and I am busy buying and wrapping presents, it is an exciting time of year I love the lights in the cities and towns and all the festive parties coming up to attend. Speaking of Christmas I have finished the series of winter scenes of Sonning Christmas cards and they will be available from 7th December from one of my stalls I hold. This year I will be at Queen Anne's School in Caversham, Berkshire on Saturday 3rd December 11am-3pm, drop by and say hello and enjoy the refreshments and of course my cards. Hopefully it will be a regular annual stall in December.

I hope you all have a lovely Christmas and enjoy a lot of parties and you prosper in the New Year.

Until next week

Joanne

Hello Everyone

Last week I mentioned I am painting new scenes of Sonning in Berkshire for my new collection of christmas cards this year. On Thursday I began painting Sonning Bridge, I recently took the photograph because I accidentally deleted it when it was covered in thick frost, but it is ok that is what my imagination is for.

I mixed the colours for the sky, grass and water using white, cobalt blue and phthalo green, burnt umber and ultramarine blue remembered to erase the pencil lines first, otherwise they will not be able to be erased once the paint is down. I painted in the sky first and then I moved onto painting the grass and water from the bottom of the page up to the bridge. I worked on the trees behind the bridge and mixed various colours to paint in the tunnels, and then I mixed various shades of flesh colour, burnt umber, cadmium red and white to create the brick colour and painted in the bridge, I added greys and whites to make the bridge look more realistic.

I decided to paint the sky, grass and water of two more scenes, but halfway through I realised I had mixed the colours too dark and applied them too thickly, I basically wasted three hours and a lot of paint which was a painful realisation, and I decided to pack up for the day. They will be finished in 2 weeks and I cannot wait to share them with my customers. I will be back in the studio all weekend to draw out the two scenes for a second time and start painting them. My intention is to also work on the other two but I will see how much time I have left. You are the first to see this new painting above. Watch out for the next blog and painting reveal, I post Tuesdays at 10:00am when there are no technical issues like there was last week and I ended up posting the blog in later that day, and don't forget to subscribe for more stories.


Joanne

Hello Everyone

Last week I mentioned I am painting new scenes of Sonning in Berkshire for my new collection of christmas cards this year. On Thursday I began painting Sonning Bridge, I recently took the photograph because I accidentally deleted it when it was covered in thick frost, but it is ok that is what my imagination is for.

I mixed the colours for the sky, grass and water using white, cobalt blue and phthalo green, burnt umber and ultramarine blue remembered to erase the pencil lines first, otherwise they will not be able to be erased once the paint is down. I painted in the sky first and then I moved onto painting the grass and water from the bottom of the page up to the bridge. I worked on the trees behind the bridge and mixed various colours to paint in the tunnels, and then I mixed various shades of flesh colour, burnt umber, cadmium red and white to create the brick colour and painted in the bridge, I added greys and whites to make the bridge look more realistic.

I decided to paint the sky, grass and water of two more scenes, but halfway through I realised I had mixed the colours too dark and applied them too thickly, I basically wasted three hours and a lot of paint which was a painful realisation, and I decided to pack up for the day. They will be finished in 2 weeks and I cannot wait to share them with my customers. I will be back in the studio all weekend to draw out the two scenes for a second time and start painting them. My intention is to also work on the other two but I will see how much time I have left. You are the first to see this new painting above. Watch out for the next blog and painting reveal, I post Tuesdays at 10:00am when there are no technical issues like there was last week and I ended up posting the blog in later that day, and don�t forget to subscribe for more stories.

Joanne

Everyone

I am starting to think about christmas for this year and how I am going to spend it, then there are presents to buy and wrap, but before that I need christmas cards to send to friends and family. I looked back over the last two years photo collection of many scenes of Berkshire i have taken and I came across some winter scenes in Sonning. Two years ago I stopped in Sonning on a beautiful frosty winter morning on my way to work, and captured many stunning scenes of the village. Tree branches,lawns and buildings were thick with ice and everything glistened as the sun shone down . I have chosen them to be my new christmas card series for 2016. So far I have drawn out four scenes and today I began painting my first one which I am three quarters way through, the painting above is a sneak peak of the collection.

Watch out for the next scene in the collection that I will give you the first glance of

Don't forget to subscribe for more news

Joanne

Windsor Castle is a second home to me because I have family who live in Eton Wick. In the summer of 1977 we spent the Queen�s Jubilee sitting on the grass outside Windsor Castle watching the procession go by. In my teens me and my cousin used to go clubbing in the town centre at night and walk round it during the day. I painted the castle for nostalgic reasons.

I drew out the Castle and buildings in a light pencil, i paintined in the sky using a mix of cobalt blue and titanium white and then i painted in the castle using a mix of yellow ochre and white. I mixed my own shades of green for the trees and grass, using blues, browns and yellow. I am really pleased with the finished painting and the white mount and frame set it off nicely giving it a fresh appearance.

Thank you for reading, watch out forvthe next flog on Tuesday at 10.00am.

Hello Everyone

Here is another painting of the collection of Dinton Pastures paintings on exhibition at National Animal Welfare Trust, wantage Road in Great Shefford on Saturday 22nd October and Sunday 23rd October 2016.

Dinton Pastures is a well known local park where families and individuals spend enjoyable days and weekends walking their dogs and playing in the park, I thiught it would be nice to paint local scenes of it.

I spent one morning walking round Dinton Pastures searcing for that special scene and nothing grabbed my attention. I followed the path back to the car park and as it curved round I walked a bit further then looked back. The sun shone through the trees onto the path because it was at an angle, the trees and path lit up. Before I started the painting I knew I wanted it to have that wow factor . After much experimentation the painting came together and I used a vast range of pastel shades of blues, greens, pinks , yellows flesh colour browns and white to bring to you a stunning and peaceful scene.

Watch out for the story on another painting which will be published on Tuesday at 10:00am

Hello Everyone

Thanks for stopping by and reading the latest blog of a new painting I completed this year which will be part of my exhibition which is taking place on Saturday 22nd October and Sunday 23 October 11am - 3pm in the barn at Trindledown Farm at National Animal Welfare Trust to raise funds for them, and it is officially being opened by Councillor Quentin Webb on 22nd October at 11.00am.

For two years I have wanted to paint a bluebell wood scene during the summer time but other paintings were on the top of the list. I visited numerous bluebell woods in and around Berkshire intending for each place to be the chosen scene to be painted later on in the year, because I sometimes paint out of season mainly to lift my spirits in the midst of a dreary English winter, but nothing captivated me. I drove to West Berkshire still in search of the perfect scene and got side tracked by the breathtaking landscapes before me which were full of rich yellows and greens. I took many pictures and felt a new wave of inspiration wash over me to just create something and I was thinking about creating a sunset scene. Back at home I looked over the pictures and decided to paint a rapeseed field in the sunset. I set up my easel and art materials and mixed the various shades of yellows, golds and mauve and began painting, half way through I wasn't feeling it, the paint applied was too thick, the wrong colour and dull, i threw it away and started again. Once again it didn't turn out right. I took it as a sign I should have opted to paint the bluebell wood scene , I took a deep breath and drew the outline of the woods, mixed various shades of greys, blues greens and browns for the trees, sky and grass, once the painting had been built up I mixed many shades of purple and mauve to paint in the bluebells which was my favourite part. I am really pleased how it turned out and the clean fresh white frames enhance the all the colours and set the painting off nicely.

I hope you enjoyed reading about the story behind Bluebell Summer Forest, watch out for next week's story.

Hello Everyone

We are back at Cliveden House for the story behind my painting of Spring Cottage. I walked down some steep wooden steps set off the side of the garden , which led me down to the gardens on the lower ground which was level with the Thames. I passed a cottage set back from the river which looked unoccupied i thought as i moved on, and asked the boat keeper where spring Cottage was situated. He pointed behind him and said "here, next door". I boarded the boat with camera at the ready, to snap at the cottage as soon as we moved off from our starting point. I couldn't see a thing on my screen because the sun reflected off of it ,so I just snapped away hoping to take at least a couple of decent pictures. After we finished our boat trip I made my way to the main house via the same route I had taken to get there, my legs were killing me when I reached the top. After a rest I replenished my fluids and ate in the cafe situated in the grounds at the front of the house, and day dreamed what it would feel like to be able to stay in one of Cliveden 's magnificent rooms for a few days and to swan around the swimming pool on a hot day, and to be waited on hand and foot.

I explored the gardens near the front entrance and took many more pictures just incase I wanted to use different scenes later on. A band played on the band stand and a tea party was in full swing. All in all it had been a satisfying and beautiful day, and i returned home exhausted and completely inspired about the new scene I had discovered. The whole reason I chose Spring Cottage is because a few years earlier I read about the profumo affair that took place there in 1960's before I was born. I was fascinated by the turn of events that were played out in private at the cottage over a weekend and in front of the world at the same time because some how a journalist got hold of the story. After reading about the scandal I felt compelled to paint an iconic cottage, and I have to say I am pleased how the panting turned out. With every brush stroke I imagined how the lawn felt soft and luxurious under my feet, which I painted in pastel shades of yellow and white.

Once it was completed I moved onto painting in the river using pastel shades, of yellow ochre, greens, blues, browns and white, the swishing of the brush back and forth imitated the quiet rush of the water.

I hope you enjoyed this story and don't forget to subscribe to receive more stories behind each of my paintings.

Joanne

Hello Everyone

I wanted to share with you the story behind a painting I did of one of the cottages at Cliveden House in Taplow England, which is immensely popular among the tourist trade because it is quintessentially English and set off the path on the Thames.

I visited Cliveden House May bank holiday in 2014 as it was on my to do list for a year and It was one of those snap decisions to make the effort to go otherwise i would probably never have got round to it. It was a steaming hot day and the sight of Cliveden House alone took my breath away, it smacked of old English elegance and the fine English gentleman. As I neared the wall of the balcony at the back of the house the manicured lawns and topiary came into view, and they were spectacular and I was mesmerised by it. At this point I was unaware of the cottages situated on the ground level. I proceeded to explore the grounds and found a set of steps that led down to it. I soon found Ferry cottage which was occupied by a family who were sitting outside eating lunch. In that moment It struck me how a guest of the cottage would like to own a painting of Ferry cottage as a memento of their stay. I took several pictures at different angles and I chose the one with the path fully in the scene as it gave a sense of distance.

I free hand drew the cottage first then made two lines for the path. When I drew out the cottage, I crashed and burned on the first two attempts because I was so engrossed in the film I was listening to I drew massive rooftops which covered three quarters of the page, I ended up throwing the piece of paper away and starting on a fresh piece. I used acrylics and I painted in pastel shades of greens, reds, yellow and white which transformed into a beautiful and tranquil scene.

I hope you enjoy this painting as much as I enjoyed creating it. Next week I will share another scene I painted which was opposite the cottage.

Hello Everyone

In the last blog I shared my story behind Ferry Cottage and today I am sharing the story behind Across The Water, which I stumbled across at the same time as discovering Ferry Cottage, because it was situated opposite Ferry Cottage on the other side of the Thames. It took my breath away. The house was set in manicured lawns which was shaded by attractive willow and other types of trees, and I knew it would make a stunning painting.

Let's start from the beginning. I searched around for another scene from a different angle or nearby to Cliveden. As I turned away from Ferry Cottage toward the Thames, poking through the trees was a magnificent white house set in manicured lawns, I was really taken in by it's beauty and elegance and I wondered who the lucky owner was, and tried to second guess what they did for a living. I inched toward the edge of the bank and tried to poke my camera through the trees, but I couldn't get a clear shot, I looked for a clearing in the trees and found one. As I teetered on the edge of the bank to point my camera through the gap my foot slipped and I heard earth crumble away under foot, and I nearly fell head first into the Thames.

Panicking I quickly snapped several pictures and hoped I got the shot I wanted. I just wanted to get off the edge of the bank and with one swift manoeuvre I leapt backwards onto the path , safe ground.

Feeling satisfied with my find I made my way up to the main house by following the path up through the gardens which was very steep but. the view from the top of the gardens down over the Thames was stunning and I took numerous pictures of the view.

I had completed what I set out to achieve that day, and after taking many more pictures of the main house and gardens I decided to call it a day.

Next week look out for more stories on different scenes I painted at Cliveden House

Don't forget to follow me and leave a comment.

This vlog written by Nikos Vaggalis is for all you pokemon fans out there, enjoy!

Even AI cannot escape Pok�mons Go's viral craze after Human Intelligence readily submitted.That's all due to a bright idea of combining IBM's Watson AI with the gameplay of Pok�mon Go.


Michael Hsu, a researcher looking to apply AI to novel uses as part of the AT&T Shape Tech Expo Hackathon, managed to put Watson's intelligence to work in recognizing, tracking and sharing rare Pok�mons' locations amongst users around the world.

Surely, tracking and sharing Pok�mon locations is not something earth-shattering as there are plenty of apps like PokeMapper that employ crowd-sourcing approaches for filling in the spots. However, that's a manual and time consuming approach that could very well be automated.

Hsu's application makes the difference in that it works behind the scenes, and without human intervention, by consuming intermittent screenshots taken from within the Pok�mon Go app, building on Pok�mon Go's functionality, that in turn feeds into Watson's engine.

Watson then considers whether there's an actual Pok�mon object within the picture and if yes, visually recognizes it and evaluates its rarity through. Of course to do this Watson actually has to be able to perform enough computer vision to be able to recognize Pok�mon characters; the use of Watson's Visual Recognition API is what makes that task possible. Watson may have started out as a symbolic reasoner but it now has added other abilities that mean it can take a more sophisticated approach to problems.

In simple terms, the VR API takes in JPEG and PNG images, and as its output emits their class description as well as their taxonomy (gender, age range, kind, i.e celebrity).

To showcase the API's capabilities, a web front end to the service has been made available which allows anyone to supply sample images and let it work its magic.

For example, watch it recognize Whoopi Goldberg as well as classify her as a celebrity:

screencapture-visual-recognition-demo-mybluemix-net-1472030045439



In Pok�mons' case, the neural network was trained with sets of Pok�mon images, which it processed in the exact same way as the Whoopi Goldberg/Celebrity match, i.e Pikachu/not rare/do nothing, or, Charizard/rare/mark the spot on the map and let other players know about it.

We couldn't resist putting it to test, so we fed it with a second image of Whoopi that diverged from the usual as it pictures her "wearing" a huge smile and sporting a different hairdo, features that would potentially confuse the algorithm into reaching an erroneous outcome. As a picture is worth a thousand words, we'll let you observe the outcome yourselves:

screencapture-visual-recognition-demo-mybluemix-net-1472031408587



For the next test let's see what happens with Pikatchu, but since the engine available was not trained with a Pok�mon data set in mind, we wouldn't expect it to reach any accurate predictions:

screencapture-visual-recognition-demo-mybluemix-net-1472030396578



As expected, it did not recover the fact that a Pok�mon was depicted, but nonetheless it successfully perceived that the picture it was fed with was an illustration of a cartoon character, backing up that prediction with a moderate degree of confidence, 0.31-0.45 out of a maximum of 1.

If you are thinking of using this service then you will be pleased to know that currently it is offered for free but with the limitation of classifying only 250 images per day and training a custom classifier using 1000 images for one month. More flexibility comes with a subscription model.

At the end of the day, utilizing Watson's power to play with Pok�mons might sound a bit silly, but looking at it from another angle, the experiment highlights how far Watson has advanced and the potential such a technology offers. When applied to serious domains such as Health, for example, being capable of visually recognizing and classifying cancer cells according to their malignity could herald a great benefit to the public.

What's more, IBM is looking into sharing that power with the world by letting Watson live in the Cloud and offering it as a service consumable through well defined API's. It's a move that adds one more to the AI-as-a-Service movement, like Hewlett Packard's Haven OnDemand, which we reported on earlier in the year.

The next step would be embedding Watson into Snapdragon 820 CPU (see AI Linux) or Samsung Exynos Mongoose enabled mobile devices, migrating its training and applications offline and in private. That's a powerful prospect; the power of AI in your pocket.

Visual recognition aside, there are many more services available through the IBM Watson DeveloperCloud such as Language Translation, Natural Language Classification, Speech to Text and Data analysis.

It seems like Pok�mon has done it again; a novel approach to entertainment, a novel approach to science...

I extracted this poem from poem daily be ause it resonated with me and i wanted to share it with you.

Two Become One Flesh
with apologies to Mark 10:8



He can't hoist either hand above his head.
Her feet won't stand more than a dozen steps.
He's too nearsighted for the DMV.
Her fingers feel like she's got mittens on.
When did his legs get too long for his arms?
When did her arms get too short for her eyes?
He can't smell newsprint pressed against his nose.
She can't hear Thanks while helping with his socks.

The kitchen bulb burns out for both and each.

She drives the car. He strides into Best Buy.
Back home, he brings the stool. She stretches high.
He shouts the recipe. She bakes the quiche.
He listens for the ding. She finds the plates.
He cuts. They eat. She tells him how it tastes.

Hello Everyone

Today I woke up this morning slightly stiff but completely happy and fulfilled because yesterday I volunteered all day at Trindledown Farm.

I arrived at my usual time of 10.30 am, signed in and checked with the staff to see if the rabbits were still at the farm and needed mucking out, this is normally my first job since the rabbits joined us a few months ago. As I entered the stables Puddy the black Shetland pony came out of her stable to greet me, she is so sweet she winnies all the while me and the staff are in the stable yard for attention and she loves a fuss being made of her. I spent time with her before attending to the rabbits, George and Oscar. When I entered the the rabbit run, Oscar ran round his pen like a lunatic and settled at my feet waiting to be made a fuss of and to see if I had any treats. I emptied trays and replenished bedding, water, swept the floor and groomed both rabbits, then I sat with them stroking their fur and watching them eat their snacks and play with their toys.

Just after midday I stopped for lunch and roamed around the farm watching the horses graze in the fields at the back of the stables and then I wandered to the front gates and watched the goats, Leo is a large goat who almost appears human at times, he sat in his house with two feet out watching the world go by as the other smaller goats got up to their usual antics, Maple squeezed between the back of one of the sheds and fence and looked surprised when she couldn't move, the others grazed on grass until they saw me then they sauntered up the field to the gate and sniffed my hands looking for food, they soon wandered off when they realized I didn't have anything.

After lunch I sat in with several of the cats and kept them company, cuddled and played with them and changed their litter trays whilst they jumped all over me trying to catch my attention. At 3.30pm I helped the staff feed the farm animals, afterwards I helped clear up, i signed out and drove home satisfied i had made a difference to the animal's lives.

Hello Everyone

I wanted to share with you a brilliant charity I discovered earlier this year.

First of all I have loved animals since I was a toddler, where ever I saw animals growing up I wanted to pet and cuddle them

All the animals are O.A.P's and have ailments just like us in old age and it takes a lot of specialist care to keep them alive as long as possible. The charity hold regular events at their centre and in the surrounding areas and receive donations from other sources to keep the costs covered and the centre open, and most of the animals are rehomed and we receive updates from the newsletter on how they are doing in their forever home.

Over the years I have searched to volunteer my time caring for animals only to come to a dead end, but this year my dream came true.

One February morning I googled animal charities in Berkshire and immediately came across The National Animal Welfare Trust in West Berkshire, after reading the info on the type of volunteering available such as cat cuddling, mucking out farm animals and feeding them, dog walking and keeping them company, this was exactly what I had been after since forever.

I made a call to the centre and arranged an induction for the following day and I opted to stay afterwards and help out. I arrived in the afternoon and one of the staff showed me round the centre and introduced me to the staff and animals. My first job was to pick up donkey poo whilst Noel the white donkey lazed around in his bed and only came out at feeding time where he paced up and down past the gate until he was fed.

Throughout the day I helped staff prepare the farm animals food, prepare hay and muck out the huts of the sheep and goats. At 3.30pm I helped two staff feed the farm animals whilst the other staff members fed the cats dogs and pigs.


I left the centre at 5:00pm filthy dirty and happy knowing I would be returning the next week and I couldn't wait.


Well that's all folks for now watch out for the next installment next week Tuesday at 10.00am and don't forget to subscribe to my blogs for more.

Joanne

Hi Everyone

There is a perception among people that artists magically create work all the time easily and effortlessly, well that is not quite true for most of us, it is exactly the same as writers getting writers block, or an actor having a bad acting moment, things can go wrong sometimes, either a little bit and other times to the point of no return where we end up throwing a painting away and starting again. I have experienced both ends of the spectrum.

Three years ago when I had the idea to create a stunning painting (which turned out to be Ferry Cottage) of a quintissentially English landscape I had the sensation it would stir up in people in my mind and I could feel it inside as well. Full of enthusiasm I found Ferry Cottage and snapped several shots of it at different angles. I stood there for a few minutes taking in the scene and imagining how I was going to paint it, what pastel shades of colour I was going to use etc, this is normal practice for each painting that I create.

Once at home I drew the cottage out, and it took ages, longer than normal and I just wasn�t feeling it because my mind was elsewhere, as I was more engrossed in the film I was watching, as a result I started the cottage too far out and drew two massive rooftops which covered three quarters of the page and left 8th of an inch for the path and foliage. Realising my mistake I scrubbed it out and started again, and made the same mistake again, I felt disappointed in myself and what I was creating did not live up to the image of the painting in my mind�s eye.

The third time I attempted to draw it out it came together. As I squeezed out the paints I worked out which part of the landscape that I did not feel confident about I would start on first, which was the cottage. Getting the right shade of brick work correct seemed a daunting prospect, but as I mixed the colours it turned out fine. I had fears and doubts about painting aspects of the landscape correctly all the way through the process until it�s completion.

There you go, an insight into the mind of a creative.

Thank you reading and don�t forget to subscribe, like and share. I post every Tuesday at 10.00am

Hello Everyone

Below is a valuable insight into getting what you want from your art career which was written by Maria Brophy sho is married to a successful full time artist. I recommend you read this if you are stuck in achieving in a particular goal or re sear hinges for inspiration in your art career.

When I was working in the corporate world fifteen years ago, I dreamed of leaving my job to work with my artist husband, Drew.

But truth be told, I was afraid to leave the steady paycheck, the comfort of knowing what to expect every day and all of the benefits that came with working for a corporation.

On the other hand, I yearned to create a business that allowed me to live a life of travel and freedom. I was tired of �clocking in� to a job working for people I didn�t really like and selling a product (insurance) that I didn�t love.

My ultimate fear was that I wouldn�t be able to make money on my own, and that I�d end up destitute! Yes, my mind went to the worst possible scenario.

Drew had begged me for years to quit and come work with him, and I truly wanted to.

But for a long time, I only dreamed about it, too afraid to gather up the courage to trust in myself and my abilities.

Then one day, an ugly fight with a difficult boss was the final straw that gave me a kick in butt to quit. And I did. I never regretted quitting. An amazing lifestyle for myself began the day I left the corporate world.

Recently I was interviewed by Entrepreneur Coach Karen Kalis and we discussed the challenge of �WHAT HOLDS PEOPLE BACK�.

Karen has created the Savvy Solopreneur Series for people looking to discover their purpose and create a business they love. (Sign up for the Series and you�ll be able to listen to my full interview where I share more on this topic.)

Karen had some great questions for me and they got me to thinking:

What is it that truly holds people back from doing what they love?

In all the years that I�ve been helping creative entrepreneurs, I have learned:

THERE ARE THREE MAIN OBSTACLES that hold people back from realizing their dreams:

1 � Not BEING CLEAR on what you really want

2 � Not truly BELIEVING that you can have what you really want

3 � Not being willing to make a true 100% COMMITMENT to doing what it takes, to create a life that you love

When I was at that corporate job, I was terrified to quit. And when I reflect back on what held me back for so long, I realize that I didn�t truly believe that I could live the life that I now live. I wasn�t seeing how it was possible. Fast forward to today, and I have proved my old self wrong!

PEOPLE DON�T THINK FOR THEMSELVES AND IT HOLDS THEM BACK:

If I dig deeper into this lack of faith in my own abilities, I realize that I wasn�t doing my own thinking. I was buying into the thinking of many people who warned me NOT to leave my comfortable corporate job.

Digging deeper into this concept of not doing my own thinking, I realized that from a young age, we are conditioned to have others do our thinking for us!

Our parents think for us from the time we are born.
Then we go to school and our teachers think for us.
This continues when we get a job; we are told what to do at work and our bosses think for us.

In that sense, it�s only natural to be fearful of coming up with our own ideas that are different from the norm. Such as the idea of being able to create a business where you can sell art, travel and surf around the world, while supporting a family. Or any other �out of the norm� idea you may have.

Here�s an exercise in thinking that I�d like to ask you to try:

Think for a moment, and ask yourself: �What is one thing that I have dreamed of doing for a long time, but haven�t made it happen yet?�

And now ask yourself: �What has been holding me back?�

Explore these questions, take the time to think and write down your answers as they come to you. You may be surprised at what comes up, and when you go deeper into it, you may discover that the thing that is holding you back isn�t a real threat at all.

Please, share in the comments below, the answer to this question:

If you aren�t yet doing what you love, what is it that is holding you back?

And, if you are doing what you love, did you struggle with it in the beginning?

Please share, I would love to hear your thoughts!

With Love,

Maria

Hello Everyone

We are back at Cliveden House for the story behind my painting of Spring Cottage. I walked down some steep wooden steps set off the side of the garden , which led me down to the gardens on the lower ground which was level with the Thames. I passed a cottage set back from the river which looked unoccupied i thought as i moved on, and asked the boat keeper where spring Cottage was situated. He pointed behind him and said "here, next door". I boarded the boat with camera at the ready, to snap at the cottage as soon as we moved off from our starting point. I couldn't see a thing on my screen because the sun reflected off of it ,so I just snapped away hoping to take at least a couple of decent pictures. After we finished our boat trip I made my way to the main house via the same route I had taken to get there, my legs were killing me when I reached the top. After a rest I replenished my fluids and ate in the cafe situated in the grounds at the front of the house, and day dreamed what it would feel like to be able to stay in one of Cliveden 's magnificent rooms for a few days and to swan around the swimming pool on a hot day, and to be waited on hand and foot.

I explored the gardens near the front entrance and took many more pictures just incase I wanted to use different scenes later on. A band played on the band stand and a tea party was in full swing. All in all it had been a satisfying and beautiful day, and i returned home exhausted and completely inspired about the new scene I had discovered. The whole reason I chose Spring Cottage is because a few years earlier I read about the profumo affair that took place there in 1960's before I was born. I was fascinated by the turn of events that were played out in private at the cottage over a weekend and in front of the world at the same time because some how a journalist got hold of the story. After reading about the scandal I felt compelled to paint an iconic cottage, and I have to say I am pleased how the panting turned out. With every brush stroke I imagined how the lawn felt soft and luxurious under my feet, which I painted in pastel shades of yellow and white.

Once it was completed I moved onto painting in the river using pastel shades, of yellow ochre, greens, blues, browns and white, the swishing of the brush back and forth imitated the quiet rush of the water.

I hope you enjoyed this story and don't forget to subscribe to receive more stories behind each of my paintings.

Joanne

Hello Everyone

Spring is here and so is the Henley Arts Trail at Bix Six village hall venue 4 on 30April - 2nd May 10.00am - 5pm. Arrive hungry as there is plenty of refreshments and cake to enjoy. My stand is in the middle of the hall so stop by and say hello, and own an original hand painted scene of Berkshire at an affordable price.

see you there

Joanne

Francis Bacon in his studio
Due to his asthma, Bacon was unable to join the armed forces during WWII. He was accepted as a member of the Air Raid Precaution sector, which involved non-military search and rescue, only to be discharged when he fell ill from the dust and rubble. "If I hadn't been asthmatic, I might never have gone onto painting at all," he admitted. After the war, he took up painting with a renewed passion, regarding Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) as the true beginning of his work. The long necks, snapping mouths and contorted bodies featured in the painting express horror and suffering, a forceful commentary on the aftermath of the war. Bacon modeled the figures after photos of animals in motion, showing an early interest in the movement of the body that became a strong theme in his later painting. During its exhibition at Lefevre Gallery critics were mostly shocked by the blatant imagery, but the numerous reviews put Bacon into the spotlight.

Mature Period

His breakout success at the 1944 exhibition gained him further opportunities to show with Lefevre. Graham Sutherland, a friend and fellow exhibitor, also recommended him to the director of Hanover Gallery, where Bacon had his first solo exhibition in 1949. For this show Bacon painted a series entitled Heads, significant for being the first series to introduce two important motifs: the first was the scream, derived from a film still drawn from Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin in which an injured schoolteacher is shown screaming [in pain?]; the second is Diego Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (c.1650), a painting Bacon only knew through reproductions (and which he would always maintain never to have seen in the original). The Heads series also made greater use of enclosing devices that suggest a pervasive sense of claustrophobia and anxiety, in this instance a shallow cage-like outline which Bacon had also employed in Three Studies from 1944.

Francis Bacon Biography
In 1953, Hanover held an exhibition of Bacon's paintings that included Two Figures, a depiction of two men embracing in bed, an image that created a huge scandal. The composition was based upon photographs of wrestlers taken by the Victorian photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904). Bacon preferred to work from photographs, relying on his friend John Deakin to take pictures of his subjects, but he was fascinated by Muybridge's attempts to capture and record bodies in motion. Bacon kept a collection of Muybridge's books in his studio as a constant source of reference, and even suggested that his intensive study of these sequential photographs triggered his own interest in working in series.

Bacon's tendency to derive inspiration from personal experiences also attracted him to portraiture. He often painted close friends (Lucian Freud, Isabel Rawsthorne,Michel Leiris), and the results convey a striking emotional and psychological intensity. One of Bacon's most famous subjects was his friend and lover George Dyer, who he met in 1964. During the course of their relationship, Bacon executed numerous portraits of Dyer that juxtaposed a strong musculature with a feeling of vulnerability, as in Portrait of George Dyer Crouching (1966), suggesting an affectionate yet protective attitude toward the younger man. Dyer suffered from alcoholism and episodes of depression, ultimately committing suicide on the night before Bacon's first retrospective in France in 1971.

Late Years and Death

Francis Bacon Photo
After the Paris exhibition Bacon moved increasingly toward self-portraiture, claiming, "people around me have been dying like flies and there is nothing else to paint but myself." Continuing to work steadily, he completed a number of paintings in tribute to Dyer's memory. Many of these took the form of large format triptychs, including the well-regarded "Black triptych" series that recounted the details of Dyer's passing. In 1973, Bacon became the first contemporary English artist to have a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. His work was exhibited internationally throughout the later years of his life, including retrospectives at the Hirshhorn and the Tate Gallery. In the mid 1970s, Bacon met John Edwards, who replaced both Dyer and Deakin as Bacon's constant companion and photographer. In his last years, Bacon retreated from his formerly boisterous social life, focusing on his work and the platonic relationship with Edwards. He died of a heart attack in Madrid at the age of 81.

Legacy

Bacon's unique interpretations and the intensely personal nature of his work make it difficult to visually trace his influence in contemporary art. Nevertheless, his paintings have inspired some of the most standout artists of this generation, including Julian Schnabel and Damien Hirst.

John Edwards, who inherited the estate, played an important role in promoting Bacon's work until his death in 2003. He was responsible for the donation of Bacon's studio to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin, and this was turned into a permanent exhibition and research archive.

wanted to share an intersting article with you on painters of the past.

Elizabeth Vig�e Le Brun: The Avatar Painter Of Marie Antoinette�s Day

Elizabeth Vig�e Le Brun created attractive, engaging images that were designed to tell the viewer what the sitter wanted them to know.

By William Newton

MARCH 5, 2016

Elizabeth Vig�e Le Brun (1755-1842) is best known today as the favorite court painter of Queen Marie Antoinette, whom she painted on no less than 30 occasions, more than any other artist. Her skills as a portraitist brought her to the attention of the ancien r�gime as a young artist, but during the course of her long career Vig�e Le Brun painted dozens of portraits of lords and ladies from all over Europe.

She not only survived the French Revolution, exile, divorce, the Napoleonic wars, and the upheaval of European society, but she lived to write about it, in lengthy and highly interesting memoirs. On the surface, then, she seems just the right sort of artist to be the subject of a major exhibition.

�Vig�e Le Brun: Woman Painter In Revolutionary France� opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on February 15, as a somewhat pared-down version of a more comprehensive show that appeared at the Grand Palais in Paris between September 2015 and January of this year. Surprisingly, it was the first major retrospective of her work to appear in her native France. Given the perennial popularity of her most famous patroness in film, literature, and fashion, it seems unfathomable that no one until now has taken the time to survey the work of an artist who was so important in forming the way that we picture Marie Antoinette.

Portraits of a Stiff, Bourbon Barbie

Indeed, The Met show contains a number of Vig�e Le Brun�s portraits of Marie Antoinette, including the very first the artist painted of the queen. Upon entering the gallery the visitor immediately confronts Vig�e Le Brun�s massive canvas, �Marie Antoinette in Court Dress,� (1778) one of many iconic images she would create of the ill-fated monarch. The piece was originally commissioned by the queen�s mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, back home in Vienna, so she could see what her daughter now looked like. That fact gives some element of poignancy to what is otherwise a flashy, stage-managed production piece.

Perhaps the image of Marie Antoinette for which Vig�e Le Brun is most famous is �Marie Antoinette and Her Children� (1785), and fortunately it was permitted to leave Versailles for this exhibition. It is a masterpiece of court propaganda, although it only blunted the attacks on the increasingly unpopular queen for a time. If you only ever see one painting by Vig�e Le Brun, this is the one you want to see, and spend time looking at.

Rather than appearing as a fashion plate, Marie Antoinette is here shown as the mother of three small children, all of whom dote on her. The empty cradle is not for the children surrounding her, but rather is symbolic of the queen�s youngest child, who had just died. It was an attempt, albeit an ultimately unsuccessful one, to try to humanize the monarchy, so that those who saw this painting could sympathize with the queen, and consider the fact that she, too, had suffered in life. Yet however sympathetic one may feel toward the family, one cannot help but wonder if creating such an image crossed a dividing line.
Neither a Mere Woman Nor Mostly in France

This line is also a problem with the show itself, as the title of the exhibition shows: �Woman Painter in Revolutionary France.� As an initial matter, while all ladies are women, not all women are ladies (see e.g., Lena Dunham). Had Vig�e Le Brun not been a lady, and one with decidedly monarchist sympathies, she would not have been accepted as a regular guest in the homes of the aristocracy.
The informality of �The Duchesse de Polignac In A Straw Hat� (1782) for example, would never have been entrusted to a �woman painter� with whom the very glamorous and fashionable duchess could not relate, on a very real level. Vig�e Le Brun hated the caked-on, powdered makeup of the age, and encouraged her sitters, as in this portrait, to be more naturally feminine. To characterize her as a �woman painter� given this context is to attempt to classify her as being akin to an early bra-burner which, politically at least, she most certainly was not.

Moreover, Vig�e Le Brun was not exactly �in Revolutionary France,� at least not for very long. The artist and her daughter fled France in 1789, shortly after the revolution began; Vig�e Le Brun did not return home for nearly two decades. Thus, there are no portraits of French revolutionaries in this exhibition, only of their victims. Indeed, half of the paintings in the show are of non-French persons. The exiled artist had to earn her living in Italy, Germany, Russia, and England.
One comes away with the impression that the organizers of the exhibition must be indifferent not only to the horrors of the revolution, but to what Vig�e Le Brun herself must have suffered personally as a result of it. After all, not only did she have to flee for her life, but many of her friends and patrons were murdered. Perhaps the decision was made that, because so many of the works in the show are the property of the French government, and are rarely allowed to leave France, it would be best to sweep the Reign of Terror under the rug, or at least try to downplay it, as the French somehow find the gall to do every Bastille Day.
Elizabeth Vig�e Le Brun Best Paints Women as Themselves

A distinct dumbing down seems to have taken hold of the collective ethos of The Met of late. From its disastrously bad new logo�excoriated to perfection recently by Justin Davidson in Vulture�to its poorly described exhibitions, it is difficult to understand the identity crisis that one of America�s most prestigious institutions is undergoing.
When the placard accompanying a Vig�e Le Brun portrait of the �Barrone de Crussol Florensac� (1785), depicted as reading or singing from a clearly legible piece of sheet music, does not even bother to mention anything about the music shown or its significance in the painting, one is left wondering what, exactly, The Met believes its responsibility as an educational institution to be.


Having considered these points, however, the truly important question in this exhibition is: Was Vig�e Le Brun a great artist? I think the answer must be: no. Although much of her work is charming, and occasionally even splendid, when she drifted away from portraiture she drifted away from her skills as a painter. The single landscape painting in the exhibition, �Festival of the Shepherds at Unspunnen� (1808-9) is an interesting work, with an amusing �Where�s Waldo?� aspect to it in which the viewer can track down the figure of the artist herself, but it is not a great painting. Similarly, the handful of mythological scenes in the show are populated by rather awkward, unbelievable gods.

Where she excelled, particularly in her self-portraits and in feminine portraiture in general, Vig�e Le Brun could turn out truly beautiful, even lively images. The pleasure of the exhibition, as one moves through it, lies in noting how she became more confident and relaxed in her portrayals of her sitters as she gained in experience.
It is hard to believe that the artist who painted the Marie Antoinette mannequin of 1778 is the same artist who painted the arresting, flirtatious portrait of �Isabella Teotochi Marini� (1792) in the same exhibition. With her flashing eyes and daring d�colletage, one gets the impression that Isabella was probably the life of the party. It is in these images, of women being themselves, that Vig�e Le Brun created her best work.


At the conclusion of the exhibition, one sees the portrait of �Count Emmanuel Nikolayevich Tolstoy� (1823). �He looks like your avatar,� commented the friend who accompanied me to the show. Without meaning to do so, I think he rather neatly summed up the artist�s work

Elizabeth Vig�e Le Brun created attractive, engaging images that were designed to tell the viewer what the sitter wanted them to know. In other words, she was an adept creator of avatars. Yet while her artistic skills in creating these images were remarkable, with a handful of exceptions she never really got the knack of how to portray someone who was not only beautiful on the outside, but also on the inside. There is more beauty in a Vel�zquez portrait of an old peasant woman frying eggs, or a Goya sketch of a crippled beggar, than in most of the pretty, but often shallow paintings in this exhibition.
�Vig�e Le Brun: Woman Painter In Revolutionary France� is at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 15.

Hi Everyone

I want to share with you what goes through my mind and how I feel when I am creating artwork and how listening to certain types of music affects the outcome.

When I am inspired to create a piece of work, I can see the finished product in my mind's eye, and then I think about the emotion I want to include in that scene, and it always comes back to wanting to create a sense of beauty and tranquility.

As I mentioned earlier music plays a big part in the creative process, before I begin working I choose the music best suited, to aid me in getting into the zone and flow, and stir up emotions of beauty and tranquility. Yes I do get a feeling when I look at someone or something beautiful. The songs don't have to be ballads, sometimes it is pop rock to rap but all of the songs I choose evoke the same emotions of tranquility, which in turn creates a sense of beauty, and that is why they are suitable for listening to during painting.

I draw out the scene in a light pencil and then mix colours for the sky, trees and any buildings that may be in the scene. I always paint the sky in first, and then move onto the trees, buildings, and grass. As I continue painting I strive for the image and emotion of the finished painting I feel and see in my mind's eye. A third way through I step back and observe the scene and note what needs to be worked on next or adjusted, these are the thoughts that go through my mind from this point until the finished painting.

"oh yeah good it is feeling beautiful and tranquil", "damn I messed the trees up, they need a different shade of burnt umber and green" "oh god it's crap! I've ruined it, all those hours of painting, and paint i have used, what a waste!" "whoever told me I could paint is mad!" "sshh don't tell anyone I'm crap" "I am never painting live because they will find out i am a fraud" "whose idea was this to paint miniature buildings and windows aahhhgg!" "oh wait, it was mine!" "All is ok with the world again I turned it around" "yes that is beautiful, I am the business, woop woop!"

It is thoroughly exhausting being an artist sometimes experiencing every emotion in the same day. I am intrigued to know what you go through when creating artwork or making hand made items, and what are your favourite genre of music to listen to and what emotions do they stir up in you? You don't need to be an artist to answer this question. Leave a comment below.

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Climate change makes the restoration and reconnection of Living Landscapes to preserve biodiversity even more crucial. Our wildlife communities will need to be genetically vigorous to adapt to whatever unpredictable conditions arise in the future. Tiny populations in stagnant gene pools clinging to isolated patches of ground will not make it. Wildlife will need larger core areas to ensure maximum variability, and these will have to be linked. As the temperature, acidity, water or salt content in the soil changes, whole groups of plants and animal will need gradually to shift along passable corridors � wildlife highways � to new elevations or aspects.
The Wildlife Trusts are uniquely placed to spearhead the delivery of Living Landscapes. Countrywide, there are 47 trusts, owning or managing hundreds of nature reserves � among the first seeds for our core areas. Each trust also has experts with the local knowledge and enthusiasm to provide the hard graft and guidance needed. Between them, the Wildlife Trusts have more than three quarters of a million active and concerned members. But this is not a job for conservationists alone. It will benefit, and must involve, people everywhere.

It�s a statutory duty Already all government departments have a statutory duty to have consideration for biodiversity in all activities. So, apart from the wider conservation movement, early partners will include public bodies such as Natural England, the Environment Agency, the Forestry Commission, the Ministry of Defence, British Waterways and local authorities. The huge amount of land in public ownership can all be managed to contribute to some extent to a Living Landscape. Equally important is to involve the private sector. Housing developers and water companies, for instance, will appreciate the advantage of effective flood controls, and sympathetic farmers can be helped through funding instruments.
Putting nature at the heart of our lives A Living Landscape means the revival of the land we love. Nature has so many uses � it can temper the climate, clean the air, regulate the flow of water, give us space in which to play and heal our souls. It is time to channel it back into the heart of all our lives. A Living Landscape is the embodiment of �joined-up� conservation.

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restore natural areas by reassembling damaged and fragmented blocks of woodand, meadows and marshes. It will reconnect the living tissues � the streams and hedges and waysides � that link them to the pockets of wildness in our towns and villages. It will rebuild nature in our midst and put it to work for us. A reinvigorated natural world will become our ally in coping with environmental threats.
Other generations have faced and conquered acute challenges. Polluted water, smog, acid rain: all have had a detrimental effect on wildlife and people, and all, through good science, strategic co-operation and sensible legislation have been tackled. Climate change (linked to intensive development) is our generation�s principle crisis. The impacts are uncertain, but the least we can expect are unpredictable weather with unseasonable winds, flooding and unfamiliar conditions for wildlife. Fortunately, our landscape, if properly refurbished and managed, can help us deal with this.

Capturing the carbon Global warming is the result of a recent build-up of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, forming a blanket that allows the sun�s rays to enter but not to escape back into space. But the CO2 from the fossil fuels we burn can be reabsorbed and stored by the plants in our landscape and the phytoplankton in our oceans. Every woodland and hedgerow we restore, every tree we plant in gardens, streets and parks makes a contribution. Peatlands have an even greater capacity for locking up CO2, and so the value of protecting and restoring these features is evident.

Soaking up the floodwater Flooding is the most conspicuous domestic catastrophe we have attributed to climate change so far. Floods arise less from an increase in water than from how that water is channelled off the land. Huge, compacted or drained fields, dredged, high-speed riverbeds and concrete roads and carparks all accelerate water off the land and through people�s front doors. What is needed are obstacles to slow it down and sumps to soak it up. Nature provides these in the form of flood-meadows, wetlands and marshes. But 90 per cent of lowland wetlands have been drained in the past 60 years. It is now in everyone�s interest � farmers, developers, householders, government alike � that we put some of them back.

Next week I will share how climate change makes the restoration and reconnection of living landscapes.

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Hello Everyone

Welcome to the first blog of 2016. I am going to share with you what you can expect from me when commissioning a painting.

Once we have established your budget we then discuss your preferred surface such as canvas, paper, board etc and I guide you on the size of the painting to ensure we remain within budget. What I need from you is clear concise instructions on the type of background you prefer if your subject is not a landscape. If you are unsure, don't worry I will be able to make suggestions of backgrounds that will suit your painting, and if I am to paint a people portrait then I will need instructions on the type of pose you are looking for.

I then take a photograph and you choose the final picture. Please allow 4-6 weeks for the painting to be completed. I keep you informed of it's progress by emailing you a picture, and if there are any changes to be made, then that is the time to make them. Paintings on canvas arrive to ready to hang at no extra cost and if your painting requires mounting and framing then I can get that done for you.

Thank you for reading until next time...........

Merry Christmas Everyone

I mentioned in a previous blog that I was participating in an open air art fair, well I am going to share with you how it went. On Monday of that week the weather was bitterly cold with torrential rain and gale force winds. I was in two minds whether to cancel the venue and wait until spring, by a stroke of luck I was contacted by a local artist who wanted to meet up for a drink and told me about an indoor christmas fair taking place on the same day, at Queen Annes School. Luckily I got a table and spent the week repacking my bag in preparation for it.

The fair took place in their sports hall and it exuded festive warmth and cheerfulness. There were plenty of refreshments, music a santa grotto and bouncy castle. I sold hand painted christmas cards you won't find on my website, and they went down a storm.

The school raised �1000 for the Kasiisi Porridge Project and National Animal Welfare Trust. They are holding a spring fair which I am keen to participate in to raise money for their next two chosen charities.

As it is nearing the end of 2015 I would like to say a big thank you for all of your support in following me as my business grows. I hope 2016 is kind to you take care and see you next year.

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Love Joanne

Have you ever looked at an artist�s work and wondered how they arrived at the finished product? Did they photograph their subject first then paint? Or did they take pictures of beautiful work?
I am going to share with you the process that I followed in creating the 16 paintings on my website.

1) Over a period of two months, I scoured the countryside for large enough scenes, which were either bland, (so I could them pretty up), or already pleasing to the eye, that could be painted from different perspectives.

2) To get that shot, I risked getting scratched by brambles, blown away by the wind, rained on, or run over by passing cars. All in the name of Art. I used the camera on my phone to take the photographs.

3) When I got home five of the most inspiring pictures to work with were selected . I tend to work on several paintings at the same time, as do numerous artists, because it keeps the interest and motivation fresh.

4) The next step was choosing a surface to work on. How to make that decision comes down to the medium being used. My medium is Acrylics therefore I used un primed canvas textured Acrylic paper, which holds the paint in place.

5) After roughly mapping out the perspective on all five surfaces, I started to paint in the details to a certain stage every day so they would all be completed at the same time, using paint brushes of various shapes and sizes.

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Painting is a wonderful hobby and pastime. It can also be a great career for those lucky enough to make it as a professional painter. Whether you paint for work or just for fun, there are lots of benefits of painting, and here are 5 of them:

1. Appreciating works of art

Paintings can be intricate works of art that have many layers to them in terms of their message. Artists complete their works in a particular way and have a particular subject matter for a reason. If you paint, you�ll get a better understanding of why other artists have completed their works in the way they have. The best way to understanding the make-up of a painting is not to look at it from afar, but to do your own paintings and get to grips with how they�re completed. The more you experiment in your own work with different styles and techniques, the more you�ll understand and appreciate other works of art.

2. Stress relief

Painting is a great way to relieve stress. Many people turn to painting because it allows them to get away from it all and focus on creating something positive. Many channel their stress into their works and create works that have been inspired by their heavy feelings. Painting becomes more fun and exciting because you�re leaving the negativity behind and doing something where you can just focus on the good.

3. Self-expression

Lots of people enjoy painting because it�s a great way for them to express themselves. There�s nothing to get your creativity going like a blank canvas. With painting you can create whatever you want and you can say whatever you want. All paintings have meaning and messages, whether they�re simple or complex. All paintings are done to convey meaning and messages to others; they�re a way for the artist to show their creativity and express themselves to the world in a highly creative way.

4. Optimism

Most painters are optimists because painting has helped them develop a positive outlook on life. Part of this outlook comes from a sense of achievement artists feel as they develop their painting skills and complete more paintings. Many artists who have been painting for a while feel great that they�ve built up a skill set and have a collection of paintings to show. Building up skills and paintings is something that can help you feel a lot more positive because you�re achieving things and doing something good.

5. Fun

To put it simply, one of the best benefits of painting is that it�s fun. You get to unleash your creative spirit and can create whatever you want without any restrictions. You�re in charge and you get to approach painting exactly how you want to. You feel motivated to get your work done then you feel a sense of accomplishment once it�s done. There is so much to explore, with loads of different styles and techniques to discover � there�s always going to be a painting ready to be created. Painting can be many things but there�s no denying that above all, it�s a lot of fun, and that�s one of its best benefits.

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What is plein air painting?

Plein air painting simply means painting outdoors. It's derived from the French term en plein air, meaning 'in the open air'. Plein air paintings are usually landscapes or snapshots of real life. The practice of painting outdoors has been popular for several centuries. Many artists regularly paint outdoors and find it a very enjoyable way of painting.

When did it start?

Painting outdoors became especially popular in the mid-19th century with the Impressionists and the Barbizon school. Artists would head outdoors and paint scenes from real life, whether it was a scenic landscape or a painting of people going about their everyday routine. The practice grew in popularity thanks to the development of paints in tubes and portable field easels, which made it much easier for artists to have all their equipment on-site. Plein air painting has been very popular with French Impressionists, American Impressionists and a host of Russian painters, as well as many others.

What about all my supplies?

If you can, have two different sets of art supplies, one for in the studio and one for plein air painting that you take with you on the go. Try to use an oil that dries quickly - transporting wet canvases can be quite a problem so make sure you know how you're going to get your canvas home. It's great if you have enough room in your car to put your canvas down flat. A French easel is ideal for plein air painting because it's portable and you can store your painting in it.

What about the weather?

One thing you have to bear in mind is the sun. As the day progresses, shadows will change throughout the course of the day. If you want to you can work on one canvas in the morning then a different one in the afternoon, each one showing the same place at different times of the day. Either way you should focus on the main shapes of the painting first, then add details like shadows in later. Impressionists would study how light and the weather both affect scenes at different times of the day. Plein air paintings are known for their brilliant, glistening lights.

What if people ask me what I'm doing?

If you're painting outdoors, you should be prepared to have people ask you what you're doing. Even if you're in a very remote place, there's always the chance that a passer-by could see you working and have some questions. If you're up to speaking to people, by all means engage in conversation and answer their questions - you never know, you could get a few sales this way! If you just want to get on with your work, politely let them know you want to crack on. Most people will just want to have a look at what you're doing and should understand that you want to concentrate on your work.

Why should I do it?

Plein air painting can be very enjoyable and rewarding. Finding a place to paint, whether it's close to where you live or further away, can be fun and adventurous. A great part of the experience is scouting about to find a great place to paint. Another great part is surrounding yourself with the sights, sounds and smells of nature and capturing all of them in your painting. There are loads of scenic landscapes all over the place just waiting to be painted.

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Hello everybody!

Over the past few weeks I�ve been asking you for your input to help me create my next painting. I�ve had quite a few suggestions � thank you to everyone who�s made one. It was hard deciding a winner as there were some really great suggestions, but I�ve decided on a winner.

I�m pleased to announce that John is the winner. John suggested painting a meadow with a bridge and a village in the distance. So congratulations John! I�m really excited to get started on this and will be posting another work in progress video either next week or the week after, so watch out for that.

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The Art on the Street open art fair is taking place on Saturday 5th December in Maidenhead town centre and I�m delighted to be taking part. The fair will be taking place from 10am to 4pm and my stand will be opposite Scrivens Opticians.

Art on the Street has been running for seven years. Every year there are two fairs: as well as this one in November, there�s also one in June. The June festival earlier this year attracted some 40,000 people from all over, so I�m hoping this time it�ll be even busier!

To entertain you while you look round the various stalls, there will be live music. Food will also be served and as the fair has obtained a license to serve alcohol, there�ll be mulled wine available as well for you to enjoy.

I do hope to see lots of you there and I hope it will be a good day out for everybody. Entry and parking are both free.

Art on the Street

When: Saturday 5th December, 10am to 4pm

Where: Opposite Scrivens Opticians, Maidenhead town centre

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Good morning everyone! I can�t believe it�s the 1st of December already � the countdown to Christmas has officially begun! Anyway, for today�s blog I thought I�d write about something a bit more serious, and that�s plagiarism.

Plagiarism is defined as the act of taking someone else�s work and passing it off as your own. If you take someone else�s painting and say you painted it, you�re plagiarising that work. If you copy an image of a painting online and put it on your website claiming it�s yours, again you�re plagiarising that work. Similarly, even if you draw or paint over someone else�s work or add things to it here and there, it�s still plagiarism.

It�s worth bearing in mind that plagiarism is illegal if it affects the artist�s intellectual property rights. If your artwork is protected by copyright or trademark, you as the owner of that copyright or trademark could take someone to court if they were found to have plagiarised your works. If someone is found to have made a substantial amount of money from plagiarising copyrighted works, they could find themselves facing a fine and a hefty jail sentence.

Of course when it comes to art, it�s practically impossible not to borrow ideas from pieces of work you�ve come across before. If you see a piece of art, you might feel inspired it and you might want to create a similar piece: that�s totally fine, so long as you don�t blatantly copy it.

If you�ve felt an inspired by a particular painting, make sure the painting you create is original and is yours. Don�t recreate someone else�s work. If you feature things that are clearly taken from another painting, it�s vital that you reference this other painting and its artist, just like you would reference a quote for an essay. Don�t cheat people into thinking something is yours when it�s not. You won�t get anywhere if you plagiarise. Sometimes artists want to use a part of someone else�s work in their own work. Is this okay? It is, only if explicit permission is obtained from the original artist. If the original artist says you can use part of their work in your own piece, then you can. If the original artist doesn�t give you permission, you can�t.

So what�s the best thing to do to make sure you don�t plagiarise? Simple: be unique. By all means look at other works for inspiration, but when it comes to creating works of art for yourself, create pieces that showcase your talent, vision and individuality, not someone else�s. If you do plagiarise someone else�s protected work, they will find you and they will take action.

When you create art, you wouldn�t want someone else coming along and ripping your work off, plagiarising it and passing it off as their own. You wouldn�t want your work plagiarised, so don�t plagiarise the work of others. There�s quite a fine line between being inspired by something and plagiarising something, so if you�re unsure, it�s always best to make a reference just in case. The best thing to do, of course, is to carry on being original.

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Good morning!

In last week�s video I talked about losing my mojo and asked you for some ideas to create a new painting. In today�s video I�m going to give you an update on what�s going.

I�m very glad to say that I�ve received some brilliant ideas suggestions so far. I�m not going to talk about any of them because I don�t want to influence any of your ideas.

What I�m going to do is run the competition for another 2 weeks, so keep your suggestions coming in! Spread the word and get your friends and family to submit their suggestions.

It doesn�t matter whether you�re an artist or not � all ideas and suggestions are welcome. If you haven�t submitted yours yet, there�s still plenty of time for you to do so.

In case you missed last week�s vlog, what I want is for you to get involved in the creative process, from conceiving the concept the painting to finishing it. You can even decide the title of the piece and I�ll make a video of me working on the painting so you can see how it�s coming along.

So what I�d like is some suggestions about:

- The composition
- What colours of flowers would work well together

If I use your suggestions, you�ll win a pack of hand-painted Christmas cards from me.

Once the winner�s been announced, I�ll leave my business email so they can get in touch with me and send me their contact details and address. All details sent to me will remain completely confidential.

I look forward to receiving some more ideas and suggestions and will announce the winner in the next video.

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Struggling to get your creative juices flowing? It can be quite intimidating when you don�t feel creative and you�re staring at a blank canvas. So how do you get your creative juices flowing? Here are 5 simple ways to get your creative juices flowing.

1. Turn off your phone and computer

We consume a lot of media and digital content these days. In fact, the amount of stuff we�re bombarded with on a daily basis can be quite overwhelming. There�s TVs, computers, smartphones, laptops, smartwatches and more. Even if you have just a few of these, you�re still going to have lots of content thrown your way. To get your creative juices flowing, turn all of your devices off for a while so you�re left with your own thoughts. You may well find yourself coming up with new ideas because your mind has been given the chance to work on its own.

2. Break from your routine

It can be hard coming up with new ideas when you do the same thing all the time. If you do the same thing day in, day out, you might find it hard stimulating your mind. When you�re in a routine, the best way to get your creative juices flowing is to break from your routine. Do something completely different to stimulate your mind. It could be something simple like going for a walk, reading a new book or going to a museum or gallery. Do something new to refresh your mind.

3. Keep a diary

Having ideas stored in your mind is one thing, but having them written down is another. Once you start regularly getting ideas, write them down. You�ll soon build up a collection of ideas, which you can look back on to inspire even more ideas. Another good thing about having a diary of ideas is thought it encourages you to come up with more so you can fill it up.

4. Keep a collection of inspirational things

When you find an image that inspires you, keep it. If you see a sight that you find inspirational, take a photo of it and keep the photo. Put images and photos of things that inspire you together in a collection. Build this collection up over time and use it to get your creative juices flowing whenever you�re lacking inspiration.

5. Have a tidy work space

Many people believe that having an unorganised work space can lead to you having an unorganised mind. Give your work space a good clean and sort your things out so you know where everything is. With a clean and organised work space, your mind shouldn�t be as cluttered and disorganised as before. You should find yourself able to think more clearly when your work space isn�t cluttered or chaotic.

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Hello everyone!

I�m excited to share with you Diary of an Artist: Inspiration Behind Mini Meadow At Ashenbury Park. This week I�ll be talking about a time when I discovered something new to paint and a new approach to painting both in the same day.

As you know, I�m really passionate about beautiful landscapes � they�re my favourite subject matter and I love feeling inspired by them. A few years ago, instead of admiring large, open landscapes, I learned to appreciate smaller mini meadows.

I was at Woodfork Park in Woodley, a suburb of Reading in Berkshire. I noticed a beautiful floral display in an S shape and found it quite captivating. It was April and the flowers were in full bloom. I�d seen the display before, but it wasn�t until it was in full bloom that I really appreciated its beauty.

I decided it would be great to paint it. It was like my instincts were telling me I had to paint it. However for this painting, I decided to take a somewhat different approach. I crouched down and got a different perspective of the flowers. I took some photos looking up at the display, rather than across or down on it like I was used to.

The finished painting, Woodland Park, is one I particularly like because it�s a new subject matter and it�s taken from a new angle. Over the past few months I�ve found a few more mini meadows to paint. Once you find a new subject matter, you realise there�s so much more out there waiting to be painted!

Ashenbury Park is near where I am and it�s one of the nicest parks I�ve been to recently. I�d definitely recommend it for a great day out.

So that�s how I came to find a new subject matter and a new approach to painting.

My next video will be a works-in-progress video of my Ashenbury Park painting. I�ll be showing you how I create the painting, while trying to capture the beauty of the mini meadow.

I hope you�ve liked this vlog! If have, please like it and share it. If you�re new to my channel, don�t forget to subscribe.

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Hello everyone!

I�m excited to share with you Diary of an Artist: My Story Part 3. Here goes!

Uni was a whirlwind. It was the beginning of an exciting new chapter, yet it seemed like it finished just as it was getting started.

I eventually moved to Farnham. My work situation wasn�t exactly promising: there were no good opportunities for art-based work, or any sort of work in general. After a year or so, I was out of there!

There didn�t seem to be anything on the horizon. I sold my home and decided to save the money to buy a house with later on in the future. My family were a bit concerned about me moving around a lot. They kept asking if I wanted any stability, but I just told them my home was wherever I lived, simple as that.

I didn�t want to spend the rest of my life tied down to any one particular place. The one thing I wanted more than anything else was to be exploring the world, not moving around places I was already familiar with.

My belongings meant less and less to me, so I gradually got rid of most of them, holding on to only a few. All I could think about was being an artist, yet nothing was happening. I thought going to uni would help, but there was still a piece missing. I had the qualifications, what else did I need?

The answer to that question was something I just couldn�t work out. I had the motivation, the passion and the certificates, so why wasn�t I working as an artist? I started to feel down because I wasn�t where I thought I would be. My negativity started to affect those close to me, which I felt bad about. It was like I was on a slippery slope, when really I should have been scaling the career ladder.

People from my course were succeeding in their different fields. I wasn�t succeeding in mine. This made me feel pretty down and disappointed in myself.

You know when you just feel like nothing�s going right? That�s how I was feeling. I had put in time and effort, but they weren�t paying off.

What do you do when there�s no light at the end of the tunnel? You make your own light to help you find the way out. For me my light was thinking about how much I would enjoy being a full-time artist. I thought about how much I enjoyed art and how, above everything else, it was definitely my greatest love. It had been a huge part of my life and always would be because I loved it so much.

It was now eight years since graduation and I still wasn�t there. Everything I tried failed miserably. Something had to give.

I was stuck in some temporary job as a PA. One day I pushed myself and did some searching on the Internet. I came across Maria Brophy�s website and I knew straight away she was going to give me lots of useful help. It was like a gut instinct, one that I had to follow up. It would take another two years or so, but help would come.

I�d Rather Be in the Art Studio by Alison Stanfield was recommended to me and it was a treasure trove of useful information. On Maria Brophy�s website I came across an ad for some art business institute and clicked on it. I ended up coming across an ad for a business consultation at this art business institute� at first I thought it might be another scam, so I was hesitant to get in touch. Was it a scam? I couldn�t tell whether it was or not. I deliberated for a week before deciding to go for it and get in touch.

And I was in luck. The people I spoke to completely understood my situation and offered lots of great advice. After a Skype call that lasted just an hour, my art business was born and I haven�t looked back since!

I became a sponge, absorbing all of this new information in. I started learning all about branding, marketing, social media�you name it! I started getting involved in the local art community and really began spreading my wings, so to speak.

That Skype call gave me the kick I�d needed for so long. I was fired up and ready to go. I was determined to put 110% commitment to my art business.
Why landscapes? It�s simple: I�ve grown up loving them, the way they change and the way they make you feel free. They�re beautiful, picturesque, captivating, enchanting, haunting and eternal.

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Hello everyone. I�m excited to share with you the second part of my vlog series, Diary of an Artist. To recap from last week, me and my family had set off on a driving trip from Italy, all the way to Spain!

We were holidaying in Spain in a beautiful whitewashed house right on the beachfront. At the time I was a normal teenager and loved going clubbing � even though I�d seen plenty of different landscapes, no one would have said I would end up becoming an artist!

When I was 16, we moved back to England, which I really didn�t want to do because I�d become so attached to my life the way it was. It took me about 3 years or so before I felt settled in England. I couldn�t stop dreaming and daydreaming about my school and life back in Italy!

When it came to Careers Day at school, I had no idea what to do. I wished I�d had the ambition to become an artist back then, so I could have got to work on my dream sooner; all I wanted to do was to travel. Of course, I would have to get a job to fund any travels. My parents suggested I work in an office and I eventually got into work placements, which I really enjoyed. I got to meet lots of great people and enjoyed my social life.

I turned 22 and started seriously thinking about where I was going in life. By then I�d grown to hate office work and the 9 to 5 lifestyle that went with it. I was still itching to travel: when the recession hit, off I popped! I went travelling around America, Canada and some other places.

Before that there was a family holiday to New York and Arizona. While there I met this bloke and we stayed in touch through writing � days without the Internet! So when I went back to America, I planned on meeting up with this bloke again and I took all my artwork to show him. Of course, airport security questioned me about anything and everything.

While I was out there I ended up getting my very first commercial commission! A local caf� wanted a painting of a cup and saucer on a checkered board. If I�d stayed in America, I might have been able to build on that, but unfortunately I had to go back to England and find a real job.

I decided I really wanted to become a professional artist when I was stuck applying for job after job. I started drawing and painting with watercolours; I had lots of free time and would spend most of it practicing and learning about art.

I eventually got a job and would paint at weekends. Luckily, some colleagues commissioned me to do paintings and portraits. I knew I�d got the ball rolling! However, I had to stay in work to pay the bills and to fund my fledgling art career.

Then there came a setback: I was made redundant because the company I was working for merged with another company. One of the company partners gave me a rather life-changing parting gift: a professional Winsor & Newton art set. He told me to do something with my love for art.

I went through a few years of thinking I would never achieve my dreams and would end up doing office work for the rest of my life. Commissions dried up and there just seemed to be nothing on the horizon. I felt out of place at work; my lifestyle didn�t suit me at all. Something had to give.

And it did. One day a colleague suggested I go to careers advice. This was following a period of nine years of doing nothing related to art simply because I felt despondent and was sure I was never going to get anywhere with it.

The careers meeting was a success: I left determined to go to an art and design university in Surrey. That evening, the application form was sent off and a few days later, I was invited for an interview! I managed to put my portfolio together after visiting an art shop and asking the girl for help because I had no idea how to do it!

The interview itself didn�t go as well as it could have, at least that�s what I thought on the day. It needed to have gone well. Going to that university was the right thing for me � I felt it as soon as I walked through the doors.

A few days later, I got the letter and�I�d got in! The course itself was brilliant, even though I had to walk 20 minutes to the train station and get two trains there � it was so worth it. I was lucky enough to get on the degree course as well and to top it all off, I got into the halls of residence right by the library. Everything was sorted!

Throughout my course I became interested in artists as people. What makes a person create art and what life experiences do they pour into their work? My degree lasted for three years and I loved every moment of it.

One of my fondest memories from university is visiting London with some friends and having a nice meal on the riverbank. I love the hustle and bustle of cities; I also love how beautiful they look at night when all the buildings are lit up and stuff. It brings the city to life in a whole new way.

Of course, my university lifestyle wasn�t forever. I graduated in 2005. On to the next chapter of my life, which will come next week!

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Hello everyone. I�m excited to share with you the launch of my new vlog series!

Diary of an Artist: My Story Part One is the first in a series of vlogs about my life and how I�ve ended up becoming an artist. I want to share with you how I came to set up my own art business and how my childhood led to me choosing the subject matter I focus on in my paintings.

One of the things I loved about my childhood was that it was ever-changing. Because my dad worked for an airline, we got to do lots of travelling around Europe, living a sort of nomadic and cosmopolitan lifestyle. When I was young and going from place to place, I noticed how each country seemed to have its own landscape. When you travel from one country to another, the landscape seems to change as well, something I find very inspirational.

There was one time when I was living in northern Italy in Turin with my family. Believe it or not, we actually drove all the way to Spain! We set off at 8 in the morning and spent a total of 12 hours on the road. We drove through the south of France and as we went through Provence, there was a particular scene that hit me and has never left me since; it was a huge, open space full of lavender fields. I remember finding that scene really beautiful and picturesque. In fact, right then and there I thought it would be a great idea to paint it. I thought it would be an even better idea to get out of the car and run through the fields! Unfortunately, we didn�t stop.

On the other hand, Paris wasn�t as captivating. We stopped over in the big city and it was too hot and sweaty�to add to that, right below our hotel there was a jazz band playing. All we wanted was to get to sleep, yet this jazz band decided to play till 3 in the morning! Needless to say, the next morning when we set off again, we were all exhausted. We drove on and as we left Paris and came into the countryside, though as we drove into Spain, the landscape was somewhat dry and barren. All that was on my mind were those fields of lavenders�

That�s it for part one! Be sure to look out for part two coming soon.

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As with any other activity, painting requires a bit of common sense. Paints and painting supplies can be dangerous if not used properly and paints especially can be quite harmful. Following a few simple safety tips will ensure your painting sessions are safe and free from problems.

Always read the label

It goes without saying that labels are very important and should not be overlooked. Product labels these days come with a great deal of useful information. They can look overwhelming at first given the amount of information, but what is there is relevant. Usually the most important safety advice will be clear and in a larger font than less important text so that it stands out. Simply do and avoid doing whatever any label tells you to. Most of it is common sense, but it�s always best to double check any labels just in case. Keep products in their original tubes or whatever else they came in, so you can always match a product to its label.

Keep your work area well ventilated

Lots of paints and paint supplies can cause harm if you work with them in a small space that doesn�t have good ventilation. Ideally, you should work in a large space and keep all windows open. If you have a fan, the best place to put it is right by the window, so it�ll blow air out of the room. You don�t want to breathe in nasty fumes which can cause breathing problems if you breathe in too much of them.

No food or drink

Do not have any food or drink with you in your studio. If you want to eat or drink, leave the studio and wash your hands before eating or drinking. You don�t want to run the risk of paint from your hands getting on your food and ending up getting eaten. You also don�t want to accidentally dip your paintbrush in a glass of water that you drink from.

Keep skin contact to a minimum

Painting can be a very messy activity and it�s very easy to get stuff everywhere, including on your skin. However, certain paints and paint supplies can damage your exposed skin. To prevent this, try to cover up as much skin as you can. Wear gloves if you have to, so you minimise the risk of getting paint on your hands. Even a little bit of exposure to hazardous chemicals over an extended period of time can cause problems. As an extra precaution, wash your hands after painting, even if your skin has been protected, just in case. You should also never let anything get near your mouth. This includes paintbrushes � even if you�re trying to get a good point on the end of the brush, don�t put it near your mouth.

Disposing of paints and paint supplies

You shouldn�t put solvent or paints down the drain. In fact, anything with paint or solvent on it shouldn�t be put down the drain. This can lead to blockage and can contaminate water supplies. Instead you should dispose of them in a metallic fire-proof container � solvents such as turpentine are highly flammable and rags covered in turpentine have been known to spontaneously ignite. Check your local recycling centre to see where you should drop your metallic containers off.

Other precautions

Keep all painting supplies out of the reach of children. Always clean up properly once you�re done and don�t leave hazardous products unopened and unattended. If you spill anything that can be hoovered up, hoover it up. Always wash your hands whenever you leave your studio and once you�ve finished painting.

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Getting started

Acrylics are one of the most popular types of paints because they dry very quickly and can be diluted with water to create a watercolour effect. They are very good at protecting a piece of art because they resist water very well, despite the fact that they can be diluted with it. They also show no signs of discolouring, fading or cracking. Beginners often start off with acrylics and take it from there.

So much choice!

The main problem is that there are so many different supplies available. It can be overwhelming for a beginner to decide what to buy and how much of each item is needed. As long as you have the essentials, you should be all sorted. Basic supplies work just fine for beginners, whether the budget is big or small. As artists get more accustomed to acrylic painting and become more adventurous in their work, they tend to then get specialist supplies that meet their exact needs.

What you�ll need

The most important basic tools you will need are acrylic paint, a paintbrush and a surface to paint on. You�ll also need an easel, a palette, an empty jar, a spray bottle and some paper towels. As well as these you might also need some running water and some protective materials. All of these basic supplies can be found at any good art supplies store and there are loads of websites offering good deals for supplies as well. Note that online shopping tends to have cheaper prices and a bigger variety of products.

How many colours will I need?

It can be difficult determining exactly how many colours are going to go on your palette. It�s probably harder deciding what colours are going to go on it. For a basic, beginner�s palette you should probably have white and the primary colours, red, blue and yellow. Add a few different shades in if you can, but if not, the three primary colours plus white should do just fine. Experiment with mixing and finding new colours. As you become more advanced, you can move away from mixing primary colours and focus on more specialist colours.

What type of paintbrush?

There are loads of different types of paintbrushes to choose from. The only way you�re going to find the one best suited to you is by giving several a go. Try out some different shapes, makes and sizes and see which one you feel most comfortable with. You should only need a few brushes to complete your painting. Brushes that shed their bristles easily tend to be cheaper, while the more expensive ones don�t shed their bristles that easily.

What do I paint on?

The best painting surface for a beginner is a canvas. You don�t necessarily need an easel if you�re prepared to paint on a flat, horizontal surface, but it�s much easier having your canvas face you on an easel.

What�s everything else for?

Have a spray bottle handy and every so often spray a bit of water over your palette. This keeps it from drying out faster. You�ll need a jar to store brushes and another, bigger one with plenty of water in to wash and rinse off your brushes. Before you get started, make sure all surfaces close by protective materials that you don�t mind getting paint on, such as an old cloth. Have access to water so you can prime your jar and wash your hands. Paper towels are handy for wiping brushes and washing your hands with.

Get the basics and go from there

Don�t let yourself get overwhelmed by the vast amount of different products out there. When you go shopping for supplies, just choose the basics and go from there. Once you�ve got the hang of it, be adventurous: try different types of paintbrush, new colours and new surfaces to paint on. There are so many options, but it�s always good to start off with the basics.

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While renting a studio can give you a work space away from home, it can also be quite expensive. About a third of UK artists don�t put money towards renting a studio and about a seventh of those who do are planning on quitting renting studio space to save money. Here are three things you can do instead of renting studio space:

1. Create a workspace in your home

If you can�t afford to rent studio space, the simplest solution is to work from home. Many artists find it hard to be productive at home, which is why they rent studio space in the first place. If you do decide to work from home, you should create boundaries and establish a separate working space. If you have a spare room, for example, make that your workspace and do your work there. It doesn�t have to be a spare room, of course; it could be anywhere you like, so long as you�re comfortable working there. If you live with others, make sure they understand that this is your space to work and that you shouldn�t be disturbed while at work. Do everything you can to make sure that while you�re in your workspace working, you can get as much done as if you were working in a rented studio.

2. Create a workspace outside of your home

If you�re lucky enough to have a front or back garden, you can take advantage of this extra space outside your home to create a workspace. The best way to do this is to have a shed, which has the advantages of being separate from your home and cutting down on your transportation costs. The only major downside to this is that if you don�t have a shed, it can be quite expensive buying and installing one, though you could consider it a long-term investment. Another downside is space, because sheds aren�t usually that big. Before investing in something like a shed to work in, make sure you�ll be able to be productive in such a small space.

3. Work outdoors

A lot of painters, especially landscape painters, do their work outdoors. Many landscape painters paint en plein air, capturing the beauty of the natural world as they see it. If you can�t afford to rent studio space, consider working outdoors � it isn�t just landscape painters who do their work outdoors. Even if you�re not doing paintings of the world around you, what you see, hear and experience can be a great source of inspiration. The main problem with painting outdoors is of course the weather. There�s also the cost of transportation to consider, depending on how far away you�re going. Overall it�s a lot cheaper than renting a studio and if offers you the chance to get some fresh air and see more of the world, rather than being cooped up in a studio with four walls to stare at.

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Visiting art galleries is a wonderful thing to do. It�s great being surrounded by so many fine works of art and being able to explore the gallery at your own pace. One of the things I love most is wandering round galleries, discovering new works I�ve never seen before and learning more new things about art. Here are 5 ways you can make the most of visiting an art gallery:

1. Give yourself plenty of time

Galleries are meant to be explored at a leisurely pace. You�re not going to properly enjoy yourself if you�re rushing from place to place because you have somewhere to be. You�re not going to be able to fully appreciate the artworks if you quickly glance over them before moving on to the next one. Make sure you�ve got plenty time in your day to spend wandering round the gallery. That way, you can spend more time looking at, and appreciating, the works of art.

2. Know about everything that gallery has to offer

Lots of art galleries are pretty big. It can be very easy to get lost or even miss out whole rooms altogether. Before you set off exploring the gallery, take a few minutes to study the guide map and see everything there is to offer. If you just wandered round, you could very well end up missing something you might enjoy seeing. Make sure you�re aware of any special events and exhibitions throughout the year.

3. Read up on works you want to see

Galleries are great for discovering new artists, but if you know there�s an artist whose works you�re keen to see, it sometimes helps to do a bit of research. Give yourself a bit of background knowledge so when you view the artwork for the first time, you can form more of an informed opinion about it; the more you know about an artwork, the more you�ll appreciate it. You�ll find plenty of information in the gallery itself, whether it�s the short bios accompanying artworks or guides, brochures and books you can get for free or buy in the gallery itself.

4. Speak to people

While you can learn plenty about an artist or a particular piece of work from printed materials at the gallery itself, you can also learn a lot from speaking to people. You never know what you can learn from other people, whether it�s the people visiting to view works of art or whether it�s the people who work at the gallery. Events are really good opportunities to meet like-minded people who enjoy art and want to learn more about it.

5. Note down your favourites

A good way to make the most of your visit to an art gallery is to take something away from your visit. Lots of people come across a new artist, for example, and want to get more into their works, but they don�t write down the artist�s name and they forget. All it takes is a quick note: you just have to note down whatever it is you like and want to look up later and then there�s no chance of you forgetting it later.

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Painting is a great hobby and, if you�re lucky, it can also become a great career. One of the best things about painting is that it allows your creativity to flourish. You can also learn new things about yourself and the world around you when you paint. Here are five ways to learn more painting:

1. Visit galleries

Paintings are meant to be viewed in person, not from a computer screen, so get yourself off to an art gallery. You can easily learn lots about painting online, but there�s nothing more immersive than the experience of visiting a gallery and being surrounded by all sorts of art works. Not only can you learn about paintings from reading descriptions and guides and speaking with the curators, you can learn from viewing them up close.

2. Join an art club

Joining an art club is a great way to learn more painting: you�ll be surrounded by like-minded people who are all interested in painting and want to learn from one another. Clubs are all about pooling ideas together and sharing them; whether you�re a novice or a more experienced painter, you�re bound to pick up some tips and learn new things about painting. Clubs are also great if you have a busy schedule because they can easily be fitted in and they provide a nice break from the routine of life.

3. Go to art school

If you�re really committed to learning more about painting, why not go to art school? Have a look round and see what art courses are available. It�s a big commitment, even if you only do a year-long course, but the information you�ll learn will be invaluable. Not only will you get lots of time to hone your craft, you�ll learn from experts and get help perfecting your skills. Speaking from experience, going to art school definitely helped me a lot and I wouldn�t be the artist I am today without it.

4. Practice, practice, practice!

It goes without saying that you learn by practicing. The more you paint, the more you�ll learn about painting and what it does for you. As you paint more, you�ll also learn more about your skills and your likes and dislikes. Painting is a great way to express your creative side and there is a lot to it. There are loads of wonderful things to learn about painting and you�re not going to know everything if you do one painting then stop, so keep practicing!

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Hello everyone,

This week I thought I�d share an interesting article I came across a while back. This article is called �Study Says Making Art Is Good For Your Brain, And We Say You Should Listen� and was published on Huffington Post. As the title suggests, it�s all about how creating works of art can actually improve your mental faculties. As an artist myself, this is something that I find really interesting.

The article is focused on a study that was carried out in Germany and had a small group of recently retired elderly people as participants. The whole point of the study was to see whether creating art would have a positive effect on the participants� brains. What this study showed was that creating art could slow down or even completely stop the decline of a number of brain functions due to old age. In other words, creating art gives the brain the exercise it needs so it doesn�t start rotting away, so to speak. The brain is like a car: you have to keep it in the best condition, otherwise it isn�t going to work as best as it can. Creating art is one way of keeping the brain fuelled.

I find the set-up of the study really interesting. There were 28 participants in total � these were split into two groups of 14. The study lasted for 10 weeks and for the duration of the study, one group attended a weekly two-hour practical art class, while the other group attended a weekly art appreciation course. Scientists scanned the participants� brains before and after the study. It was found that the people who had taken part in the practical art class showed a significant improvement in psychological resilience and had more functional connectivity. The results from the art appreciation group weren�t as promising.

I know the study was quite small and was carried out on people of a certain age group, but the results are still promising. People have always said that being creative is good for you, so it�s encouraging to see scientific evidence showing that creativity can have a positive effect on the brain.

Here�s the article if you�re interested in reading it:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/08/how-art-changes-your-brain_n_5567050.html

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All my life I�ve wanted to paint, but it wasn�t until the other week that I had a good think about how painting�s benefitted me throughout my life so far. I�ve always been determined to become a professional artist yet I never truly appreciated what good painting was doing for me on the way to becoming professional. There were times when I thought I would never make it, yet painting was still doing me some good � I just never realised it at the time.

The main way painting�s been good for me is because it�s given me something to concentrate on and something to aim towards. I think that�s the way it�s benefitted me the most, to be honest. Without painting, I don�t know what I�d be doing. In an ideal world, I would have always been a painter; this isn�t an ideal world, but at least I�ve always had my painting to keep me driven and motivated.

I think painting�s also helped me develop as a person. Through painting I�ve learned to take a step back and look at the world in a different way - I don�t think I would have gained that perspective from anything else. I can zone out from the hustle and bustle of daily life and devote my full attention to my work. Because painting helps me relax, I�ve learned to take a calmer approach to a lot of things in life. Again, I wouldn�t have learned to take that calmer approach had it not been for painting.

Finally, I think painting�s allowed for me to get to know myself better. The more I learned about painting, the more I learned about myself, because painting is something creative that requires you to think about what you want and how you want your work to be. Whenever you work on a painting, you pour a lot of emotion and feeling into it; for me landscapes evoke memories from my childhood of travels through Europe. Painting landscapes is a personal experience because it involves me taking inspiration from memories and thinking about how they�ve influenced me.

How do you think painting�s good for you? How has it benefitted you?

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Art is a vast and complex subject with a rich and colourful history. It�s something I find utterly fascinating and compelling. There�s nothing more exciting than appreciating someone�s creative work and trying to gain some sort of meaning from it.

In my career as an artist, I�ve mainly focused on landscape painting. While it�s certainly a very popular genre of art, there are plenty of other areas of art I could have specialised in. I could have focused on pottery, photography or even abstract painting, for example. So why do I paint landscapes? Why is this the area I�ve come to specialise in?

People who know me know I had quite a nomadic childhood. Instead of spending my childhood rooted in one place, I spent mine travelling throughout Europe, living in different places and gaining valuable experiences from different countries. Though I�ve since settled down, I think those childhood travels instilled a love of nature in me. I loved seeing scenic landscapes, each one different from the last. Appreciating the natural beauty of the world around me was something I loved doing from a young age and it�s always stayed with me.

Even to this day I still love nothing more than going for a drive and appreciating the beautiful landscapes around me. One of my favourite hobbies is going for drives and doing a bit of plein air painting to capture some of the beautiful scenery I see in a painting.

So that�s why I paint landscapes. If my childhood had been different, I don�t know what I would be doing now in terms of art. I might not even be interested in art! Looking back, I�m glad I have the same appreciation for the natural world that I did during my childhood. I�m very fond of my childhood and I�m very glad my love of the natural world has always stayed with me and has become a key part of who I am and what I do. Being a landscape painter is what I was always meant to do.

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Artsy Shark has asked a number of artists what their creative inspiration is. What drives them to spend their time creating art? Why do they get joy out of being creative? When they�re in the creative spirit, what do they think about to push them forward and realise their full potential as artists?

One of the artists Artsy Shark questioned was Joanne Perkins, a landscape artist from Berkshire. When asked about her creative inspiration, Joanne explained how she had lived a somewhat nomadic childhood travelling throughout Europe. She visited and saw lots of different places, many of which she found interesting, captivating and inspiring. Seeing these places inspired her to paint and continues to do so to this day. While she specialises in painting scenes from around Berkshire, she always recalls her childhood journeys whenever she paints. Part of her creative process involves reflecting on those inspirational journeys throughout Europe. Not only does Joanne capture the Berkshire scenery in a unique and thoughtful way, but she also infuses her work with feelings inspired by her childhood travels.

Joanne loves exploring Berkshire and finding new places to paint, whether it�s a popular park or somewhere a bit off the beaten path. She manages to make every scene beautiful and captivating; her work has a sort of mystical and dreamlike quality that makes it stand out. She�s able to create inspiring paintings in this way because she always remembers her creative inspiration when she works. Thanks to this, it�s clear that Joanne has found her niche. It�s great to see an artist who keeps their past experiences and memories and close to them at all times. Joanne�s found her winning formula and Artsy Shark looks forward to hearing more about her work in the future.


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Here�s the original Artsy Shark article:

http://www.artsyshark.com/2015/01/20/studio/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+artsyshark%2FNCiC+%28ArtsySharkFeed%29

Achieving your dream is never going to be easy. I know too well how things can happen and life can get in the way. There�s no list of set rules of how to achieve your dream, but there are a few things you can do to help you get there.

1. Think about what your dreams are

It would be great if we could just devote our lives to realising our dreams, but real life will always come first. Take a step back from the rush of daily life and devote some time to yourself. Find a nice, quiet place where you can have a think to yourself and reflect on what it is you want to achieve. You may remember something from a while ago that you�ve never actively pursued or you may remember a childhood dream that would be worth chasing. It�s important to have these moments to yourself, otherwise you�re not going to have a clear idea of what it is you want.

2. Be determined

Dreams don�t achieve themselves. If you want to achieve something, you have to put in the hard work necessary. Sometimes it doesn�t always work out and sometimes you�ll feel like it�s never going to happen, but you have to always be determined, no matter what. Make a sort of reminder and keep it somewhere you�ll see it regularly; if you dream of visiting a particular country, for example, you could have a photo of that country on your desk at work. You�ll be regularly reminded of what you�re aiming for and it will keep motivating you to work for it.

3. Choose the right path

With being an artist, for example, there are many different paths you could take that could lead to you becoming an artist. Sometimes you will find yourself having to decide between several different choices � which do you go for? When you can�t decide, think about what stands the greater chance of getting you there, even if it isn�t quick and easy. Sometimes you have to put in a lot of time and effort for things to start happening. Having said that, there are advantages in everything, so do consider all your options carefully before making that decision.

4. Know what you�re doing

It goes without saying that you have to have at least some idea of how you�re going to achieve your dream. If you have no idea how you�re going to do it, get some research done and see what options there are for you. A good thing to do is to speak to people who are further ahead than you in whatever it is you�re pursuing. Be organised and draw up a few different plans of what you could be doing. You have to be doing something, even if it�s just taking the first step, because doing nothing isn�t going to get you anywhere.

5. Don�t feel rushed

It can take a lot of time and effort to realise your dreams, so don�t get too down if you haven�t reached your goals yet. It�s important to understand that these things can take a lot of time. Don�t be impatient and don�t get frustrated, otherwise you won�t be in the right frame of mind to achieve anything and you�ll burn out. Part of the joy of having a dream is enjoying the time it takes to realise that dream; it�s better to make small steps towards something rather than large strides.

6. Remember to step back every now and then

It�s great if you have a dream and you�re focused on achieving it. What�s even greater is if you can take a step back every now and then. If you devote all of your energy to something, it�s going to take over your life and drain you. What you need is something else to focus on every once in a while � make time for hobbies and things that aren�t directly linked to your goals. Your dream shouldn�t take over your entire life, instead it should enrich different areas of your life. Even pursuing your dream can benefit your life in different ways, so don�t forget about other aspects of your life.

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Plein air painting is the practice of painting outdoors. It was a key part of the landscape painting movement and is still very popular today. Artists started appreciating the natural world more and more when they stepped outside and decided to paint the beautiful landscapes they came across. As a landscape painter myself, I practice plein air painting a lot because it�s a wonderful way to get work done and see more of the world around us. Here are three things I love about plein air painting:

1. Discovering new places

There�s nothing like going for an aimless drive in the country and finding a beautiful spot you think no one else in the world knows about. There have been many times when I�ve find somewhere off the beaten path and I�ve thought, �this would make a wonderful painting!� Going on these drives gets me excited because I never know what I�m going to find � you�ll never get to see the wonderful scenes just a short drive away from where you are unless you hop in your car and go exploring!

2. Drawing inspiration from the natural world

As a landscape artist, I�m in my element when I�m surrounded by the natural world and I�m painting a beautiful scene. A lot of artists draw inspiration from photos or pictures of landscapes, but there�s really nothing like being out there and seeing it for yourself. What I like the most is when you feel inspired by something you were never expecting to come across; sometimes I might see something that reminds me of a happy time in my childhood, for example.

3. Interacting with others

This is something that doesn�t necessarily happen every time I practice plein air painting, but it�s nice when it does happen. Sometimes people come up to me and ask about my painting, which is always a good thing to happen. I enjoy chatting to people I meet while working outdoors � it�s something that wouldn�t happen if I was working indoors. You never know what interesting people you might meet or what interesting new things you could learn from them. Whenever someone you don�t know says they like you work, it makes you feel good and it�s one of the best things I like about being an artist.

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Art is subjective and there�s no definitive answer to the question �what makes art unique?� Every artist has their own style and creates their art in their own particular way, but there�s not set list of things you have to do to make your art unique.

Making your art unique can help you in two ways: first, it can expand your creative horizons and keep art exciting and interesting. Have a think to yourself about the art you�ve created so far and ask yourself whether you truly think it�s different from what others are doing? Is there something you can definitely say is unique to your work? Art is about expressing yourself, but it can also be about self-discovery and trying new things. If you look at your artwork and you think it�s quite similar to what others are doing, think about how you can put a twist on it.

You might have painted a well-known landscape that many others have painted. Take the White Cliffs of Dover, for example. The cliffs are a well-known landmark and have appeared in a lot of paintings. Have a look at these paintings � try Google, for example � and have a quick glance over the paintings. See which ones catch your attention and ask yourself why. A lot of landscapes of famous landmarks tend to be painted in summery weather. Why not paint a landmark in the snow? If lots of the paintings don�t include people or animals, include people and animals. If lots of artists have painted a landmark from a particular angle, try a different one. These are just some ideas of how you can think outside the box. Art is much more fun and rewarding when you start exploring new ideas and pushing your creativity to its limit.

The second way making your art unique can help you is that it can help your art business. Like I said before, the market is very crowded and there�s a constant influx of artists trying to make it. If you can find some niche - something that sets you apart from the crowd - and market it well enough, you could be on to a winner. There�s no guarantee that other people will find your art unique, but it�s definitely worth trying. People take more interest in something that�s different. Stand out from the crowd in your art and people should pay more attention to your work. The people who appreciate uniqueness the most are the ones who a really into art and know their subject matter. If you can carve a niche for yourself and market this to people who are in the know, you�ve got the ball rolling.

When it comes to marketing your art, you have to sell yourself as much as your art. Once you�ve come up with your nice, that special something that makes your art unique and sets you apart from the competition, bring this up in all your marketing. Be sure to let people know that this is your art and there�s something unique about it. Show people what�s unique and tell them what�s unique. You have a unique selling point and by focusing your marketing around that, you should give people more of a reason to buy into you and your art.

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There are no rules when it comes to landscape painting. You�re free to approach your painting in whatever way you want to. Every artist has their own preferences and that�s what makes painting in general so exciting. Here are four general tips for you to consider if you want a bit of help painting landscapes:

1. Appreciate colours

One of the most wonderful things about nature is the huge numbers of colours. There are all sorts of shades, hues and tones of colours out there to be seen. Pay attention to colours that feature prominently in the landscape � if you�re painting a field, for example, note all the different shades of green. Likewise, if you�re painting a snowy landscape, observe all the different varieties of white. Whatever type of landscape you�re painting, take some time to explore the colours in depth. Experiment by mixing different colours on your palette to try and match the colours in the landscape before you. Make note of what colours to mix to produce the colours you�re going to use in your painting. I find it always helps to get some colours prepared beforehand.

2. Include what you want

There�s no obligation for you to include every single tiny detail you see before you. There�s nothing stopping you including everything if that�s what you want to do, but at the same time it�s your painting and you�re free to create your take on the landscape. You could include the parts of the landscape, such as rivers, trees and hills, while omitting smaller details such as animals, bushes and rocks. I like to focus on a few particular parts of the landscape that capture my attention the most for whatever reason. I feel that my paintings are more likely to capture other people�s attention if I include the things that caught my attention.

3. Create what you want

Your landscape painting is your unique representation of a scene. By all means, be creative and use your imagination when deciding what goes into your painting. You�re using the landscape before you as a basis for your painting, but there�s nothing stopping you adding your own touches here and there. Rearrange elements to suit your vision � if you think a tree, for example, would look better on top of a hill rather than at the bottom of a hill, place it at the top of the hill. If you�re painting a really famous, well-known landscape, you want to be sure to include whatever makes it famous, but don�t be afraid to add things and move things about.

4. Decide what should have prominence

You want your landscape painting to draw people in. If you give something prominence, that�s going to stand out and will draw people in more. If you paint everything with the same amount of detail, there�s not going to be anything outstanding to really capture people�s attention. A good way of having something stand out is to paint whatever�s in the foreground with a lot of detail, using less and less detail the further into the background you get. Alternately, you could choose to focus on something that�s not necessarily in the foreground but further away. It�s entirely up to you.

Hello everyone. Hope you all had a good Christmas and are looking forward to the New Year. I thought for my last blog post of 2014 I�d talk about different things that can damage paintings. Here�s a brief guide to things you should look out for and how to prevent them damaging your paintings:

1. Sunlight

The radiation from UV rays in sunlight can cause the colours on a canvas painting to fade. You might think this is a long-term effect, but it can actually happen quite quickly. Keep your painting out of direct contact with sunlight. Artificial lights can also cause damage over time, so be sure to keep your painting well away from artificial lights.

2. Temperature

Paintings should be stored at room temperature and the temperature should be kept constant. You should keep your paintings away from sources of heat, such as radiators and fireplaces.

3. Moisture and damp

Water from moisture and damp can cause lasting damage to paintings. Keep your paintings in a room that has good air circulation and use a humidifier to keep the room�s humidity under control. Avoid storing your paintings near anywhere that has damp � check the walls and floors of your storage room before putting your paintings there.

4. Household pests

Even the smallest of household pests, such as tiny insects, can damage paintings. One of the problems is that these pests like the dark, quiet and dry areas that are good for storing artworks. Make sure the room is as pest-free as it can be; keep all food out and check for pests and damage regularly.

5. Contaminants

A lot of domestic products, especially aerosols, can damage paintings. You might be surprised to know that even handling paintings with your bare hands can cause them some damage. Always wear gloves when handling artworks and avoid using aerosols or any similar products in the room where your paintings are stored.

There are never enough hours in the day. Sometimes you want to get loads done, but time�s always against you and before you know it, you�re heading to bed and your list of things to do is incomplete. I very often find myself wondering where the time goes�I�m sure you do too!

When it comes to painting, time is even harder to manage than usual. Painting requires you to commit a lot of time to it, and in this busy day and age, it can be really hard to find a good length of time for you to just unwind, get in the zone and get on with painting.

Here are five tips for busy painters. I hope they help!

1. Stop procrastinating

Time is precious. If you have something to do, just get on with it. The more you spend procrastinating, the less time you�ll have for other things. The word �procrastinate� comes from the Latin word meaning �to put off till tomorrow�. If you have something that can be done today, get it done today, then you can move on to whatever�s next on your to do list. The more you procrastinate, the more you�ll get in the habit of getting things done sooner rather than later.

2. Be organised

I�m not exactly one to be organised, but I try and I do manage to stick to a schedule every once in a while. If you�ve stopped procrastinating, you�ll find it a lot easier to organise yourself. Draw up a schedule and try to stick to it, or make a to do list and set yourself a goal for getting everything done. Once you�re organised, you�ll find yourself powering through task after task with ease!

3. Find the time

Even if you are organised and don�t procrastinate, there�s still the matter of actually finding time to paint. One good tip I like doing is to set aside a chunk of time for painting and fit other things around it. I also find it good to have one day a week where I don�t have anything planned, so I can commit the whole day to painting without having to worry about anything else. It�s great because the only thing on my mind is painting!

4. Make the most of the time you�ve got

By all means don�t push yourself or rush your painting, but do be sure to make the most of any time you can dedicate to painting. Time is valuable and you�re going to feel better if you�ve spent your time productively. Try getting into the zone and think of nothing but your painting. Allow yourself to forget everything else that�s going on in your life and fully concentrate on painting.

5. Enjoy it!

Most importantly, you should always make sure you enjoy painting, otherwise it�s going to become something you don�t look forward to. Even if you�ve got a busy schedule and can only find time for painting every now and then, make sure that when you paint, you allow yourself to enjoy it. Don�t see it as yet another task to shove into your schedule; if you see it as your passion, you�re going to enjoy it no matter how much else you�ve got going on in your life.

Whether you�re using cheap or expensive paintbrushes, they�re still an investment and they should be taken care of. They won�t remain in perfect working condition forever, but you can make them last longer by taking good care of them and especially by cleaning them after every painting session. It�s easy to do � just follow these few tips and you�ll end each painting session with (hopefully) a lot of good work done and some nice, clean paintbrushes.

Rinsing water-based paints out

If you�ve been using water-based paints, all you need is a container, some water and some soap/washing-up liquid. Simply place your paintbrush in a container. Fill the container with warm water so all the bristles are completely submerged. Add a little bit of soap or washing-up liquid and swirl the brush about a bit. Take the brush out, empty the water out of the container then refill it with warm water and repeat the other steps. Keep doing this until the brush is clean.

Rinsing oil-based paints out

If you�ve been using oil-based paints, you�ll need a container and a solvent to clean your brush with. It should say on the paint tube or can what solvent is best to clean the paint off with, so go with that. Oil and turpentine are good at cleaning oil-based paints off brushes. Simply fill the container with whatever solvent you�ve chosen and completely submerge all the bristles. Swirl the brush round a few times, take it out then empty the container. Refill it and repeat the other steps. Keep doing this until the brush is clean.

Getting rid of paint and other substances

It�s important to make sure there�s no paint left on your paintbrush. Keep rinsing thoroughly and gently use your fingers to remove any clumps of paint you might see. It�s easy to tell if all the paint�s gone � simply dip your paintbrush into clear water and if you can�t see any colour, your paintbrush is free from paint.

You also want to rid the paintbrush of any soap, washing-up liquid or anything else you might have used to get the paint off. Again, keep rinsing thoroughly and if there are any clumps of whatever you�ve used, gently remove them with your fingers.

Cleaning the bristles

It�s a good idea to give the bristles a gentle combing once you�ve finished rinsing them. This should get rid of any paint or anything else you might have missed and it helps to keep the bristles in their original shape. Always be gentle with bristles as they can become misshapen quite easily.

Drying

Once you�re satisfied you�ve got all the paint and other substances off your paintbrush, you can then leave it to dry. It�s fine to leave brushes to dry at room temperature, but make sure you don�t leave brushes standing with the bristles pointing down, because this can cause the bristles to become misshapen. The best thing to do is to get a tea towel or kitchen roll and place the paintbrush flat on top of that. You don�t have to use a tea towel or kitchen roll � anything that�s good at absorbing water will do.

Once your paintbrush is completely dry, place it back in its original packaging and keep it stored safely until next time.

There are quite a few things to consider when cleaning paintbrushes, but it�s really easy to do and shouldn�t be too problematic. These are just some tips to help you � there are plenty of other guides out there as well.

I�d also like to say Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone! I hope you have a wonderful and memorable Christmas and all the best for 2015.

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Last week I spoke about how word of mouth can really help push your business to the next level. This week I�m going to share some ways you can get word of mouth going to help your business.

1. Know your target audience

Do you know the people you�re selling to? What boxes do they tick? Are they old or young, male or female, married or single? Make sure you know who will be more likely to buy your products. People who aren�t interested in your business are less likely to talk about it, whereas people who are interested are likely to talk about it to others.

2. Talk to influential people

Talking to people you�re aiming your business at is a good way of getting your message out there, but it can be more effective. Talk to someone with influence, someone who many people follow; go on social media sites and find people in your area who have lots of followers and post regularly. If someone with influence is speaking about your business, it�s going to reach more people. Don�t go bombarding people with in-your-face emails and calls. Treat people like people, not business clients. Learn about them and get a conversation going.

3. Build up an online community

If you can build up an online community of potential customers, it will be great for your business, because you�ve got your target audience right where you want them. Get yourself on social media sites and steadily build up a following of potential customers. This can take some time, but it can also work really well. The more people you�ve connected to online, the more people there are who can refer you to someone else.

4. Be consistent in your offerings

No matter how big or small your online community, make sure you keep their interest by posting regularly, whether it�s about your business or about other things. People will lose interest in you and your business if you don�t post anything. Keep your pages updated regularly and always make sure your posts are engaging and tie in with you and your business.

5. Ask people to refer you

There�s no harm in simply asking people to talk about your business with others. Manners and patience are key, of course; tag it on to the end of a conversation, that way it doesn�t feel forced. Be polite and say you�d really appreciate it if people could spread the word. Remember that people are only going to talk about your business if it�s any good. If they�ve had bad customer service and have umpteen other things to complain about, they might spread the word, but it won�t be good and bad word of mouth could hinder any efforts to help your business grow. The customer does always know best, so treat them respect and they�ll hopefully spread the word, even if you have to ask politely.

6. Give them something for nothing

People don�t expect to get anything for free these days, so it�s always a nice surprise to get something for nothing. Give your customers and potential customers something for nothing, even if it�s a little sample or a postcard with one of your paintings on or something like that. That something is a reminder of you and your business. People are more likely to remember you if they have something that jogs their memory.

7. Manners go a long way, and they�re free

Always go that extra mile and be polite and friendly to people. If someone makes a purchase, thank them for it. Engage people in conversation. Let them engage you in conversation. Offer to help them. Always be polite and always put the customer and potential customer�s interests before your own.

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If you want to be a professional artist, you�ve got to be able to sell your art. A lot of artists create beautiful paintings but they struggle to gain the sales and recognition they deserve because they�re not salespeople.

These days it�s really easy for something to spread and reach a lot of people very quickly. With the Internet, you can write about something and people all over the world can read what you�ve written as soon as you�ve posted it. It�s crazy to think of how much information you take in on a daily basis that�s originated in places all over the world.

The Internet is a great tool for promotion, but so is the classic word of mouth and the two are very closely linked: a lot of people will use social media platforms to spread the word about something rather than doing it the traditional way of actually speaking to people directly about it. If someone writes about your painting, chances are it�s going to reach more people than if that person had spoken about it. That�s what�s so great about the Internet: it broadens your prospective customer base. You can reach people you might not have been able to reach otherwise.

Word of mouth, in the traditional sense, is still a really great tool, but it�s even greater thanks to the Internet. If you can get people to talk about your paintings, only good can come from it. With traditional word of mouth, you�re probably going to attract more local people, whereas with the Internet, there really is no limit.

For an artist, you really want to be attracting people from everywhere to maximise the number of potential customers you�re reaching. Word of mouth is your secret weapon because it can lead to a lot of exposure.

In next week�s blog I�ll be talking about how you can get word of mouth going to help promote your art, so be sure to come back next week.

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Being an artist is a great career to have. You get to be creative, work to your own schedule and, hopefully, earn yourself a very good living. Like with a lot of creative careers, if you want to become an artist, you can�t just one day decide to be an artist and start earning a living; to get to the stage where you�re earning a good amount of money, it usually takes a lot of time, a lot of talent and a bit of luck. Being an artist isn�t suited for everyone. Here are seven simple questions you should ask yourself before becoming an artist.

1. Am I good at it?

Of course art is subjective: someone might think a painting�s great, another person might think the same painting�s not so great. If you want to be an artist, you have to have some level of skill at it. Some people are naturally gifted and take to art straight away, while others have the potential to be good, but they just need time to develop their skills. That�s why things like art schools and art classes are great. If you want to become an artist but you�re not sure whether you�re good enough, join a class and hone your skills.

2. Am I dedicated enough?

It can take a lot of time and effort not only to build up your skills, but to also establish your brand. If you want to be an artist you have to be dedicated, whether you�re aiming to be a part-time artist or a full-time artist. This is something that you have work on yourself. You have to be responsible for developing your skills and using them to the best of your abilities to create works of art that will sell. You also have to keep pushing yourself to get your works noticed by people. For most people it�s an uphill struggle. Many people have the potential to succeed but are let down by their lack of determination.

3. Do I know what kind of artist I want to be?

It�s important for you to find your niche. From a business perspective, it�s important to find a USP and make the most of it. If you have an idea of what sort of an artist you want to be, you�re already well on your way to developing your USP. These days there are so many people vying for attention and customers that it can be hard to get noticed and attract customers. You need to stand out from the crowd and offer something the others don�t.

4. Am I prepared for setbacks?

There�s no guarantee you�ll ever succeed. If you do succeed, it might take a year or it might take ten. You�re bound to have setbacks along the way, but it�s important not to let them stop you from trying. If you�ve been working for ages on a painting and it doesn�t sell, should you give up on becoming an artist? No. You should keep on trying. Your first painting might not necessarily kick-start your career. You never know when your career�s going to properly start. Keep on trying and it will start sooner or later.

5. Can I be confident with something I�ve created?

As an artist you�re creating wonderful works of art and hoping to sell them. It�s very important that you have confidence in yourself as an artist so you can confidently present your works to the public. It often happens that people become shy or embarrassed about sharing something they�ve created, no matter how good it is. They also might want to keep something to themselves because they think it isn�t good enough for other people to see. To put it simply, you aren�t going to get anywhere as an artist if you can�t bring yourself to share your work with others. You have to learn how to appreciate your work. There�s nothing wrong with being proud of something you�ve created.

6. Do I enjoy creating art?

This is the most important question you should ask yourself because there�s no point embarking on a career as an artist if you don�t enjoy creating art. One of the things you need to succeed is a passion for your work, and you aren�t going to have that to push you further if you don�t like creating art. If you find it hard to get creative because you don�t enjoy it, being an artist probably isn�t for you. If you look forward to your time �in the zone� working on your next creative project and you�re always bursting with ideas about new projects, you have the right approach. To put it simply, if you love what you do, there�s no telling how far you can go with it.

One of the main reasons people create things is to have them acknowledged by others. Your creation might set off a debate amongst people, it might grab people�s attention and make them think about things in a new way, or it might simply make people smile. Whenever someone reacts to your creation, you can say that your creation is indeed fulfilling its main purpose because it�s being noticed by others, who are interpreting it in their own way.

When it comes to art, what is its purpose? Is it to get people thinking? Is it to get people to like it? Is it to remind people of a particular place or time in their lives? For me it�s the latter - I want my landscape paintings to make people remember a place they visited that means something to them. I was inspired to paint by seeing wonderful places and experiencing things I still hold dear today.

I could say that my art has two purposes: I want people to react to it, but more specifically I want them to remember a place that means a lot to them.

Even though you may know why you�re creating art, how do you know if it�s doing what you want it to? Simple � just ask people. If you�re having an exhibition, the opening day is a great way to get talking to people and gauge their reactions. Show your art to family and friends and see what they think. Put it online and see what people say. You�re only going to know if your art has purpose if you see what impact it has on people. When people tell me my paintings remind them of a particular time and place in their lives, my art has fulfilled the purpose I have given it, but it�s also fulfilled the more general purpose of simply being appreciated by others.

Your art might not be well-known but it still serves a purpose and every time it�s seen by someone, it�s fulfilling some purpose. Even if just a few people react to your art, it�s still fulfilling a purpose. The challenge is getting as many people as possible to react to it. The more people are exposed to your art, the more of an impact it will have and the more it will fulfil its purpose.

1. It doesn�t feel like work

Whatever your life�s work is, it isn�t a �job� in any sense of the word. Instead, it�s a way of living. Your work is part of your lifestyle and you can have the lifestyle you want because of your work. A lot of times you�ll ask yourself �am I really doing work right now?� because it�s no longer a chore that has to be done. Work, play and life have all blurred into one, as if they are all intertwined. You�re constantly chasing your dream way of living, but you�re enjoying the journey there.

2. You�re aligned with your core values

Your life�s work is a reflection of who you are. It�s an extension of your beliefs and the way in which you see the world. You�re true to yourself as a person because you�re doing something you truly want to be doing. You feel like a complete person doing what you�re meant to be doing, and this can work wonders for your confidence. You can do anything when you put your mind to it � you can take the world around you and make a meaningful contribution to it by actively making a difference.

3. You�re willing to suffer

The word �passion� actually derives from the Latin word �pati�, which means �to suffer�. Realising your life�s dream isn�t going to be easy and only those who are prepared to suffer stand a chance of achieving what they want to achieve. No journey is plain sailing: there will be ups and downs along the way. At times you�ll feel like it�s all about to end. You might get rejected; you might have to sacrifice something or you might have to endure a tough period of your life before you come out the other end. The cleverest people know that hard times are all about improving yourself. Take pain and suffering and turn them into something good. Learn from negative experiences and turn them into something positive.

4. You�re often in the zone

Getting in the zone is something that very few people are good at. Modern life is filled with so many distractions that it can be hard to have the time to get in the zone and have a really productive period. Some people can get into a really good flow of work whenever they want to � five hours might fly by without them noticing. If you�re not one of those people that can just sit down and focus, don�t worry, because you�ll still your find getting into the zone when you feel a creative urge.

5. You make time for living

Some people live to work, others work to live. If you�ve found your life�s work, you�re definitely working to live. Even though you�re doing what you love the most, you make time to reap the benefits of it. Your time outside of work is filled with meaningful and productive activities, from socialising and keeping fit to joining new clubs and just enjoying some downtime. Even when you�re not technically working, you feel like you�re being just as productive.

6. Commitment is an honour

Once you�ve realised what your life�s work is, it�ll be easy for you to dedicate yourself to it. If it really is right for you, you�re going to commit to it no matter what. Every part of you tells you to go for it. There�s no part of you that tells you to consider something different. It�s second nature to be committed to your work. This is what you�re dedicating your time to and you can�t imagine it any other way.

7. The people who matter to you will pay attention

Your friends and family will be wholly supportive of you. At first they may question what you�re doing and they may be worried it won�t work out, but they�re only worried because they so much and want you to succeed. Once you�ve made it, they�ll feel just as excited and happy as you. Those closest to you will say things to you like �you�re living your dream!� and �I�ve never seen you look so happy!� and �you�re looking great these days!� Little comments like this will mean a great deal when they come from those who mean the most to you.

8. You fall asleep exhausted, fulfilled, and ready for tomorrow

Every day is an opportunity for you to continue living your dream. Tomorrow is a new day and to work more on your life�s work. Every night you�re grateful for the day you�ve had. You�ve spent your day how you should have spent it and you can�t wait to do it all over again tomorrow. You�re living the life you�ve dreamed of for so long and you can�t see yourself doing anything else.

Plein air painting is a great way of painting. You�re in the great outdoors, breathing in the fresh air, admiring the beautiful view and capturing it in your painting. But, the great outdoors isn�t like your studio at home, where you�re safe from the elements. There�s nothing you can do to stop the heavens opening up, but there are a few preventative measures you can take to ensure your painting sessions doesn�t go awry.

Essential supplies

Umbrellas should be on every plein air painter�s checklist of essential supplies. Add to that list things like a waterproof overcoat and a rubbish bag, or some sort of covering, which you can use to cover your painting if you get caught in the rain. If it�s lightly raining, use the umbrella to shield your painting from the rain. If it gets too much, put your painting away in a rubbish bag until the rain clears. If you get wet, you can always dry off, but if your painting gets wet, there�s a good chance it�s going to get ruined, especially if you�ve already made a good start on it.

Paint from a sheltered place

You could always avoid the rain by painting from a sheltered place, such as under a bridge or a tunnel. Of course, you might prefer the view from somewhere that isn�t sheltered, so don�t feel you have to paint from a sheltered spot whenever you paint en plein air. If it does start raining, it might be a good idea to head to a sheltered place and resume your painting there until the rain clears. Or if you don�t actually paint, you can at least appreciate the scene you�re painting from a different angle. Better yet, you could just paint from your car, but then you�re not getting out in the great outdoors, which is part of the fun of plein air painting.

Defying the rain

Some painters will prepare for every eventuality and will paint no matter what. If you have your essentials with you, you can effectively complete your painting in the rain, though there�s a chance it will be a lot different from what you originally thought it would be. Some people like this � they love being able to paint a scene in the rain because it adds a whole new perspective to the scene. Painting in the rain is definitely worth trying � just make sure you cover up and are able to make the most of the bad weather. If you�re put off by it, think of how interesting it would be to do a painting in a different way like this.

At the end of each month I find my list of things to do has got longer and longer! Over the past year I�ve learnt a lot of new things since I went about setting up my art business. I�m still learning new things every week; I prefer going about things by myself and picking up new ideas and skills using my own initiative rather than paying someone to give me a list of things to learn. There have been people who have tried to show me something useful, but they then want to be paid and to be honest I don�t think you should always have to pay out for this sort of thing.

What I�ve been learning this week is how to create end cards with clickable links for my videos. One obstacle that I�m facing is trying to find a photoshop that�s compatible with a MacBook Air. I�ve been watching quite a few videos on how to create end cards, so I�m feeling confident about that and there�s always the videos I can use for reference when it comes to actually creating the end cards.

Another thing I need to do is write my next newsletter which I just recently started. I�ve also got business cards and postcards that I created last week and they�re still waiting to be printed off. I�ve just finished another painting and am busy editing and uploading video clips for my latest works in progress video. Even though I�ve got lots on, I absolutely love because this is what I�ve wanted to do for my dream job for years. It doesn�t really feel like work at all. I believe art is my calling and I feel really lucky to be able to do this instead of working a regular 9-5 job. I did that for many years but I was unhappy and it wasn�t exactly the best time of my life. Even though I was working, I felt like I was unproductive and wasn�t doing what I was meant to be doing. All the while I knew something had to change but I didn�t know when that change would happen.

On top of all that there�s my social media sites that I have to keep up-to-date. I would spend more time on them, but there just aren�t enough hours in the day to be honest. When I�m working on several paintings at the same time � which I usually end up doing � the days just seem to go so fast and before I know it the day�s nearly over. Speaking of paintings I�ve got another one I�m aiming to have finished by the end of the month. Unfortunately I�m not going to do a work in progress video for this one because after I started recording footage I ended up losing all the footage because the camera broke on me. It wouldn�t feel right for me to start recording with a half-finished painting.

Anyway that�s just an update on everything I�ve got going on. As you can see I�m very busy, but it�s all good and it�s all hopefully going to lead to good things in the future!

Here�s a photo of me sketching out a particularly beautiful scene in Berkshire. What I do is I use a very light pencil to create a brief outline of the scene before me � this helps me understand the perspective of the scene and see how everything fits together. Once I understand how to translate the scene into a painting, I go ahead and start painting.

As you can see in the photo, I�m wearing a jacket. It was the classic case of unpredictable British weather. When I put my jacket on in the house it looked quite cloudy outside, but of course it turned out to be a nice, hot, sunny day! In fact it was such a nice day that my paints started drying too quickly even though I was using paint retarder, which I always use when painting in the studio � you couldn�t make it up!

I�m not the biggest fan of textured paper. It sometimes creates an effect where the texture of the paper actually pokes through the landscape. Other artists like it but I find it a bit distracting, so I use heavy weight (350gsm) white acrylic paper that has a smooth surface.

While I was painting, something quite unexpected happened. A woman walked by and recognised me. It turned out I�d asked her for directions in the very same place the previous year! I remembered asking her and I was surprised she remembered what I looked like. I�d been taking loads of photos of the landscape surrounding me. I later painted these scenes and sold them as Christmas cards that winter.

The part of Berkshire I was painting is a particular area that is really dear to me. It�s a hidden gem, really. It�s a bit off the beaten track as it�s hidden away from the main road. You feel like you�re deep in the countryside, even though you�re not. The thing I love the most about this particular place is that it just sums up the English countryside. It just has that quintessential English essence that is too appealing for me not to paint it! You can see some quaint, little cottages and I decided to paint them in a winter setting with snow everywhere. The finished painting looked like something out of A Christmas Carol.

Who was Paul Signac?

Paul Signac was an Impressionist painter who, along with Georges Seurac, developed pointillism. Pointillism is a painting technique whereby thousands of tiny dots of pure colour are applied to a canvas very close to one another. One of the main ideas behind pointillism is to use only two to three colours of dots in a particular area. The basic idea behind pointillism is that your mind and eye blend the different-coloured dots together to create the image when viewed from a distance. There is no set subject matter � pointillism is all about the technique.

Have a look at his paintings

To understand just how pointillism works, take a look at some of Signac�s most famous works. Some of these include The Dining Room (1886-87), Sunday (1888-90) and The Women at the Well (1892) among many others. The Dining Room depicts a Parisian family at the dining table having breakfast, while Sunday depicts a typical Parisian couple at home on a Sunday morning. The Women at the Well is a seascape painting which shows two women working at a well, with the sea in the background.

Subject matter

It is important to understand that Signac�s style is all about technique. The subject matter can be whatever you want it to be. Signac painted many landscapes, seascapes and paintings depicting daily life. He also did some more abstract paintings, such as Portrait of F�lix F�n�on. This particular painting depicts F�lix with an abstract background consisting of swirling patterns with loads of different colours. There is no limit to what the subject matter can be � it�s entirely up to you.

The size of the dots

When you look at these paintings closely, you�ll see how they�re composed of thousands of tiny dots. The effect created by this particular style of painting is really quite marvellous. The dots blend together to form a cohesive image. Some of Signac�s paintings, such as Sunday, have clearly defined areas and there are lines clearly separating one area of colour from another. Take a look at Capo di Noli and you�ll see the lines aren�t as clearly defined. The effect is still the same when viewed from a distance, but Capo di Noli was painted with much larger, more noticeable dots. The different colours that make up a particular area are a lot more noticeable.

Line definition and colours

Some pointillist paintings such as Sunday have two or three colours in one particular area. This helps create more clearly defined areas of the painting. Compare The Papal Palace, Avignon to Sunday to see how differently colours are used. Notice how The Papal Palace, Avignon doesn�t have clearly defined areas and colours � take a look at the water and notice how loose the reflection of the palace is. Now look at Sunday to see how clearly defined all of the lines and different areas of the painting area.

Colour theory

Before you get started, you should understand the basics of colour theory and the colour wheel. The whole point of pointillism is letting the mind create new colour by fusing two colours that are on the canvas. So, for example, if there are red and blue dots, from a distance these will blend together to form purple dots. If you�re creating a primary colour on the canvas, simply use dots of that colour. If you�re creating a secondary or tertiary colour, use different coloured dots that will blend together to form the colour you want from a distance.

Paintbrushes and colours

First you should decide whether you are going to have small or large dots. Then buy a paintbrush that corresponds with the size of your dots. A round point brush should work just fine for doing a pointillist painting. As for colours, having a lighter and a darker shade of each primary colour is a great start. For pointillist paintings, you shouldn�t need black paint because black and shadows can be easily created by using other colours, such as blue and darker shades of colours.

Getting started

Do a light sketch of your image on the canvas. Load your palette up with your white, the three primary colours and any extra shades you want, but make sure they don�t mix. Start applying dots to the canvas, but try to do one colour at a time and always thoroughly wash your brush in between colours. Apply dots densely if the colour is the main component of that part of the image and apply them lightly if the colour is only a minor component of that part of the image. Make sure the paint doesn�t mix on the canvas and only use a single layer of paint.

Is it OK to overlap dots?

It�s OK to overlap dots or have them barely touching, but remember that pointillist paintings lack depth and texture. If you have too many dots overlapping, especially if the dots are large, the painting�s going to appear to have more density and texture than the typical pointillist painting should have. This density will give the painting less of a brilliant effect, which is a characteristic of pointillist paintings. The more overlapping dots there are, the less merging of colours there will be. The occasional overlapping dots shouldn�t create too many problems, but try to avoid them if you want a painting in the classic pointillist style.

General tips

The act of applying thousands of small dots to a canvas can be monotonous, time-consuming and quite tedious. Take a break every so often to refresh your mind and relax your painting hand. When painting a pointillist painting it is very important to keep stepping back to see how the painting looks. When you look at your painting up close, you should see nothing but dots. You have to keep stepping back so you can keep track of exactly what it is you�re painting. Before you get started on your painting, practice on a spare bit of canvas or paper so you can see how the pointillist technique works. It may take a while for you to get the hang of this different technique, but it�s definitely worth trying out.

Painting can be difficult. It can be difficult trying to master it, whether you�re painting for leisure, for work or for both. Many artists are unable to realise their full artistic potential because they lack confidence in their painting skills, for one reason or another. Here are a few simple steps you can take to boost your confidence with painting.

Be your own artist

If you�re constantly comparing yourself to others, it�s not going to do your confidence in painting any good. Painting is largely about self-expression and interpreting the world in your own way, or showcasing your imagination. Use painting as a means of self-discovery. Treat it like a journey you�re on. Remember it�s your journey and ultimately it�s about you, no one else. Sure, you�re probably painting so others will be impressed by your work and even buy some copies, but you have to follow your own initiative and satisfy yourself first. Painting isn�t a competition, so don�t make it competitive.

Learn to appreciate and overcome obstacles

Painting is never smooth sailing for anyone. Even the most famous of painters had to overcome numerous obstacles. Sometimes it�s a personal problem, sometimes it�s a health problem, sometimes it�s painting itself � the point is you are never going to be able to prevent any obstacles getting in your way so you have to learn to deal with them when they come. Take negative experiences and turn them into positive ones. If you�ve just overcome a problem, take all your feelings and emotions and channel them into a painting. Obstacles are challenges that build up our character. To be honest, life, and painting, would be a lot more boring without them.

Become part of the community

A really good way of improving your confidence is simply to speak to other painters. This is a great way to pick up a few hints and tips. Other painters will know exactly what you�re going through, so they�ll be able to offer some advice to get you back on track. You can also build up confidence by showing other painters your work and asking for constructive criticism. Go on painting trips and visit local galleries. Become part of the painting community and you�ll feel more confident about your painting than ever, because painters support one another.

Learn to deal with money

If you paint for a living, painting becomes more than just filling a canvas with paint. You have to deal with money and there�s a lot that comes with it. You have to value your art, promote it, sell it, sort out your finances�the list goes on and on! If you want the luxury of painting for a living, you have to deal with money and it can get burdensome. You can easily lose confidence in your painting if, for one reason or another, money becomes an issue. If you�re not making enough money, is it your painting that�s at fault? Thinking like that can really knock your confidence down a few notches, so don�t think like that. We all have to deal with money, but the key is not to let it affect how you feel about painting and your confidence with it. Painting is one thing, money is another. Keep the two separate.

Plan ahead and prepare

You�re more likely to end up frustrated and unmotivated if you randomly decide to do a painting and haven�t thought about it at all. Sure, many great paintings have been done in this way, but if you want to improve your confidence with painting, planning and preparation are going to help you greatly. Set yourself goals � you�ll feel great once you�ve got a list of things checked off. Learn about everything you�re going to be doing before you start painting. Make sure you�ve got everything you need and you know everything you�re going to be doing. It may not sound like much, but having everything sorted will make things go more smoothly, which in turn will make you feel better about the whole painting experience.

To me my creative space has always been very important to me. It�s my special little area where I can get in the zone and produce good work in peace. It�s the one area of the house I won�t change unless I absolutely have to.

The other week I found myself moving my creative space to a different room in my house. After much deliberation, I decided to go ahead with the move, even though I knew I�d feel a bit iffy about the whole thing.

So I got started. I cleaned up all the rubbish and sorted and organised everything. I moved everything into my new creative space and I felt quite sad that I was leaving the old space behind. My new creative space is only in the next room along, but when you�re used to an area being the same for so long, sometimes it�s hard to see it change.

I know it�s only moving stuff from one room to another, but it does feel like I�m starting a new chapter. In fact it feels like I�m moving into a new house! In the photo you can see some paints and other supplies I left in the corner of the old room for the time being. I�ve also left a box of uni memorabilia there. I can�t wait to spend a good few hours rooting through the box, rediscovering fond memories from my time at uni.

As for my new creative space, it�s a bit smaller than the old one, but I like to think of it as more cosy and intimate. I�ve always worked in larger, more open spaces, so working in a smaller space will be exciting and different. I�m still going to be working on canvas and paper, but I�m not going to be experimenting with loads of different surfaces like I did in the older space.

I�m excited to start getting to work my new creative space. I�m going to miss working in the old space, but change is always good and you never know what good things can come from make simple changes.

Of all the artists I�ve learnt about, the ones that I admire the most are the ones who weren�t afraid to be innovative. They were very skilful at painting and drawing, but they took their art to the next level by pushing boundaries and doing things that hadn�t been done before. They weren�t afraid to experiment and be different, even if that meant they weren�t appreciated by the critics or the public. Many artists only start to be truly appreciated once they die. The passing of a creative person often regenerates interest in their work.
What really interests me is the artist themselves. I love reading about their life and about their character � it helps me build up a sort of connection with them. I find the more I understand the artist, the more I understand the artwork. The two are always intrinsically linked.

Caravaggio

Caravaggio is known as one of the great Italian painters of the 17th century. He was a baroque artist and led a wild and notorious lifestyle. He was involved in numerous brawls � in fact one led to him stabbing and killing an opponent. He then had to flee Rome, settled in Naples for a while then travelled on to Malta and throughout southern Italy. For one of his first public works he was commissioned to decorate the Contrelli Chapel in the French Church in Rome with scenes depicting the life of St. Matthew. The reaction to these paintings was overwhelming thanks to their extremely high level of realism and the dramatic contrasts of light and shades, a technique known as �chiaro scuro�.

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol started off in New York working as a freelance shoe designer for a variety of fashion magazines. Even though popular opinion was against him, he managed to carve out a career as an artist thanks to his business acumen and technical drawing skills. His life was brought to a sudden end when he died following a routine operation in 1987.

Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo never actually had any proper training as an artist, yet she is still widely praised for her work. She was the first ever artist to produce a series of large paintings depicting different stages of her life. These paintings told the story of how she experienced both mental and physical pain throughout her life, including incidents such as a bus crash she was in when she was a schoolgirl, and the abuse her unruly husband inflicted on her. Tracy Enim would later reintroduce this concept to the public, achieving much critical acclaim in the process.

Have you ever had that feeling when you wake up and you forget where you are for a second, then you realise you�re in one of your favourite places? I had that exact same feeling when I stayed at the Ritz Hotel. I woke up on a Saturday in the Royal Suite and saw sunlight streaming through the window. I could hear birds tweeting away. It�s a noise you don�t get to hear every morning. I took my time getting out of bed and what awaited me was a nice hot bubble bath drawn by one of the staff. I was in heaven!

After soaking in the tub I got dressed. I invited a friend over for breakfast and we planned what we were going to do for the day as we ate our full English breakfasts and washed them down with fresh fruit juice.

Our first stop was the beauty retreat, where we treated ourselves to a relaxing massage. While we were there, we thought we�d have manicures and pedicures as well! You�ve got to treat yourself once in a while. Once we were pampered and relaxed, it was time for lunch. We enjoyed an � la carte meal of lobster and crunchy vegetables, washed down with a glass or two of bubbly crystal.

Later on that evening we ended up in the casino with some mutual friends. We were laughing the night away, trying our luck on the slots and celebrating our wins. I didn�t want the night to end. We went back to our rooms as the beds were being turned down. The lighting was also being adjusted so the room had a sophisticated and warm ambiance. My room looked so inviting when I got back! I knew as soon as I got into bed I was going to fall asleep, yet I didn�t want to. I wanted to take it all in and make the most of it�but the bed was too inviting and irresistible! I got into bed and it was so comfortable! I lay there and enjoyed every second of it. I soon drifted off to sleep�

�and woke up the next morning facing cold, harsh reality. I had to check out and check back in to normal life, which I wasn�t looking forward to at all. Once I was home I had to run my own bath and sort my washing out; I got back to find a large pile of washing staring at me from a basket that was overflowing with clothes, the last thing I wanted to come home to!

My friend lives in London and if I want to have breakfast with her, that means lumping suitcase on and off a train then catching a hot, stuffy tube. At home there are no manicures or pedicures waiting for me. There�s no one to turn my bed down.

As the evening went on I clambered into my bed, which was unmade and rather cold, the opposite of the bed I�d been in the previous night. I soon fell asleep and dreamt of my time at the Ritz.

Sometimes in life you want things to happen straight away. You don�t realise that some things take a bit of time to happen. I was like that when I was younger. I desperately wanted to achieve my goals, but I wanted to achieve them sooner rather than later. I loved the idea of working hard and seeing results � in fact, I would try to cut corners whenever I could so I could see the results more quickly. I just wasn�t prepared to invest a lot of time into achieving my goals.

I had this approach until I went to university where I ended up getting a BA (Hons) in Fine Arts. Because you have to commit several years to completing a university degree, going to university made me realise that for some things you have to invest some time, whether you like it or not. The modules on my course really taught me how to dedicate time to my work. I would devote a lot of time to researching different subjects and I ended up learning a lot of useful information. I got used to being patient and using my time wisely instead of just trying to get things done as quickly as possible. University made me realise that sometimes patience does pay off.

Going to university was one of the best things I�ve ever done, not only for the experience but also for the lessons it taught me. Since university finished I�ve always had a better attitude when it comes to achieving my goals. I don�t cut corners any more. I�m prepared to invest time into something and hope that my patience and hard work pay off.

The lessons I learned at university have led me to setting up my own art business. I know I have to be patient and that businesses can take a while to grow, but I�m excited to watch it grow. To help my business grow I�ve been networking with other businesses and I�m equally excited to see what that leads to.

What�s the fun in having a goal and achieving it the next day? Having a goal and achieving it is great, but so is everything in between. Getting there is half the fun!

It�s funny how an opportunity can arise out of something very random and not really connected with anything important. This happened to me once � I was going for an interview for a part-time job. One of the interviewers asked me what my hobbies were and I told him I was really into landscape painting. I just happened to have a few of my paintings on my phone, so I showed the interviewers and they loved them! It was nice to get a bit of appreciation in the most unlikely of situations. One of the interviewers told me he knew the owners of a local art gallery and that they sold a lot of artwork similar to mine. Before I knew it, I found myself submitting my artwork to them and � it got accepted! This eventually led to me being able to launching my offline art career. Again, it�s great how opportunities like this can arise. I thought the interview would be all doom and gloom, but it made my day! You never know when great things are going to happen!

You might recall on 17th June I blogged about painting a famous secret location? It was somewhere that had had quite a scandalous history, with a series of shocking events taking place in the 60s. The location I painted is Spring Cottage at Cliveden House in Taplow, Berkshire.

Spring Cottage is known as one of the most beautiful cottages along the Thames. It was built in 1813 as a summerhouse and tearoom for the Countess of Orkney. It was designed to offer a peaceful and secluded retreat away from the hustle and bustle of London. There�s a nearby spring that trickles down from some cliffs � it�s after this spring that the cottage was named.

In the 1870s the Duchess of Sutherland had the cottage extended into what it is today. The cottage was known as a beautiful haven where many rowdy parties and high society events were held. Then in the 1960s it became known in a different light thanks to the role it played in a political scandal.
It was 1961 and the Cold War was having a heavy impact on British politics. Christine Keeler, a wannabe model, was attending a high-society party at Cliveden House. She was 19 years old and was the lover of Eugene Ivanov, a Russian military attach�. The party was being held by Lord Astor, who at that time was the owner of Cliveden House. Also at the party was John Profumo, who was the Conservative Secretary of State for War. His wife, Valerie Hobson, was a popular actress. Keeler and Profumo met and embarked on a secret affair, which was influenced by Stephen Ward, who maintained contacts both in the underworld and the aristocracy. This affair would eventually result in Profumo having to resign and Prime Minister Macmillan�s reputation being damaged. It was partly to blame for the Prime Minister�s downfall and the following year, the Labour Party defeated the Conservatives in the National Election.

Despite all the scandal, it was never confirmed or denied by the authorities whether Ivanov was trying to entrap Profumo by influencing his affair with Keeler.

Everyone who knows me knows I can be very spontaneous and impulsive. One Monday morning I woke up and told my mum I wanted to travel to America. She then told my dad and he arranged a ticket for me. On Thursday, I was on the plane! I had a friend, Andy, living there, and I wrote to him asking if I could stay with him. I�d met him three months previously. After ten hours on the plane and a further hour and a half waiting to get through customs, I was finally there, sitting on my suitcase outside the airport, waiting for Andy to come and get me.

We both had a great time. We�d go to the cinema at midnight, then spend the early hours of the morning shopping, something which you couldn�t really do in England then. We went into the desert and shot rifles. We didn�t think anything out of the ordinary or dangerous would happen, but we were shot at by one of Andy�s roommate�s friends! It turned out this guy was wanted for arson and possession of fire arms in several different states. We ended up getting stopped by the police for possession of alcohol. The girl driving the car also had an expired driving license, which didn�t help matters. My accent made me stand out from the others. The police interrogated me, shining a bright torch in my face. They asked me when I�d arrived, how long I was staying in the country for and when I was going to leave. The torch was very off-putting and I couldn�t concentrate on the policeman�s question; I felt the torch was an unnecessary distraction. I didn�t let the policeman know my feelings � I just answered his questions because all I wanted was to get home safe and sound.
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The last time I�d been to America, I visited a caf� at a tourist complex quite often. Andy told me his boss, who worked at the caf�, wanted someone to design a new sign for the caf� and had put me forward as a volunteer. We worked together to create a template for the words using a cardboard box. I also started working on the sign�s imagery. Then halfway through, Andy suddenly mentioned that it had to be finished by the next day! I was definitely up for the challenge and spent most of that night painting the sign � luckily I got it finished in plenty of time. Andy�s boss loved it � his wife didn�t want to pay me for it, but in the end I didn�t charge much for it. I felt like I�d achieved something: I�d produced something good while working to a very tight deadline and knowing how to get a job done.
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On my final day Andy drove me to LAX airport, which at that time was being expanded into what it is today. Unfortunately, the traffic was horrendous and I ended up missing check-in and it turned out the flight was already closed. I hurried over to the desk and told the man there I had to get on that flight and, surprisingly, the flight was reopened for me. I couldn�t believe my luck�this sort of thing never happens. I could have kissed the man behind the desk! I ran down the corridor, which seemed to go on forever. As I approached the plane, I could see loads of people staring out of their windows at me. The steps were being brought back, just for me. I ran out on to the tarmac and was greeted by the stewardess. Ever the professional, she was smiling as if we were best friends and showed me to my seat. I�d been upgraded to first class � an added bonus � because someone hadn�t turned up.

For some reason, everything seemed to go right for me that day, even though the odds were stacked against me. I had no money left and hadn�t had anything to eat since dinner the previous day, so when the meals came, I was relieved. I enjoyed my meals while watching a good film and was back home before I knew it.

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If you want to improve your art skills, attending an art class is a good step to take. However, art is largely about following your own initiative and motivating yourself, so the best thing to do is to practice in between classes. Art classes can be very useful, but ultimately you have to learn how to do it by yourself.

The reason why I�m talking about this is because people assume artists have this innate ability to draw or paint really well. The truth is that it isn�t really the case at all. As is the case with any talent, the only things that are going to get you to a high level of success are practice, practice and more practice! Unless, of course, you�re a prodigy!

There was a recession in England when I was in my early twenties, which resulted in me finding myself out of work. To be honest, I wasn�t 100% keen to find another job. I spent my time socialising with friends and pretending to be looking for a job. I decided to set myself a goal: I set myself a timeframe to learn how to draw portraits of people and vastly improve my painting skills working with a new medium. At this stage I was already quite proficient with pastels and graphite pencils, but I really wanted to excel at watercolours. I thought if I could master watercolours, then I�d find it easier to tackle oils and acrylics, which at that time just seemed daunting.

To help me improve my skills and reach my goal I bought a few books on drawing people and painting with watercolours. I would practice painting fruits and vegetables at first, then once my confidence grew I moved on to more intricate subject matters. I could easily spend eight hours a day every day of the week completing all the exercises in the books. I managed to achieve my goals and started undertaking commissions from neighbours and work colleagues.
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I don�t think anyone reaches their full potential when it comes to painting and drawing. There�s always something you can do better and part of the fun is constantly learning new things along the way. I do believe the more you practice, the better you get, but there�s no upper limit of how good you can be. With each painting, I�m honing my skills, learning new things and learning to become even more efficient for when I start the next painting.
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Oscar-Claude Monet was one of the founders of Impressionism. In fact, the term �Impressionism� is derived from one of his paintings, Impression, Sunrise. This particular painting was first exhibited in 1884 in Paris and was the first of many independent exhibitions Monet held as an alternative to the Salon de Paris. Monet was born in Paris in 1840 and died at the age of 86 in 1926. He was known for revisiting the same scenes many different times to capture them in different light and different seasons. This article will discuss some of Monet�s most famous and influential paintings.
Impression, Sunrise

This is one of Monet�s most famous paintings and was completed in 1872. It depicts a view of the harbour in Le Havre at sunrise. The whole scene is covered in mist and you can just about see the masts of boats in the harbour in the distance. There are a few smaller boats in the foreground. The sun can be seen in the distance and is a dull orange colour. There�s a dull and sort of faded quality to the whole painting and there are loose brush strokes instead of firm contours. This was intentional on Monet�s part, as he sought to depict the misty scene as the impression it made on him. In other words, he didn�t depict it exactly as it was in real life, instead he depicted the very first impression the scene made on him when he first saw it.
Water Lilies

This is a series of paintings, rather than a single painting. In the late 1880s Monet developed a water garden around the pond at his home in Giverny, similar to Japanese-style water gardens. From the year 1900 to 1926, Monet painted the water lily pond a staggering 250 times, each time capturing it in different light and in different seasons. The pond fills the canvas, allowing the viewer to be completely submerged in it. When you look at the different Water Lilies paintings, it�s fascinating to see how the same scene can be captured in so many different ways. In fact, Monet began suffering from cataracts while he was working on this series of paintings.

The Magpie

The Magpie is one of around 140 snowscapes painted by Monet. It was completed during the winter of 1868-69 at a house in Etretat where Monet was staying at the time. It is commonly believed that France experienced a series of severe winters around this time, which resulted in many snowscapes being produced. The Magpie depicts a lone magpie perched atop a gate, with sunlight casting shadows behind a fence joining it. This painting was one of the first where Monet used colour in his shadows, allowing for a more realistic depiction of the shadows produced by the fence. The Impressionists were deviating from the normal practice of simply darkening the colour of whatever was to be cast in shadow. This painting is widely regarded as one of Monet�s finest snowscape paintings, as it shows him skilfully experimenting with light and shadow in a wintry setting.

The Poppy Field, near Argenteuil

This painting was completed in 1873 and is one of the few Monet paintings to show human beings. It depicts Monet�s wife Camille and their son Jean not once, but twice. They appear in the foreground at the bottom of a hill with poppies on it, and again at the top of the hill further into the background. The depiction of them on top of the hill shows less detail and is vaguer, but it�s still clearly them. What this painting shows is a simple and relaxing stroll through the beautiful poppy fields just outside Argenteuil. The contours appear to be very loosely defined and the poppies appear to be a bit bigger than they should be. It is thought Monet was adding an abstract element to this painting by doing this.

The Artist�s Garden at Giverny

After purchasing the Giverny estate, Monet redesigned the entire garden in front of the house. He was keen to have his house surrounded by flowers of all sorts of different colours, seeing his garden as a masterpiece in itself. His colourful garden was a great source of inspiration for him. In this painting, created in 1900, Monet beautifully captures the vibrancy and vivacity of his garden. He designed his garden so it would meet his needs � he wanted to capture nature full of loud, lively colours, so he made sure his garden was full of these colours. This isn�t Monet capturing nature unaffected by man; instead it shows Monet deliberately influencing nature to make a beautiful painting. He was painting nature as he saw it, but he had a hand in creating what he would then go on to paint.

These are just a few of the many landscape paintings created by Monet. What�s great about Monet�s landscapes is that they show just how experimental and forward-thinking he was. Instead of following what previous landscape artists had done, Monet took things further, explored new methods and developed new styles. He has influenced many artists throughout the years and his landscapes have left a lasting impression in art history.

The one stroke painting technique simply means you achieve everything in just one stroke. This includes shading, highlighting and blending - you get all this from a single stroke instead of having to use multiple strokes. All you have to do is load different colours on to a flat brush. It can be used on a variety of different surfaces.

Even though the one stroke painting technique was developed with beginners in mind, it's fully accessible to painters of all capabilities. People who have never painted before find it just as enjoyable as people who've been painting for years. One of the reasons why it's become so popular is because it's so accessible and easy to learn. It's attracted lots of new people to painting and it's intrigued and caught the attention of many professional painters.

The one stroke painting technique was devised by American author and artist Donna Dewburry. She paints flowers and animals in her demonstrations, but the technique can be used to paint practically anything. This painting technique has become very popular because it allows you to very quickly and easily create very beautiful works of art.

You should use paintbrushes developed by Donna herself because they are best suited for this technique. On her website there are loads of different options to choose from. To load your paintbrush, simply make little puddles of paint on your palette. Dip one corner of your brush into one colour then turn it over and dip the corner into the other colour. Keep stroking the brush back and forth across the paint to fully load it. You can add as many different colours as you want, but for beginners, it's best to start off with two.

The brushes are usually flat and have a chiselled edge. To do a typical stroke, simply have the brush standing on the chisel edge then press down while moving the brush and ending up on the chiselled edge. The more pressure you apply, the wider the stroke will be. Move the paintbrush in different to create different effects. A good way to practice different techniques is to paint different flower petals.

To create a teardrop petal shape, have the paintbrush on the chisel edge then press down so the bristles bend. Then pivot the paintbrush around till you've created a teardrop shape and lift the paintbrush up to the chisel. Thin, pointed petals are very easy to do; simply lean down on the chisel and slide the paintbrush up to the tip of the petal and release. Twist the paintbrush to have the petals bend. Petals with jagged edges are done by pushing down on the bristles and slowly wiggling the paintbrush up. When you're near the tip of the petal, smoothly slide the paintbrush the rest of the way and lift it up to the chisel edge. Then reverse the direction of the bristles and lean down on them. Work your way down to the base of the petal by applying pressure to the paintbrush and slide slowly back to the base.

The examples given are just a few of the many different things you can do with one stroke painting. Though it's easy to get started, you need to practice to become really proficient at it and flower petals are good practice for beginners. The more you use this painting method, the more you realise how much potential it has. You can use all sorts of different colours and different types of paintbrushes to create different effects. People even decorate household items using this technique. The possibilities are endless!

I was very excited at the idea of attending art and design university full-time. I could finally say goodbye to office work and do something I knew I would really love. I was driving into town and all I could think about was starting this new chapter in my life. I was a bit nervous, but wouldn�t let that stop me from finally doing something about my dreams. It was going to be a dream come true to spend every day painting, drawing and researching art history. Part of me thought this wasn�t the right thing to be doing. Was I pigeon-holing myself? What if I finished the course and there were hardly any options open to me? What if I don�t end up where I want to be?

I visited the local art shop and the girl behind the counter very kindly helped me with my portfolio. She helped me choose one and gave me advice on how to put it together. It took me no less than four hours to put it together! I added more pieces of artwork over the next week or so.

I filled in my application form and sent it off. That was it � I�d made my first pro-active step. I was happy with myself, but I wasn�t guaranteed a place just yet. Fortunately, I received a date and time for my interview. I had to skive off work to make the interview, but sometimes these things crop up and you can�t miss them just for the sake of going to work. There was no way I was going to miss this interview.

Once I was there, I met one of my future tutors, though I didn�t know it at the time. We had a nice conversation while walking down one of the university�s many long corridors. He asked me what my aspirations were and I told him I just wanted to be a full-time painter for the rest of my life.

Once I was done, I went back to my car only to find a fine on the windscreen. I�d been unable to renew my tax disc because of a lack of funds, and I hoped no one would notice. I remember being annoyed, but I then realised that it was only a small, insignificant setback. One day I�d be living a great and successful life, and a fine wasn�t going to get me down.

That September I started a foundation course. There was a lot to take in and a lot of changes happened over the course of the next ten months. Not only did I learn a lot, but I also made some new friends. We�d socialize together and visit art galleries in London. My new life was taking shape all around me.

I took the course seriously and worked very hard to pass all of my module and exams. My hard work paid off when I was guaranteed a place on the degree course. I spent the following summer working in the paper shop close to where I lived and still saw my artist friends regularly.

That September I moved into halls of residence for the first full year of my degree course, after packing up my apartment and letting it. The degree course lasted for three years and I enjoyed every second of it. It was like I was already a full-time artist, except I wasn�t being paid for it. As I worked hard for my degree, I kept imagining what it would be like to actually earn a living working as an artist. It would be great having friends come over to my studio to paint and catch up.

Even after I graduated from university, I never stopped dreaming of being a full-time artist. One day at work the opportunity presented itself to me and I went with it. I didn�t necessarily know how to go about building up a business, I just knew what lifestyle I wanted.
Now I can happily say I�m living my dream.

I�m very glad to be able to share details of my exhibition at Wokingham Library. It�s on the caf� on the top floor. When you enter the caf�, you�ll be able to see lots of my paintings depicting the peaceful and beautiful landscapes of Dinton Park in the spring. All of the paintings where created using pastel shades of yellows, blues and greens in acrylic on paper of the highest quality. People say my paintings give them a sense of wellbeing, which is why I continue using the same methods and techniques.
You can visit the exhibition and own your very own original framed painting. The address for Wokingham Library is as follows:
Wokingham Library
Denmark Street
Wokingham
Berkshire
RG40 2BB

Art has been a major part of my life for as long as I can remember. I was 11 when I took part in my first ever art competition. It was in Italy and we�d just moved there. I was thrilled to come second; even though I really wanted to come first, I was still proud of myself and I let my imagination carry me away. Could I one day be a proper artist? It was something I kept daydreaming about ever since winning that first competition.

My art teacher at school encouraged me to keep my passion alive and helped me develop my talent. I didn�t realize it at the time, but the stuff she taught me throughout school prepared me a lot for university, which I attended in England many years later. So far, I hadn�t actually made the decision to become a full-time artist. For some reason I just didn�t make the leap � looking back I really wish I�d just grabbed it and gone with it because the following years would bring a lot of heartache, which I could have avoided.

Life is full of decisions that are made and not made. It�s so crazy to think how many different possible paths your life can take based on your decision making. Sometimes halfway through your life you make a decision and it opens so many new opportunities for you. You meet new and different people and find yourself in a new chapter of life that�s exciting and not where you ever expected to be.

One evening I was sitting at home, just passing the time away by staring out of the window. I was in my mid-thirties and wasn�t happy with where I was in life. The place I was in just felt wrong. Something had to change. I confided in a work colleague who encouraged me to book an appointment with the local careers advisor. It seemed to happen at exactly the right moment because I then found out that half of my job was being given to a different department, so I spent most of the day just looking out the window staring into space.

My appointment was for the next day so I had to make up some excuse for my boss, who bought it, thankfully. The advisor asked me what it was that I wanted to do with my life and what I saw myself doing in ten years� time. The first thought that came to me was that I�d be a rich and successful artist. I�d rather be anywhere where I currently was. I started telling the advisor where I saw myself. It was then I realised I should tell her I�d need a proper qualification in art so she�d take my problem more seriously. Right then and there the one thing I wanted to do above all else was to start a brand new chapter of the rest of my life.

The advisor did listen and swung round in her chair to face her computer. She did a bit of research then gave me a list of some universities I could apply for. One was really close by � in fact it was just up the road from where the advisor lived. I decided straight away that I wanted to broaden my horizons and not go to a local university. The next choice on the advisor�s list was in Surrey. I decided I was going to get accepted into that university and the advisor gladly handed me an application form. I was full of determination, I had something to aim towards and I couldn�t believe I was finally going about realizing my dreams after doing nothing for so long.

Hello everyone! This week I thought I�d give a few hints about packing artwork for shipping. Knowing what supplies to have and having them in stock can really speed up the packing process, which can take a while if you don�t know what you�re doing.
If you want to pack your artwork in a safe and secure way to protect it against any damage, you�ll need the following:

- A roll of bubble wrap with large bubbles
- Polystyrene chips
- Cardboard corners
- Parcel / duct tape
- Medium-sized and large-sized boxes

To pack your artwork for shipping, simply put cardboard corners across all four corners of the painting. Then wrap the whole painting in bubble wrap. After you�ve done that, place the painting in a medium-sized box, then place that box into a larger box. Use polystyrene chips to fill any gaps between the two boxes and use strong parcel / duct tape to seal the box up.

If you only have one box, don�t worry, you can still pack your artwork safely and securely. Once you�ve placed the cardboard corners over all four corners of your painting, wrap the whole painting with bubble wrap three times. Get your box and fill about a third of the way up with polystyrene chips. Then carefully put the painting in and fill the rest of the box up with polystyrene chips. After this all you have to do is seal the box with strong parcel / duct tape.

So packing your artwork can be quite simple and shouldn�t pose any problems as long as your painting is securely packed away. Do you know any other ways of packing your artwork away for shipping?

One of the things I love most about being an artist is being able to see the world in a different way. As a landscape artist, I spend a lot of time observing and appreciating all the finer details of a landscape so I can capture everything about it in a painting. I�ve learned how to appreciate a landscape as a whole; I see how all the different colours and contours come together to form beautiful landscapes. I concentrate on perspective and how to translate the landscape before me on to a 2D canvas, while still accurately representing it. Non-artists tend to view landscapes as loads of different things put together. They see all the different objects that make up the landscape one at a time, but as an artist, I have to see it as a whole so I can create a cohesive painting.

When I was a young teenager I began to draw with my eyes. In other words, I looked at an object and would trace its contours with my eyes. I still do it to this day and can sometimes get lost in it � sometimes I can spend over half an hour tracing contours with my eyes, just going back and forth over the lines! It�s something that I find relaxing and it helps me see how everything fits together. Doing this helps me a lot because observing the way a landscape is formed improves my drawing skills. Going over the contours with my eyes and recreating that on a canvas both help improve my hand and eye coordination.

I wouldn�t be able to create landscape paintings if I didn�t see the world this way. Appreciating the finer details makes me able to accurately recreate landscapes on canvases. If you�re having trouble painting landscapes, simply try going over all the contours and colours in your mind. See how it all fits together � landscapes are really a complete jigsaw. You have to work out what all the different pieces are and rearrange them in your painting.

Last Saturday me and a friend visited Southall. We wanted to be able to learn about a lot of different cultures. Wandering around the streets, you can soak up a lot of knowledge and appreciation of different cultures, including Indian and Arabian. I love places like this because they showcase different lifestyles and offer a glimpse into ways that people from different parts of the world live. Having my eyes opened to different customs and cultures around the world is always a very enjoyable and enriching experience.

A few years ago I�d bought myself a lovely kaftan when I was abroad. It was perfect because it kept me protected from the sun and it looked really nice as well. When I was in Southall I saw loads of different kaftans � they had them in all sorts of different styles and colours. I was really tempted to buy one, especially because they�re quite expensive on the high street and they were a lot cheaper in the Southall markets. I ended up buying a few different ones to add to my collection!

On Saturday evening me and my friend decided to try one of the local restaurants. I�d never really tried much Arabian cuisine before, but I really enjoyed our meal. Everything tasted delicious and it was great trying some new food. Eating out in new restaurants is definitely something I want to do more often in the future. I�m becoming more adventurous when it comes to exploring new types of food.

One of the things I love about Britain is that it is really multicultural in places. There�s a great diversity of people living in this country and that makes it very unique, exciting and fascinating. I hope to explore many more places like Southall that will allow me to sample a different country�s culture. It�s great having so much diversity right on your doorstep!

What cultures do you enjoy learning about? Are there places like Southall that you enjoy visiting?

The middle of May saw one of the hottest days of the year. Luckily I wasn�t indoors � I was visiting quite a famous place and spent the days wandering around, exploring everything it had to offer. There were beautiful, scenic gardens which I spent over three hours walking through, taking in the sights and smells and appreciating the quiet. There was a really tranquil atmosphere and I felt really calm and relaxed as I explored the gardens. I must have taken hundreds of photos!

After I was done exploring the gardens, I took a boat trip. There was a famous cottage right next to where I got the boat � I was lucky to get some really great photos of it as we sailed past. There�s a lot of controversy surrounding this cottage, though it does look just like a typical idyllic cottage. It hides its history very well. A series of very secretive meetings took place here in the 1960s. I�m working on a painting of this particular scene and I�m lucky not to have a deadline, so I can take my time with it.

I really enjoy being able to work on this painting at my own pace without the pressure of a deadline. I can make adjustments here and there and can take the cottage�s history into account when interpreting it in my painting. What I�m also enjoying is the challenge of painting water � it�s really exciting because I can use loads of different colours to create the reflections of the landscape in the river. I�m using two different types of brushstrokes: I use very loose strokes when working on the water and use tighter, more focused strokes to paint the small details of the cottage.

Do you have an idea of what I�m painting? If you want to find out, keep checking my TV channel at http://joannesberkshirescenes.com/about-joanne-perkins.aspx. I�ll be posting a work-in-progress video about the painting which will reveal what exactly I�m painting.

Hi, everyone! I thought this week I�d talk a bit about social media and how people use it to build up their businesses. It seems like social media is key to launching or expanding any sort of business these days. Everything has a social media presence � even things like toothpaste brands have their own pages! It�s crazy to think just how much is on the Internet; you can find practically anything on it!

Before the Internet came round people would have to directly engage with others a lot more to build up their business. They�d have to put themselves out there in the real world. Nowadays, a lot of that can simply be done on the computer. The virtual world is getting bigger and more important by the day. The more time people spend in this virtual world, the more important it is for businesses of all types to have some sort of presence in that world so they can continue attracting customers.

One of the best things about social media is that you can reach people you wouldn�t be able to reach otherwise. As a business owner, it�s important to establish and build relationships with potential customers and social media is a great way of doing that. One of the ways I really like reaching out to people is by writing articles. A great thing about this particular type of social media is that you can get all sorts of statistics and feedback about your work, as well as comments from potential customers. So, for example, you can see how many people have viewed a particular article and you can start a conversation with people who have commented on the article in question. Being on social media really helps you quantify and keep track of how many people you�re reaching and who these people are. So far on Wordpress, for example, I can see that I�ve got 22 followers and I�ve got 20 likes across my blog posts. I�ve even got a trophy (not a real one, of course!) for publishing 20 blog posts. It�s great that I can keep track of how many people I�m reaching. If it wasn�t for the Internet and social media, I wouldn�t know how many people are seeing my articles.

It�s really exciting to have the Internet and social media as tools to reach new people and maintain relationships with people. Social media really does have the potential to open a lot of doors. It�s no wonder people spend so much time on it!

Travels through Europe

Travelling through Europe as a child was an experience that has continued to inspire me ever since. I remember travelling through Italy and France, then on to Spain, noticing how the countryside would gradually change. These stunning landscapes inspired me to paint - as you can probably tell, I could spot a good scene even as a child! One of my favourite memories is of a road in Provence that meandered through fields of lavenders and wild, colourful flowers. Believe me, I wanted nothing more than to just run free through those fields!

Painting Berkshire landscapes

I love nothing more than going on long drives through the Berkshire countryside. It is full of scenic spots and picturesque landscapes. Whenever I capture these beautiful images in my paintings, I recall my travels through Europe. By doing this, I'm recreating the beauty of the Berkshire countryside and infusing my work with unique touches here and there. I could paint the landscape exactly as it is, or I could add little quirks here and there to make it my own take on the scene. I apply soft brush strokes and use a number of different brushes and sponges when painting plants and trees. My travels inspired me to look at trees and plants in a new way, which is why I use this particular technique.

Standing out

Take an image that has been painted many times, for example the Eiffel Tower. It is one of the most commonly painted landmarks in the world. If you decide to paint something that many others choose to paint, what's going to set your painting apart from the many others? Adding your own personal touch will make your painting unique. Draw inspiration from past travels and experiences to add a special twist to a painting of something like the Eiffel Tower to make it stand out. Your personal experiences help you see things from a new perspective and this perspective can help you hone your craft.

Always adding that twist

Of course, you should always add your own special touch inspired by past experiences to your works. Whether you're painting a famous landmark or a scenic spot in the country, you should never forget to make your works unique. Doing this can help you develop your own particular style. Artists who have a particular style and something unique to offer stand out from the crowd. We have all had unique personal experiences and we should try to make our works of art equally personal and unique.

There�s nothing better than travelling, don�t you think? I love just leaving everything behind and spending time escaping to a place that�s completely new and different from any other place I�ve been to before. I love exploring new places, learning about their history and culture and, of course, finding beautiful landscapes. You don�t appreciate how big the world really is until you�re somewhere so far away from home. Travelling really is a great thing to do and I wish I could do more of it � don�t we all?

Every now and then I like to remember the different places I�ve been. I really enjoy looking back and remembering little things about each place. I also enjoy looking forward to wherever I�m going to go on my next trip. If I haven�t got anything planned, my imagination gets carried away and I think about travelling to all sorts of out-of-the-way places! The possibilities really are endless � and that�s what makes it so great.

Another thing I really like about travelling is that you never know what to expect. Anything can happen and you can come back home with some really memorable stories. Even if you plan every day down to the minute, you can still find yourself being pleasantly surprised by something along the way. Some places are full of nice surprises.

As a landscape artist, travelling is also a great way to get inspiration and creativity. I can very easily spend hours and hours on a train or in a car just sitting there watching the world go by. The world is full of beautiful landscapes and travelling allows me to see many unique, diverse and stunning landscapes that I don�t see in my day-to-day life.

Share some of your travelling experiences. How often do you get to travel and where do you go? What do you like most about travelling?

No matter how hard you try, you�re bound to get a splodge of paint on your clothes every now and then. The more you try to avoid making it happen, the more it seems to happen! The good thing is there are a few simple steps you can take to get rid of acrylic paints from clothes. It�s really not that hard to do.

This is what you�ll need:

- A cotton ball (a paper towel will do)
- Rubbing alcohol (alcohol-based hand sanitiser or acetone nail polish remover will do)

First, simply get a cotton ball and soak it in rubbing alcohol. Then dab the affected spots on the fabric with the cotton ball and make sure you completely soak the fabric. The wetter the fabric is, the more loosened the paint should be. You should now be able to start wiping the paint away. Use the cotton ball and keep dabbing at the paint and it should start to come off. Try to remove the paint from the fabric without making the paint spread. Keep soaking cotton balls in rubbing alcohol and keep dabbing and wiping the fabric. The colour should start to fade until you can�t see it any more. Put the piece of clothing in the washing machine then set it out to dry. Once it�s dry, have a look at where the paint (hopefully!) was. If the colouring from the paint�s gone, great. If not, simply keep applying rubber alcohol to the affected area with a cotton ball. Even if the paint�s faded a little bit, you�re making progress.

If it�s an old or really dry acrylic paint stain, what you should do is soak the fabric with rubbing alcohol with a cotton ball then leave it to thoroughly soak for an hour or two, then start wiping the paint off.

This is just one way of removing paint from clothes. Do you know any other ways?

Isn�t it nice when birthdays are bit more special than you thought they were going to be? Just recently I thought my birthday was going to be, well, the same as it is every way. To be honest, I wasn�t really looking forward to it that much. You know how it is, you put on a smiley face and join in because everyone around you wants to make a fuss. Well for my birthday this year, I found myself genuinely enjoying it for once.

I was pleasantly surprised at work when I was presented with a box of chocolates, some money and a large bouquet of flowers! It turns out my colleagues had done a whip round � I was really surprised and thought it was a lovely thing for them to do. The chocolate were delicious! If that wasn�t enough, the next day my lunch was paid for as well.

To top things off, I got home that evening to find even more cards and presents, as well as a birthday cake! Again I was genuinely surprised and thought it was really kind and generous for everyone to do. The thought put into it made me feel really special and happy. It felt great knowing that people had put effort into helping me celebrate my birthday � it really was the icing on the cake!

Well that�s it over for another year. My birthday was much more memorable than I thought it would be. In a way I�m actually looking forward to next year�s � I hope it�s as fun and memorable as this one�s been. Have you ever had a birthday full of nice surprises?

Have you ever had a scatter-brained moment when you just forget something and chaos ensues? That happened to me once a few years ago when I was travelling to visit family. I�d had a long day at work and I had just got off the bus back home when it hit me that I�d left my bag on the bus! It had everything in it � plane ticket, passport, money, you name it, it was in my bag! As soon as I realised what I�d done I panicked, got in my car and actually manage to find the bus and follow it along its route back to the bus station. I bet many people can�t say they�ve done that before! Once I was at the bus station the staff showed me the lost property room, which, to my horror, was crammed with black plastic bags full of people�s lost possessions. My bag had to be there somewhere! So how long did I spend rooting through these bags? An hour. Yes, it took me a whole hour to find my bag and luckily it still had everything in it. Believe me, I would have spent all night looking through those plastic bags to find my bag. By the time I eventually got home it was 11pm � and to think I was planning on having an early night!

As I went to sleep, I thought everything was going to run smoothly�but I was proven wrong the next morning when I was checking in and couldn�t find my plane ticket. For some reason I remembered seeing it on the dashboard of my car � I had to ring my mum on the nearest payphone using the only pound I had left. And would you believe it, the phone ran out of credit just as we were discussing how I was going to make this flight. Thankfully the man behind the ticket desk heard my entire conversation and was able to reprint my boarding ticket. I got my flight � which, before you ask, wasn�t delayed � and was relieved to see my parents on the other side. Travelling never goes smoothly! Have you ever had any similar experiences?

Hi everyone! I�m busy getting prepared and sorted for my upcoming exhibition at the Dragonfly Caf� at Dinton Pastures Country Park so I thought this week I�d do something different and get some feedback from you about my blog posts so far. So far this year I�ve written about quite a few different things �my dream holiday destination, the Maldives, a trip to Harrods, a book I enjoyed reading and, of course, my upcoming exhibition.

I�ve never really stuck to a single topic in my posts and I�ve tried to keep them different and surprising, so you never know what I�m going to write about. I�d really like to get an idea of what you�ve liked reading about so far and the types of things you�d like to read about in the future. Most of my posts have been quite personal, about things I like and things I�ve experienced. Should I continue writing personal posts to let you get to know me better or should I focus more about my work? Should there be a mix of the two? For example, I could post something personal one week then something more to do with my work the following week?

I�m open to all suggestions and would be very happy to hear any pieces of advice you might have to offer me. If you want to know more about me or my work, ask some questions and I�ll answer them in the next blog post. Do you run a similar blog and if so, what do you write about in your posts?

Hi everyone! I thought I�d dedicate this week�s blog post to my upcoming exhibition which I�m very excited about. It�s going to be held at the Dragonfly Caf� at Dinton Pastures Country Park from May 1st to June 31st. A trip to Dinton Pastures Country Park is a great day out for anyone who loves the great outdoors � as well as the Dragonfly Caf� there�s also a 9-hole golf course, the Hurst Golf Course, which is great for keen golfers. The park is very popular with wildlife enthusiasts, especially birdwatchers, as it is home to a wide variety of bird species.
I�m going to be displaying 16 acrylic paintings of beautiful scenes throughout the park. All of the paintings have been painted on paper and are all mounted and framed. I think Dinton Pastures Country Park is the perfect place for me to have an exhibition because I think it�s a beautiful place full of scenic spots, stunning landscapes and gorgeous views. I absolutely loved painting different scenes from throughout the park and can�t wait to share them with you!
I donate a percentage of all my sales to the Thames Valley & Chiltern Air Ambulance Trust. The helicopter, also known as BOB, is based in Benson, Oxfordshire, which is a central location for the three different counties the helicopter covers. It is operated during daylight hours 365 days a year and had over 50 successful missions in February 2014. The trust doesn�t receive any government funding. It relies entirely on the public to contribute so the public can rely on it if they find themselves in a sticky situation.
I�m counting down the days, hours and minutes to the exhibition! As you can tell I�m very excited about it. I�m really looking forward to putting my work out there, getting some feedback and meeting lots of new people. I really hope the exhibition goes well and I hope you come, have a great day out at Dinton Pastures Country Park, and appreciate my paintings.
Hope to see you there!

As part of my business I sell prints of some of my paintings on demand. If you want to have a look for yourself, simply click on joannesberkshirescenes.artistwebsites.com and scroll down to the �artwork� section or click on joannesberkshirescenes.com then click on the �gallery� tab at the top of the page. Here you will see some photos of my paintings in situ, so you can see how they would probably look in your own home. If you click on the �to order� button, you�ll be directed straight to my print on demand website. Here you can choose whether to have your print framed or unframed. There are also greeting cards and iPhone cases you can get with the prints on. You can even get gift cards for special occasions.
If it�s an original you�re after, keep checking my exhibitions page on joannesberkshirescenes.com where I post information about upcoming exhibitions. I�ve actually got one coming up at the Dinton Pastures Country Park � I�ve already posted some details about it but I�ll be posting even more in next week�s blog post. I donate a percentage of all my sales to Thames Valley & Chiltern Air Ambulance, a charity that provides a lifesaving service, covering three regions. I hope you enjoy yourself and have a fun day out at one of my exhibitions in the near future.

One of the things that I love about being a landscape painter is that I can visit some beautiful and picturesque places and create a unique painting that captures the places� natural beauty. Dinton Pastures Country Park is a perfect example of the type of place that I love exploring to find beautiful landscapes to paint. The park is just full of unspoilt scenery, picturesque landscapes and gorgeous places off-the-beaten-path that just have to be painted!
I�m delighted to be holding an exhibition in Dinton Pastures Country Park from May 1st to June 31st � it can�t come quickly enough! The photo you can see is of a painting of a particularly scenic view on one of the walks. I�m very excited to be able to share more paintings with you and can�t wait for the exhibition to begin.
Dinton Pastures Country Park is a great day out for anyone who loves the great outdoors. You can amble along beautiful country walks, have a game of golf at the Hurst Golf Course and of course stop by the Dragonfly Caf� for a nice refreshing drink and some snacks. Whether you�re a keen golfer, an avid birdwatcher or you just fancy a day in the fresh open air, Dinton Pastures Country Park is a great place to visit for a day. I cannot wait for my exhibition to start and hope to see you there!

Hi everyone! I though this week I�d share some tips on saving money on art supplies. I love getting a bargain and saving a couple of quid whenever I can. Saving money whenever I can means I have more money to spend on quality paper and paints � things which I need and can be quite expensive. It�s definitely worth saving a bit here and there and splashing out on something you know is good and will last.

Clearance days are always a great opportunity to find a few great bargains. You can find lots of brand new items at greatly reduced prices. I love stocking up on things like brushes, putty rubbers and plastic paint palettes. One of the good things about the Internet is that many shops have sites which also have clearance days, so you can grab a few bargains without having to leave home!

Another good way of saving money is to hang around university art departments close to the end of the academic year. You wouldn�t believe how much stuff gets left behind! From tool boxes and brushes, to paints and canvases�the list goes on and on! After my graduation, there was a massive pile of supplies that students had left behind on the mezzanine right above my studio. The students had either given up on a creative career and didn�t need their art supplies any more, or they simply couldn�t be bothered to take them home with them. I couldn�t resist going through the stuff and finding some quality art supplies. I only wish the students had left more things behind!

Dinton Pastures Country Park is located roughly halfway between Reading and Wokingham. This sprawling country park has over 335 acres, with numerous lakes, rivers and meadows throughout. It�s open all year and receives hundreds of thousands of visitors annually. It�s especially popular with nature enthusiasts as it�s a wildlife haven, with swans, gulls, mallards and nightingales just some of the many animals that call this park home. What�s quite remarkable about this park is that it�s home to 18 out of 42 species of dragonfly present in Britain. There are three public bird hides, which let you watch waterfowl in secret. It�s a great day out for anyone who loves being in the great outdoors, enjoying scenic sights and watching undisturbed wildlife.

Also in the park is the Hurst Golf Course, a nine-hole course that attracts many avid golfers. There�s a nice caf� called the Dragonfly Caf�, which is a great place to grab a light snack when you want to take a break from exploring the park.

The Dragonfly Caf� is going to be holding an art exhibition of my works from May 1st to June 31st. I�ll release more details about my exhibition soon.

Hello everyone! Hope everyone�s having a good February so far. I thought I�d talk to you about how I get into the mood to work. One of the hardest things about being an artist is motivating yourself to start a piece and get it finished. Whether it�s a painting, a sculpture or something else, a work of art can consume so much of your time that it can be both physically and emotionally draining. It can also be hard to get yourself in the right frame of mind to work on a particular piece.

I find that listening to music helps me a lot with feeling motivated and getting in the right mood for a particular piece. The thing with music is that, like art, it is so varied with so many different styles and genres. Different sounds and melodies can inspire different moods. You can relax to classical music, feel upbeat listening to pop music or experience stronger emotions like anger or frustration listening to a genre such as rock or heavy metal. It�s all about feeling what you want to transpose on to your painting and music can definitely help to generate those feelings. Some of my favourite classical musicians to listen to, for example, are Bach and Brahms. I find that listening to these artists allows me to relax and feel positive about the piece I�m working on. I�m in the zone and my piece reflects my calm state of mind. One of the great things about art is that it allows you to get in touch with your feelings and express them; I find that listening to music is a great way of finding those feelings and really understanding them.

Video editing is one of those things that look easy but are in fact very hard to do. Whenever you watch a video, you often don�t realise just how much work has gone into creating that video. You see bloopers and things like that all the time � video editing is definitely a skill that�s hard to master! What experiences have you had with video editing? Have you ever cut yourself off in the middle of a sentence? Left in some bloopers by mistake? Mash everything together so it jumps all the time? Perhaps all three? I've definitely experienced all three, if not more!

I've been trying for about a month now to edit a video that I�m hoping to upload to my new website. So far it�s going quite smoothly � I�m just about managing to edit out all the bloopers and those little moments when I need to fluff my hair and apply some more lippy. The one thing that�s getting to me is a little millimetre of a frame that just keeps evading me. When I watch the video in playback, I can just see my head quickly jerk back. This particular frame is a left over from the ending, which mainly consisted of me ranting and raving.

It�s taking me a while to get the hang of this, but I�m getting there! Hopefully video editing is something I can learn to conquer. I guess it�s just one of those things that takes a lot of practice before you get it right. At least I�m having fun with it along the way!

Because gicl�e prints are created using the latest printing technology and materials of the most superior quality, it is worth understanding how best to care for them to ensure their longevity. Though the technology used to create them is relatively recent, it is widely thought that gicl�e prints can last for a substantial amount of time � much longer than standard prints � if they are cared for properly.

Framing:
Firstly, if you ordered your print unframed, it will come rolled up inside a protective tube. When it comes to framing your print, you should only use a professional framer who is familiar with the process of stretching and framing gicl�e canvases. It is advisable that the framer only use the finest materials to frame the print.

Handling:
You should handle your print only when necessary and only ever hold it from the sides. Never handle the print from the corners as they are very easily damaged. Handle the print with gloves if possible. Whenever the print is being transported, it should always be well protected and should be kept flat and face down. Never place any object on the canvas, no matter how small or light, and never lean the canvas against anything. This is because canvas is left exposed and is therefore a lot more susceptible to damage and denting.

Storing:
Canvas pieces that have been stretched or mounted should be stored upright and should never have any amount of weight placed upon them. They should be stored with archival paper dividers interleaved between them and should never touch any other canvas pieces. Ensure that tape never comes into contact with any prints as it can cause peeling. If you intend to roll your prints up, you should roll them it up very tightly so they don�t sag as this can cause permanent. Prints should be carefully laid on their side before being rolled up and should be kept standing up if they are to be stored for an extended period of time.

Lighting conditions:
Even though canvas gicl�e prints come with ultraviolet coating, it is still advised not to hang them in direct sunlight because exposure to UV from sunlight over an extended period of time can still cause damage.

Room conditions:
Canvas is very hydrophilic and therefore takes in and lets out a lot of moisture. This can cause too much shrinkage or stretching, so the climate of the room the print is kept in should be carefully monitored and regulated. Exposing your print to extreme temperatures, or even sudden changes in temperature, can affect both the longevity of the print and the materials it�s made from. Different websites suggest different things, but a temperature of around 70 degrees Fahrenheit and a humidity of around 55% should be sufficient. Having a relatively high humidity can eventually cause yellowing. Ideally the room the print is kept in should not have a lot of traffic to reduce the risk of someone accidentally damaging it. Additionally the print should be hung high enough off the ground so that young children cannot reach it.

Cleaning:
When it comes to cleaning your canvas print, you should use a soft, dry cloth to wipe off any dust or dirt. Never wash any printed surfaces with water and never expose your print to any solvent-based substance as this can cause yellowing. If you use a light-coloured or white cloth you will be able to see when too much dust or dirt has been picked up. It is acceptable for you to carefully wipe your canvas print with a soft cloth that has been slightly dampened with water, however you should only do this if absolutely necessary. The print should be left to dry at room temperature once you�ve cleaned it.

These are just a few guidelines to caring for gicl�e prints. Following these will ensure that your print stays in the optimum condition for a very long time. Gicl�e prints are highly valued pieces of art so it is highly advised that you care for them as you would any other valuable piece of art. Your reward for following these guidelines is having a fine print that will stay in pristine condition for many decades to come.

Hi everyone! I hope everyone�s having a good 2014 so far � I can�t believe it�s February already! I thought I�d share with you this really great book I�m reading at the minute, The Juniper Bush by Audrey Howard. It�s a classic romance novel set in Liverpool in the 1700s. The main character, Christy, is the daughter of an affluent businessman and is set to marry the son of a local squire. However, soon before the wedding is due to take place, tragedy strikes in Christy�s family, leaving her devastated and heartbroken. After being abandoned by her fianc�, she sets about marrying again but finds herself unable to forget her one true love.

What I really like about this book is that not only is it easy to read, it�s also very imaginatively written. It explores the layers of society by examining the relationships between the upper social classes, which is really intriguing to read about. Audrey Howard always has a big twist towards the end of her books, which makes them real page-turners - whenever I read a book of hers I�m always hooked from the start and cannot put the book down till the end! This book deals with love, tragedy and happy times, so it�s quite the roller coaster ride. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who wants to get lost in a bygone world with characters that jump from the page and events that twist and turn, leaving you wondering what�s going to happen next.

Hi everyone! This week I thought I�d tell you about my favourite breed of dog, Labradors. Of all the different breeds of dog, Labradors are the most special to me. I just love everything about them. I can�t resist stroking and kissing their soft, velvety ears. When I�m stroking their ears, they slowly start closing their eyes and look really relaxed! I love how friendly they are � you can go up to any Labrador and they will show you their love. They have a really soft nature as well. Sometimes they have a sad look on their face, which does look very cute, but I like to think they�re happy deep inside.

I love how every Labrador is different. Some are very friendly and will try to get your attention and affection, while others may be a bit shyer. No matter what their personality is, they are all very loyal to their owners. If I�m out and about and I see a Labrador, it�s the highlight of my trip. I always enjoy meeting them and speaking with their owners to find out a bit more about them.

Are you a big fan of Labradors? What's your favourite breed of dog?

Hi everyone! I thought I would share with you my dream holiday destination. If I could go anywhere in the world, it would be the Maldives. I fell in love with the place the moment I first saw it in photos ages ago and I�m working hard to try and visit - hopefully in the near future. Picturing it in my mind keeps me focused on my work and keeps me motivated to succeed. It is nothing short of stunning; every time I see a photo of a sun-drenched island surrounded by calm blue waters and clear blue skies, I fall in love with it even more.

The photo just sums up everything about the Maldives I hope to be able to experience soon: relaxing on golden sands on a secluded island in total peace and serenity, lounging about on the beach, letting all my cares melt away and soaking up the sun. Doesn't this photo just look like paradise? It really is the ultimate holiday destination! I really do hope I get to visit soon. I can just picture myself having a nice cool drink while watching the sunset on the beach, or snorkelling in the clear sea and seeing loads of colourful fish. Have you been to the Maldives before? What did you think of it? Do you have some other dream holiday destination?

After enjoying Christmas and Boxing Day, I decided to make a visit to Harrods, one of my favourite stores, on the 27th December. The post-Christmas sales were on and just as I expected, the store was pretty hectic! I couldn�t believe just how packed it was � not long after setting foot in the store, I found myself being swept along the beauty halls and before I knew it I ended up in the food halls without knowing exactly how I�d got there! Before I knew what I was doing, a store assistant started ushering me over to a stool and suddenly thrust a menu in my hand. Despite being unexpectedly rushed about, I managed to enjoy the rest of my day there at my own pace for once. I headed for the art gallery and was looking forward to seeing the pet department � a personal favourite of mine � though when I got there I found out it was being remodelled, much to my disappointment. I still really enjoyed my day, but the next time I go I�ll be better prepared for the crowds!

I find London such a fascinating place. It�s a city buzzing with creativity, diversity and energy. There�s so much going on wherever you go and there�s so much to do it�s impossible to stand still. I really love it at night when all the bright lights transform the city into something completely different. It�s true what they say, it really does come alive at night. I hope to live there one day and would love to get lost in the hustle and bustle of city life. There really is no place at all like London!

Art school was one of the most important and fun times of my life. Not only did I learn a lot about the craft that is now becoming my career, but I also had many memorable experiences and adventures that made my time at school unforgettable.

One such story I�d like to share with you took place on a taster day where we were learning the basics of film making. Our teacher warned us not to imitate a group of students in the year above � it turned out that the previous year these students had actually gone and tried to make an authentic film all about robbery. To get their footage, they donned balaclavas then ran into the local post office and began taking photographs! Staff at the post office rightly began chasing them away, asking what on Earth they thought they were doing. Not content with upsetting the daily routine at the post office, this renegade group of students then proceeded to make their way to the nearby army barracks where they rolled around outside the gates. To make matters worse, they brandished fake weapons right in front of the guards themselves before taking off and vanishing. The guards accordingly raised the alarm, which resulted in a helicopter being dispatched. This helicopter then spent the following several hours searching throughout Surrey for these wayward students, who unbeknown to everyone conducting the search, were happily dozing off in bed back on their uni campus, blissfully unaware of the chaos that their actions had caused.

As you can probably tell, the rest of our taster day was not quite as eventful as that of the wayward students, but it was certainly enjoyable nonetheless. Despite what they did, you certainly have to admire their guts!

Hi everybody! I hope you all had a really great Christmas and New Year! This is my first blog post of 2014 and will hopefully be the first of many! I just thought I�d share with you these gorgeous brown leather boots that I got at a sale at Clarks just before Christmas. It was such a lovely surprise to see these boots on sale � once I saw them I knew that I just had to have them!

One of the things I love most about these boots is the crocodile effect you can see at the back in the photo on the left. I think this little touch makes these boots stand out from the crowd � they certainly caught my eye in the shop!

When I tried them on for the first time, I was delighted to find they were very comfortable. I would have been really disappointed if they hadn't! Luckily for me they are very snug and match the shape of my legs, which is always a plus.

I never expected to pick up such a nice addition to my shoe collection � these boots just made my day! It just goes to show you that you should always keep your eyes peeled because you never know when you might find a good bargain.

Have you made a nice impulse purchase recently? Have you found something lovely in a shop that caught your eye and thought �I have to have that�? I�d love to hear about some delightful impulse purchases so tell me about some of yours and share some photos below.

The Reading Art Exhibition which took place from 25-27 October at St Joseph's school was met with mixed reviews. The exhibition was well organised although misleading to a newbie like myself.

The information in my pack failed to inform me of meet the artists between certain hours, therefore i missed out and it wasn't clear that the artists don't attend if they aren't doing a meet and greet. It was disappointing to miss out on interacting with the public.

The plus side of exhibiting there is you have the opportunity to make a profile about yourself and display next to your work. They advertise the exhibition heavily which attracts a fair bit of foot fall over the three days, and they hold a private viewing for friends and families in the evening on the first day.

Click on the title of this blog to view a slide show of all of my current work

Hello

Attached is the second painting in the new series I am working on which will be finished this week. I had a lovely day out in windsor a couple of weeks ago. Windsor town centre was awash with tourists as always. I passed mile long queues to get into the castle on my way in to Great Windsor park.
The depth of the greens in the painting are a true reflection of the trees in the park but I will tone them down as I work on the painting .

I arrived at this stage of the painting quicker than the lazt one. Mainly be ause it isnt as detailed abut also i wasn't distracted by the admin side of my business.

There will be a sequal to this painting after I have painted a sequal to the first work in progress I posted a few weeks ago

Until next tiime

This painting is acrylic on board and it is of a local scene in the park up the road from where I live. I have experimented with new techniques on painting the grass with a fan brush. And I have to say not only is it effective it is also very time efficient. I will stick to this technique moving forwards. Over the next week I will upload photos of its progress and of the next painting I will atart this week which will beof a similar scene at dusk

I have been approached several times as to the best companies, and methods of getting artwork copyrighted, printed and sold online, therefore I thought I would share with you, the knowledge I have gained in these areas.

Firstly, I would advise you to get your work copyrighted and registered before it leaves your sight, even if you don�t intend to sell your work online in order to prevent it being used illegally.

Here is this link for more information http://copyright.co.uk/about-copyright-uk.html#ixzz2Y4TEtLes

Finding local, quality printing companies who produce high quality work at a reasonable price, can be a challenge. If you are lucky enough to come across one, it would be prudent to develop a good working relationship with them and put a lot of business their way and in return they may scan your images for free!!

If a local printer isn�t at your disposal, and you don�t like the idea of sending your �originals� to a printer via a courier, find a website that provides a �print on demand� service. I use one who produces several types of prints such as Giclee, Canvas, Art and Metal Prints. Click on the image at the end of the page to view it. This company also mounts and frames the work, and delivers it within 2-3 business working days.

They were recommended to me by ArtyShark.com here is the link http://www.artsyshark.com/125-places-to-sell/ you will find 125 more places to sell online that may be suitable to you.

To find out more about Giclee Prints copy and paste this link http://www.gicleeprinting.co.uk

I hope this information is helpful to you. Please feel free to ask me more questions or post a comment at the bottom of this page.


We will speak again soon

Have you ever looked at an artist�s work and wondered how they arrived at the finished product? Did they photograph their subject first then paint? Or did they take pictures of beautiful work?
I am going to share with you the process that I followed in creating the 16 paintings on my website.

1) Over a period of two months, I scoured the countryside for large enough scenes, which were either bland, (so I could them pretty up), or already pleasing to the eye, that could be painted from different perspectives.

2) To get that shot, I risked getting scratched by brambles, blown away by the wind, rained on, or run over by passing cars. All in the name of Art. I used the camera on my phone to take the photographs.


3) When I got home five of the most inspiring pictures to work with were selected . I tend to work on several paintings at the same time, as do numerous artists, because it keeps the interest and motivation fresh.

4) The next step was choosing a surface to work on. How to make that decision comes down to the medium being used. My medium is Acrylics therefore I used un primed canvas textured Acrylic paper, which holds the paint in place.

5) After roughly mapping out the perspective on all five surfaces, I started to paint in the details to a certain stage every day so they would all be completed at the same time, using paint brushes of various shapes and sizes.

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