A Spanish cherry, in watercolour, May 2019.
A Spanish cherry, in watercolour, May 2019.

Watercolour is an unforgiving medium. It demands patience, which is something I tend to remember once I’ve messed it up a bit. In the cherry above you can see a dark line on the edge of the cherry, which came about because I wanted to make the cherry darker, but wasn’t patient enough to wait for each layer to dry.

The banana has some ‘cauliflowering’ from where I failed to create a decent shadow and left too much water sitting on the page. And the artichoke has a soft blurry edge from where again I struggled to create a shadow.

All the fruit was drawn from life, but the apples, as you can possibly tell from their odd shapes, were moved from the table for dinner, and then I finished up the painting elsewhere, fruitless.

There is an obvious lack of colour theory in the single landscape picture – painted from a photo I took on an evening walk. The hills in the background ought to be cooler. The thing that looks like a stick is supposedly a path, but it doesn’t seem to sit in the grass.

The lavendar is crisp, simply because it’s from a tutorial I was following. Tutorials are good, you can learn a lot from them, although it’s also important to mix in some of your own constructions.

I have an awful lot to learn, but I feel like despite (or because of) all the mistakes, I’m making progress.

My mother’s strawberry plant, June 2019.

And on the topic of art, you might have forgotten the story of that one time I took the Nonna to an art gallery.