Rebooting: the journey starts here

Ok, I am a software engineer but I hope you're not expecting me to produce anything clever with all this HTML stuff! After much deliberation and goodness knows how many failed attempts to choose a name for this blog I'm finally here.

After a sabbatical of about 15 years or more I've recently started to sketch and paint again. I'm mainly into watercolour but I have dabbled a bit with pastels, coloured pencils, oils and acrylics although I can't say I'm  a master of  any of them yet! There's a wealth of information out there to help the amateur and professional artist alike and the number of art blogs is bewildering. So why would you want to come here and waste valuable blog reading time. Well, I hope to share with you a little bit about my artistic journey: the materials I use, the places I go to sketch, the problems I encounter and the solutions if and when I find them :-) I have very little time in the week due to my job and fairly hectic life but I will try to post at least once a week, most probably at weekends.

To start things off, here's a sketch of the ubiquitous rusty barn in  a field. I love these things and Cambridgeshire is full of them. I think it's the complementary colours of the red rust and green grass that just beg to be painted. I finished work early - it was a Friday and a fine day too - so I cycled out to a neighbouring village with the intention of finding something to sketch. The barn itself is quite well hidden so I was delighted to catch a glimpse of it and stopped immediately to take a better look. I did the basic drawing with a soft pencil and then added watercolour back at home. I used Cotman watercolours but I'd like to do some more sketches and possibly work on  a larger format version with artists' quality colours. This is a double page spread in my A6 Daler Rowney Ebony sketchbook - very nice paper for watercolour sketching like this.

That's all for now. Back again soon.

RUSTY BARN, HUNTINGDON, CAMBRIDGESHIRE