The Saltaire Studio

Apr 12, 2020

16 warm-up paintings

Lock down has given me the time to do a lot of jobs that have been hanging around the house. It has also given me the opportunity to play! Here I have taken a very large piece of Arches Huille to create 16 warm-up paintings in one go.

Apr 12, 2020

Limiting your palette

With lockdown now in place you may have limited paint colours available. So why not try an exercise in limiting your palette? I find it really helps to simplify things, to avoid overthinking. All you need to have is a white, a dark colour, warm colour and a cool colour and you are all set to go.

Jan 21, 2020

New card collection

Unusually this painting was deliberately created with the intention of turning it into Christmas cards hence the rather predictable green and red start to this piece. In the spirit of getting myself organised for Christmas I started this in October but life had a different idea. So over the Christmas break I started playing around with this piece and seeing whether it would go.

Jan 15, 2020

Blending on a large scale

Here I show you how I used a palette knife and a fan brush on a large scale to create atmospheric skies.

Nov 24, 2019

Creating a triptych

I have been experimenting with different sizes and different surfaces over the last couple of months and this painting was the result of two ideas coming together.

Sep 24, 2019

Scaling up

I have absolutely loved being back in the studio painting and this time I have been experimenting with scale and surface. For the last 3 years I have been mainly painting with cold wax on a smaller scale and on paper. I love working on the paper but you can only scale up so far with work that has to be behind glass, unless of course you fix the paper to the board and well I know that will just go terribly wrong for me.