A busy few days demonstrating

Well, I have had quite a little tour demonstrating for Art Societies over the last three days  visiting Hemel Hempstead, Cuckield and Bexhill On Sea, a good three hours drive from the Cotswolds, so I stayed in the area for a few days.

Its lovely to meet such enthusiastic painters and to share a few tips and ideas, my first two demos were flowers and I painted a large range of subjects including sunflowers, tulips, roses, stock, anemones, freesias, daisies, hebe's, and buttercups but not all together and both demos were different.

This time I had a couple of new ideas which I tried out for the Bexhill Group. When I say new, no one in the group had ever used this technique before to create the texture I wanted on the pebbly harbour, and as I had not demonstrated it before, I class it as 'new'

My theme was 'Boats and Harbours' and I painted two paintings, one of which was two boats on the mud in Shorham Harbour at low tide. I had never painted it before and chose to use Bockingford watercolour paper as I intended to use some masking fluid, as it always rubs off so beautifully.
This demo took me an hour, it was a bit rushed towards the end as I wanted to get a second painting done too, so I could demonstrate how I 'float' colours which is such a fun technique, but I managed to get both done in the end and thoroughly enjoyed my afternoon!

This week is going to be another busy one as I will be at the NEC demonstrating later this week..... more about that later, I am preparing my demos over the next couple of days.