An old family relative

This was a commissioned gift from my uncle to my auntie. The man on the right is her father, he was a farmer up on the Glyn Mountain, which is near where I live, and that's his prize winning bull. The photo must have been taken around the nineteen fifties.

The undercoat of every painting I do is really just a scribbled mess, but it's very useful. It stops me getting too precious about the process. It shows where the light and dark sections are, and also creates a nice thick layer of paint for the top layer to sit on, making it nice and shiny. Acrylic paint which is too thin just looks dry and chalky.

As if by magic a finished painting emerges. I like taking photos of the painting in progress, because it's so easy to forget the stages that you have to go through to get there.

Seeing the original photo and the photo of the painting side by side I can see now that the bulls forehead is a too high, but it's easy to change that with acrylics because they dry so quickly.

I purposefully wanted a balance between sketchiness and detail, so the hands are just blobs, but making sure the planes of the face are in the right place is really important. The sketchiness of the background and his clothes acts as a nice balance for the detail in the face.

Children on the Beach

I've been working on a series of paintings for a local shop The Potting Shed which feature children playing on the beach. I've done a small version based on this photo which has come across really well. The painting is painted primarily in black and white, with tones of dark brown, then as an accent colour I also added a red bucket for the girl and a red spade for the boy. The painting shows really well how elements from a photo can be kept as they look in the photo whilst also adding features from the imagination that add to the composition.

Tonyrefail Train Station

This is an image of a painting that I did last Christmas that was quite popular, I did four versions in all for various people. This one was quite large, around 50 by 70 cm and was painted with acrylic on canvas, with around three coats of acrylic in total, from the rough sketchy paint underneath to the finished coat on top.

There's something about trains, and especially steam trains that's so evocative and feeds the imagination, plus the added bonus that you're far less likely to get travel sickness! Buses are my nemesis, I've been on two journeys to London recently, both to view work in the Tate Gallery for student courses, and both journey's made me as sick as a dog, mind you the fact that we had to get up at five o'clock in the morning didn't help my constitution! And they were three and a half hour journey's both way. Give me a train any day.

This was painted from a photo of Tonyrefail station, near where I live, though sadly the station is no longer there, a relic from the coal days in the South Wales Valleys. My brother actually lives in Station Road which led onto the station, and I live near the current road bypass which uses the old train line as the orientation for the road itself.