I,m dreaming for a white Christmas!

Its the height of summer here but I dream for a bit of snow even though we don't get snow like this here, only a smattering, barely enough for a snowball most of the time :-) 

Seaton Carew around the 19th century.

I have  just finished another watercolour  in a small series of bringing to life old early 19th century photos of around Hartlepool to life.
As ever this was taken  from a photo over 100 years old so the actual quality of the image was rather naff so I had to use a tad of  imagination to fill in the completely underexposed areas that you  always get on photography of this age but I feel I did it justice. The area is Seaton Carew and how different it looks today !!

Sunset

I don't really do sunsets in watercolour as I feel it's better suited for an opaque medium such as oils or  acrylics but looking through my photographs I came across one I took  last November at the Headland in Hartlepool so I thought  that I would give it a try.

First thing was to keep the colours  muted as it is very easy to make the scene look overly colourful and gaudy and secondly to try and watch the tonal values. The end result pretty much matched the atmosphere of my photo and I may try another sometime!

Small watercolours.

I have recently been sorting through my  watercolour stuff  and noticed how much scrap paper I am left with. Normally I would just use this leftover paper for swatches of colour but I thought about trying to paint much smaller pictures and see what happens especially as I have a  load of mount board inserts, the part of a mount that is left from cutting a larger mount so I simply cut these inserts into another mount which the watercolour scrap paper seems to fit nicely!
I now have enough materials to paint many more watercolours and have them mounted...no waste :-)

Looking  over to Hartlepool headland. 10x11 inches.

Scottish loch. About 6x10 inches