The Start of Spring

 Having had the most gross cold ever, I am finally aware of spring in my garden through the daffodils and crocuses, aconites and forsythia, in the bird world through the dawn chorus and growing excitement of the singing and in the longer light we receive. All so welcome. Reduction printing will be returned to as we have a day planned in a local school to get every child completing a poem and a reduction print based on their study of Hull in this year of it being the city of culture.
However, today I have been playing. I have started a paired sketch book with a painting friend.If you want a reason to sketch that helps you to learn and links to studying artists, this is a great idea. I love it. We each have a sketch book which we use and then swop. We talk about each other's sketch and then build on something in the other's work to complete the next sketch. Below I show the work from the sketch book currently in my possession. I hope you can see some link between each of the five sketches. I did the first one, my painting friend the second and so on. I really recommend this if you have a friend you could meet up with regularly - great excuse for much coffee drinking and chat also.

The final image is not from my sketch book but from my study link. It is an image of a painting by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. I will talk more about her in my next blog