more painting and winter weather

One of those instagram top nine posts (of 2025) in a square. It’s interesting that the green, pink and red pop out so much.  Of course I have painted over the bottom right image. The replacement didn’t attract the algorithm anything like  as much. And the one in the centre has had work done on it, and is pending a paint over ….

I took this on January 5th, walking back from Ceres, on such a beautiful sunny day with the ground frozen hard underfoot. No mud! On the horizon you can see the distant northern hills covered in snow. On such a clear day you can see the Cairngorms. The snow seems to bring them nearer.

Then later that week we got some snow.

The first snow of the winter as well as the year. Tarvit ponds lit up instead of their usual gloom under the yew trees.

From the old  water meadows (no longer grazing but drained and growing cereals) between the railway embankment and the river, or the Eden Burn, Garley Bank with its tree clumps.

Everything picked out in monochromes.

All the trees have white foliage.

Resulting in a watercolour attempt.

It’s irresistible,

my sofa studio.

It got really icy and treacherous underfoot. These droplets are frozen, and they stayed frozen for several days.

I had to negotiate slippery pavements with my highly reactive excitable dog, and some days, after teetering across untreated pavements and roads on the estate, we just did a circuit of the nearest park.

I bought a pretty hellebore at the local garden centre, but it didn’t like being indoors and developed aphids. I am going to plant out a hellebore patch in a shady part of the back garden.

Meanwhile this canvas came indoors for a third attempt. I turned this one (of myself as a teenager having a piano lesson) upside down, and started one of Lucy from the photo she sent me from Florence.

I had cleaned everything up and brushed the left over paint onto a couple of small surfaces, this canvas,

and this plywood panel. The are sure to come in handy for something or other.

A clean start.

It went quite well in a fairly hands off sort of way to start with. The canvas is a different shape from the photo and some things changed shape. I wish i could have kept the wrong-way-up plant, but it didn’t work out.

the orange sofa was a delight, the dress I kept very abstract, and the pink and blue from the original painting was perfect.

These shoes were interesting to paint but every time I got back from the painting to look, they were still too big.

wearing vari-focals and working in a small room didn’t help.

I did enjoy painting both sets of legs.

The original painting started with lots of pigment and blobs of acrylic paint, hence the textures.

There’s no possibility of getting a smooth silky polished sort of painting.

I wandered into portraiture a bit with this one.

then this watercolour afterwards as an antidote, sofa painting again.

Under the lazy but watchful eye of Miss Toofy, or Madam Shark.

The weather has improved a bit so we went to Tentsmuir for the first time for a couple of months.

It was Baltic as we say in Scotland, a cold wind and only 3C. Madam Shark is not so fit, so what with that and the cold we did not have a long walk.

A bit of ball play. I kick it rather pathetically, she excitedly chases and grabs it and runs off. Then lies down and drops it. “It’s your turn now”. Not a hope of turning her into a retriever.