Woman and Child

18.75 x 27 cms, pastel, gouache and acrylic on board, 1998 finished in 2007

Well, Dai, you might not like this one - it started off as one of my old mad paintings and has been finished now as one of my current mad paintings. I had to finish it.

It's about A4 (will measure it) on board, and it doesn't have the half inch margin round the edge because I started it about 9 years ago before I received your instructions. (What a sensible thing to do - why hadn't I thought of doing it before...)

I'd already painted in the two heads and a bottom part that didn't work, then I left it. I didn't want to change the position of the two heads so that gave me some problems trying to balance the painting. It was started off in pastel and gouache and finished in acrylic.

re the HW paintings - In the esnips folder I've named both the paintings and the drawings to make them easier to refer to. I've also added comments (including for this one) as Chuma asked. He said it would make it easier for him to write poems for them.

I didn't really like adding comments since most of them just appeared and I made sense of them after I saw them, or during the process, but it was never - here is my plan, I'll draw a picture to illustrate x.

This has all taken much longer than I thought it would - the adding names and comments, I mean. I'm going to go and draw now and will come back to watch the demos on utube that you found for me later on. I found a large book by Barrington Black called something like Fundametals of Drawing reduced from £15 to 5! It's got a lot of the 'how to draw everything' in it, but my copy of that is small and hard to see, so this is glorious. I'm going to start at the beginning and try to stick to at least one exercise from it per day.

I try to do at least one of your exercises per day, too, in addition to thinking about the latest piece of wisdom you've sent me. In fact, your teaching opens my eyes wider each day - and my mind...

That's it for now. Hope you're living it up in Abergavenny. Greetings to you all.