I'm back again - well, have been for a week but was slain by a cold and also have been sluggish about getting back to normal life after all the excitement and highs of a wonderful wedding trip.
I did little sketching and hardly got my paints out - it was primarily a lovely time spent with family and friends, reunions, celebrations, and sightseeing of the first bit of England outside of London that I've been to. Windsor, Oxford, little Pangbourne, Stonehenge!... I wondered if I'd ever get there and now I have... the wedding itself was held in the idyllic settings of bluebell woods and the tulip bedecked garden of this old Priory home, which I sketched very badly on the spot and have not done any justice at all. The top sketch is from the lower double window in the middle one...
...and this a 'pleached' apple tree, carefully trained and pruned into a long flattened shape over many years, leaning over 'black' and pink tulips that echoed the colours of the old tree. I could've spent months or more just moving a few metres at a time to the next perfect picture-painting spot, it's all so beautiful, but this time was much more sociable than that - I did a few sketches pre and during the wedding... quickly and inadequately, leaving my carefully chosen watercolour palette undisturbed as I grabbed at fleeting images in fine pen lines. I'm now adding colour and a couple more scenes to flesh out the album, from photographs as a gift to the newlyweds. Once they've seen them, I'll show them to you - my intentions to present it to them as they left on honeymoon were completely unrealistic, but I hope it won't be too long a-coming!
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