Photo's on my Phone 23rd August 2024 to 4th of September

What do you do when your life is collapsing around you?

Go on holiday and forget it all for a few days!

So we went back to Suffolk to see our families and cuddle my boy and his husband.

We also spent time with both of our parents, Phil's nephew, sister & brother & my aunt, 

We were only gone 72 hours, but in that time we drove 16 hours, slept for 14 hours.

Visited 3 pubs (including The Jolly Sailor at Orford as seen in the photo above)

Visited 2 beaches, Walberswick  above where a stone/tooth/finger incident occurred.

Plus 5 hours in casualty, there was an incident with a stone, Siri's mouth and Phil's finger. Siri ended up with a chipped canine that sliced Phil's finger badly enough to need stitches. 

Moral of the story is always make sure Siri is sitting in front of you and waiting before you throw anything.

We both waited patiently outside for 5 hours while Phil waited patiently inside, only to be told they couldn't stitch his finger because it was an animal injury.

Beach number 2 was Shingle Street (our old home). You can almost see our old house in the trees across the marshes

And then we drove home, luckily the 18 mile traffic jam was on the other side of the M25.

On Sunday it was Bert's 7th birthday, his 2 uncles gave him an iguana and great Grandad gave him a remote controlled model boat.

The iguana ate fish & chips with us on Ilfracombe harbour beach and the model boat in the words of Bert is the best present in the world.

Now I'm back to the depressing job of packing our lives in boxes, while we desperately try and find somewhere to live.

No drawings last week except for a couple of badly drawn quick sketches, however I will be at the Lyn Valley Market at Lynton Town Hall on Saturday. 

Please come and say Hi, but please no sympathy unless you want a flood of tears.

Photo's on my Phone 7th August 2024 to 22nd of August

 The sun still shone (for a while).

 

We went on a family trip to Landacre. All the grown ups laid on the river bank and enjoyed the sun, except for Mummy who played in the river with the boys.

I didn't take any photo's, the ones above are of another family trip back in 2015, with our grown children (before the small boy's existed) and our beloved previous GSD Loki, I miss them all so much....

Anyway I did a very bad sketch, which I had to colour in when I came home as I didn't want it to ruin my sketch book. The only bit that remotely looks like the Landacre are the bridge arches.

The next day the sun went away and the rain arrived.

So we took the boys to soft play, which is the best rainy day invention. This was our view for 2 hours, the boys came back once or twice to demand drinks & food, we enjoyed every minute of it.

I finished my second colouring. It's an A4+ print, hand coloured with water colour pen. I've included the pen so you can see the size and depth of detail.

Last Thursday we received an official looking e-mail from our landlords solicitor, we've worried about eviction for a long time, the e-mail didn't say we were being evicted, but it made us fear what was coming next. We took the dogs up to Countisbury to try and blow some of the worries away. The colours were amazing in the early evening sun. We met a herd of Exmoor ponies and stood still with the dogs while the ponies passed us on both side. The dogs were amazing just stood still with us and watched, both Siri and Ron had a slight wobble, but didn't bark so the ponies ignored them. We were both so proud of our dog boy's, seems like all our constant training is paying off.

On Monday both us and Dais were served a section 21 no fault eviction notice. We both have 2 months to find a new home, before our landlord starts court proceedings.

At the point in time when this photo was taken both Maggie and Siri had no idea that Queenie and Grandpa were scared and angry and trying to hide their tears. I wish I could say they were still oblivious to what was happening. Mummy is doing her best to protect the boys, but it's too big a thing to hide, they know they are going to move house and maybe have to leave their friends & family. Siri is worried and stuck to my side like glue, he's scared and doesn't understand what's going on, so I'm making sure he spends lots of time with his girlfriend & her mum.

There's a housing crisis, too many houses have been sold as second homes & airbnb's, there is no where for the locals to live. 

To make a single mum with 2 small children and a slightly broken old couple close to retirement age homeless is devastating, it means our family has been broken in two and face an uncertain future.

I have no doubt our flat will be sold as a second home or airbnb and will remain empty for months of the year. 

This is the 4th time we have lost our home, the first was our house when Phil was made redundant, the sale of the house went through the day before the bailiffs turned up. 

The second was because our landlord didn't want to repair the chimney so evicted us and sold the flat so it was someone else's problem. 

The third was a bolt hole the second time Phil was made redundant. We have very kind friends who helped us out when we needed it, we knew it was only temporary and would be sold, but it still hurt when the estate agent came round to value it.

Life has kicked us so many times, I fear that if we have to leave our friends, family & village behind there won't be much left to kick.

The one thing I am adamant about is I will not give up my dogs, I would rather live in a tent and you never know it might just come to that.

We have applied to the council for help, but have been told we are in a long queue due to landlords panic selling. Labour have promised a new law making section 21 notices a thing of the past, but until it is passed there will be a lot more in the same situation as us.

On the day the notice arrived we took the boys to Dunster.

Dunster beach was grey and gloomy, but we made the most of it Grandpa climbed rocks with the boy's while I threw (and lost) balls for the dogs. Then we ate ice cream in a gale on the top of the hill overlooking Porlock.

In an effort to avoid looking at the packing boxes surrounding me and to try and take my mind off it I've coloured a second Summer print. Its also coloured in watercolour pens, so strictly no tears or the rainbows will end up running all over the page.

The photo is of it almost finished, I've finished it now and moved onto the next.

Rainbows are full of hope & positivity , if I colour enough of them maybe the positivity will rub off on us and we won't have to spend Christmas Day living in a tent.

We are off to stay with our son & his husband next week, so we can visit family and have a couple of days with them. We both desperately need this break, maybe it will help us come to terms with what's going on and help us move on to better things.

Drawing for me

Looking through my photo's I realised that last year was the year I drew for everyone else but me. 

I wanted (and needed) to sell prints, due to the recession which has shrunk all my income streams into a trickle.

I thought that if I drew what I thought people would like to buy that the prints would sell, but I hadn't considered that just because you like something it doesn't mean you are going to buy it.

I also drew for the people who said "I'd love to see a drawing of my building/shop/house etc etc" at the time I considered this was an intent to buy, but it wasn't. It was exactly what they said, "I would love to see.." not "I would like to buy.."

Over the last year attending fairs & markets numerous people commented that their house wasn't on one of my drawings, so they wouldn't buy it, but if I did a drawing that included their house that they would buy a print.

Over the past few weeks I have been considering starting several new drawings that would include all the missing houses, I even printed several photo's to use as inspiration, but I haven't been inspired enough to put pen to paper.

I think life is telling me to draw for me, so I'm rewinding, hoping I'll get back to here or some place similar.

At present I have a block about starting something and getting it wrong, so Iam colouring and altering prints that don't sell.

At the moment I'm working on Hollerday House

Which started off as this.

The coloured version is a bit of a mess, as I'm still trying to find the right pens to use, there are a few places where the markers have bled over the line or tiny spots of colour when the acrylic pen decided to leak, but on the whole I'm very happy and enjoying every minute of it.

At the moment my guilty pleasure is looking at pens on-line trying to find the perfect one to colour prints, a few have accidentally ended up in the post on their way to me 😁

Experiments & other stuff

Not only have I finished Ilfracombe , but I've also finished Woolacombe.

I quite like it, but got carried away with acrylic pen and have over worked it. I was going to have it framed so I could exhibit it, but I'm not sure its worth it, so I'll find/make a mount and sell it as it is.

After finishing a major project I always feel a bit lost, so this weekend I've been playing until inspiration strikes. I decided I needed to tackle my Verona green sketchbook, the paper is beautiful, but the green dulls the colours and colour is my thing, so I've struggled to use it. I decided to experiment with different mediums, the first was Posca acrylic pens (one of my favourites) and think I don't need to look any further they are perfect, the colours are luminous.

The drawing on the right is drawn with a 0.003 pen and coloured with a 0.5 pen, it would be nice if I could perfect combining the two pens. 

 

I follow the artist  Niamh Moran on Instagram she works over her prints, adding more colour and detail, so each print is individual. As I've got several prints that don't sell I thought I'd experiment.

This is the First quarter of Summer, I've used several different mediums trying to find one that works. I used fine line felt pens, marker pens, coloured pencils and finally acrylic pens. Fine line pens are too dark, the paper is porous so the markers bleed, my pencils are too soft, I struggle to keep them within the lines, but yet again the acrylic pens are perfect.

Experimenting with Summer has led me to look at it again.

Summer started as a drawing of all the places we had visited with our grand boys in the school summer holidays in 2022.

The original has orange juice and dog foot prints all over it thanks to my then very large bouncy puppy, so I knew I could never sell it, so I put it into photoshop and started drawing over it. In the autumn of 2022 I started drawing Lynton and abandoned Summer. At that time I had only drawn the top half, so I cut it into 2 pieces to sell as quarters of Summer.

I had several prints of the First quarter of Summer, but as it wasn't popular I never bothered having the second quarter printed.

At some point in time I coloured the first quarter in digitally, which I love. I only have one copy, which is framed and has been shown at my Exmoor Parks exhibition.

I loved the colour version so much that I want to colour the whole drawing, unfortunately I can't find the original the digital progress image, plus the two quarters didn't match up as I'd redrawn the edges where they met.

So I've started the digital drawing again. The above is what I have drawn so far, the cream background is just to give an idea of how big it is.

I have visions of an A1 coloured version, framed on my wall and maybe a plan of where to submit it if I finish it in time.

And lastly I have a new sketchbook, which I'm so excited about, it's a A5 concertina sketchbook. I will be able to draw one page at a time and slightly overlap onto the next page, enabling all the drawings to become one large image.

I'm so excited I can't wait for it to stop raining so I can find something to draw in it.

Ilfracombe Harbour

 Ilfracombe is finished .. YAY!!

(Apart from a few waves around Verity, that Ive only just noticed, I'll draw them in before its goes to be printed.)

Anyway this drawing has taken me over a year, from the very first set of photographs to the drawing you see on screen.

I started drawing in December, using a 0.1 fine line pen, by the end of February when I had draw half the original pen drawing before I discovered it wouldn't fit on the page, so the original drawing ended up as a set of sketches.

Since April I have been working on it in photoshop, I've done an awful lot of cut and pasting, been back several times to take more photo's, studied google street view trying to fill in the gaps. The photo's below show my progress over the last 4 months.

 

         

The image will be a Giclee print, printed using pigment inks onto archival fine art paper.

The print is now ready for ordering, UK orders will be delivery straight from the printer, so will be unsigned. 

I am able to sign and deliver copies locally anywhere within 20 miles of Lynton, which includes Ilfracombe, Barnstaple, Braunton, South Molton etc etc If you live a little further please contact me as I will need to charge a small amount towards fuel costs.

The Image can be printed in three sizes and costs (UK shipping) included as follows..

A1+ (limited edition 500) £300

A2+ £130

A3+ £85

I am able to send internationally however shipping will be extra.

I accept PayPal or bank transfer payments.
If you have any questions or would like a copy of the print please leave a message in the comments box on the left hand side of this post.