The book is nearly complete

Photo of the Cygnets (some of my beloved students) at the recent and wonderful Society of Botanical Artists’ annual exhibition at Westminster Hall. I am extremely proud of the fact that 11 of my students had work hung at the exhibition and superb work it is too.
At long last the book ‘Botanical Drawing with Coloured Pencil’, the writing of which has eaten up so much time of late that I haven’t posted any blogs since last year, is finally nearing completion. The picture editor plus a photographer visited the studio this week to take all the photographs for the book. Very painstaking and involved 2 days of pencil sharpening alone prior to their arrival.
In 2 weeks I am off to Italy for the first painting holiday up in the hills of Umbria. We have been promised wild orchids, truffles and all sorts of delights and I pray for warm weather.

The ‘Cygnets’ enjoying lunch at SBA exhibition

So much has happened recently.  In March I had my first experience as a judge on the RHS Picture Committee.  Some fabulous work was displayed but unfortunately no gold medals this time around.

Last week I did a one-day workshop for the South West Botanical Artists Groupd at their annual exhibition at the Arts Centre in Illminster.  Well worth a visit even if you only buy some of the lovely greetings cards on sale by the artists.  Although most of the group are watercolour artists they enjoyed having a bash at coloured pencil work and some of them really took to it like the proverbial duck to water.  I was nearly flattened in the stampede to buy pencils at lunch time.

This last weekend I was demonstrating at the National Botanic Gardens of Wales.  It was a lovely day, the sun shone and quite a few intrepid explorers managed to find me located down in the Aqua lab.  Afterwards we visited Aberglasney Gardens, what a joy, I can thoroughly recommend a visit.

Today I recevied a kind thank you card from someone on the SWSBA workshop at Illminister and she wrote and I quote ‘ It was worth a 3 hour drive just to see you lift a vein with a piece of sticky back plastic!!’ That brought a smile to my face after all the hard slog on the book.