A word from Alice - studio stories from Alice Draws the Line

This extract hopefully shows some of the brush marks I was working with. The sky was amazing - blue but with streaks of white wispy clouds. Hard to achieve with watercolour without white or masking fluid, and so I added just the blue for the sky and left out spaces for the white clouds. 

I was also working with a partially dry brush to try and create the white horses at the shoreline - I started to want to really play with this and develop it - but prolifically filling pages and stopping them blow away in the middle of a birthday picnic didn’t feel the right thing to do!

As regular readers will know, I seem to have an interest in experimenting with working at a larger scale.

Last week I took a big piece of paper out into the parkland near the studio and sketched using one of my homemade feather quills.

I spotted my first bluebell of the year a couple of weeks ago. Six days ago I returned to see how they were getting on and there were many more appearing.

This morning I went to find them before opening up the studio. 

There is a carpet of blue now! 

I paused for a minute and did some quick studies in the A6 sketchbook I'd put in my coat pocket.

Last week I had a day at the beach with my cousin. Despite heavy drizzle when we left Herefordshire we had a dry day at the coast, with a bit of sunshine for an added bonus!

We picnicked at Borth beach - and I sketched

I've occasionally been asked on Instagram about my sketchbooks and the materials I use to create my artwork.

So here we go, some answers...