No matter what my plans were before the month begins, everything is swallowed in the mad rush to the end of the school year for all the small, and now not so small, people in my house.

That said, July was still art filled. Three paintings have spent at least part of the month in two different exhibitions at the Alexandra Arts. At the start of the month, the painting of Robin Hood I was commissioned to paint for Juliette Harrisson’s Creepy Classics series and a flower painting were part of the Rugby Artists and Makers summer exhibition. For the last part of July and the start of August, the painting of Rugby I began for the demonstration at the Alex for the Love Rugby festival and finished at home is hanging up now in the Made at the Alex exhibition. If you are local, drop in and have a look. The wonderful artists who have studio space at the Alex are all exhibiting, along with many of the artists who demonstrated their work throughout the festival.

I also spent quite a few hours in the sunshine, creating chalk paintings in various parks and locations around the town. Along with the GEC park, I helped with the chalk art at Whitehall Rec and on the pavement outside of the Alexandra Arts. Some of the chalk art has managed to survive until now, thanks in no small part to the drought we have been experiencing this month.

Creating art with chalk, on the floor, in public, was a totally new experience for me. We had some lovely people of all ages stop by and chat about what we were creating, and years of working with watercolour has made me reasonably comfortable with working in a medium that you can’t rub out. Once you’ve made a mark you have definitely committed to it being there. After my nerves had settled, I found myself really getting in to the work. I forgot that I was in a public space and that I could not throw away what I had created, and just had fun.

I have spent the past few weeks trying to continue on with this feeling, and have been working with some more experimental ideas in my sketchbook. I’ve been trying out mixing media, changing the sizing of my work and creating some complete rural landscapes for a change. Some have no buildings in them at all! I have banned the white space I habitually leave around my subject and worked to simplify the images I am working on.

On August 22nd I am heading out again, this time to Rugby’s Art festival. I want to take along a new series of original paintings, based on my experiments, so hopefully August will be as full of arty fun as July.

Enjoy the summer everyone!

Sam

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Now that is out of the way, I’ve had a very busy weekend, with not one but two arty events to share, both funded by and a part of the Love Rugby Festival, which runs a multitude of fantastic events to take part in from 20th June through to the 5th July. If you are local, check it out! There are leaflets available all over town, and a lot of the events are free to attend.

On Saturday I headed over the the Art at the Alex (super arty venue in the town centre, in what was once a pub and is now an exhibition/workshop/cafe/art studio space for an amazing bunch of creative folk). I was there for four hours, demonstrating watercolour painting, while Gemma, from Gem’s Creative Place, led a workshop where attendees could have a go at painting their own version of the drawing I was working from. It was a very relaxing and enjoyable afternoon, and reminded me what I love about my job.

It is strange to say, considering I am an artist, but it has been about a month since I got my watercolour paints out, and it felt great to lose myself in a painting again. Some months do go like this - it has been very admin heavy (including chasing a missing payment - my least favourite part of my job), and I have started the huge job of editing the novel, so the actual making of art has slid down to the bottom of the pile of “things to be done”. It has now been relocated to nearer, but not quite at, the top!

Then today was also an actually making art day again! This time with a group of local artists. We are decorating locations around the town with chalk drawings related to the events happening for the festival. Today myself, Jenny Ball and Huyen Phan, headed over to the GEC park to decorate in time for their Family Fun Day next weekend. Due to a number of robotic related events in the festival we have chosen robots as our theme, so we drew many different robots playing all kinds of sports.

The cheeky yellow and green, round robot bouncing a ball is mine, along with quite a few foot prints and some musical notes.

Finally, in some exciting news, I am planning a workshop! It is still in the organising stages, but it looks like I will be running a workshop for four weeks on a Wednesday evening, in September, looking at how to paint buildings. If you are local, and want to learn how to paint a house portrait of your own, based on a building of your choice, watch this space. More information will be arriving soon!

For now, have a lovely June and enjoy the glorious sunshine which seems to have reappeared!

Best wishes,

Sam

I only started being able to use the word “artist” to describe myself after my eldest (and very blunt) child pointed out that my reluctance to use the word was ridiculous. “You’re an artist, Mum. People literally give you money for your art.” Good point, well made.

Anyway, back to the whole “I can’t draw or paint from my imagination” thing.

I have been thinking about this topic a lot over the past few weeks. One of the lovely women who were taking part in a cupcake painting workshop I was running mentioned that she was a terrible artist, because whenever she tried to draw something from her imagination, it always looked like a five year old child’s scribble. I laughed and told her, me too. That is exactly how my drawings appear if I don’t have a reference in front of me.

It is because I do not have the ability to visualise things in my mind. If someone asks me to picture something, I can’t. There are no pictures in my brain. Just comforting nothingness. Apparently there is a word for this - it is called aphantasia.

Which means when I am asked to draw or paint something imaginary, like for example a scene from my best friends new book to use as a front cover, I have to build the visual without a visual imagination.

It is a lot easier than it sounds.

First I read the story. For the paintings here, the stories were “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, and “Robin Hood’s Death”. You can read both of them in ’s books. Go check out her Substack to find out more. I love to read. I read a lot, both fiction and non-fiction, and again a lack of visual imagination does not hold me back. I live the stories, feel the character’s feelings, sense with their senses. I just don’t see what they see.

I make notes on what I have read, particularly on any visual descriptive information. What is the setting? Who is there? What are they wearing? What objects do they have in their hands, or with them? What time of year is it? Most importantly, what are they doing? If I am not sure about the answers to any of these questions for the scene that I am painting, I send the questions to Juliette.

Once I’ve done this, I collect together images that I feel would fit some part of the overall picture. I am not going to copy any of these exactly, they are all for inspiration. I begin by looking through my own photos. I take reference photos constantly, so there is usually something useful in my collection. Then I trawl the internet. For anything I am going to use in a large way, I make sure to chose images that I am legally allowed to reference. I have no interest in stealing someone else’s art and calling it my own.

Then I use these to rough up some ideas for layout. I usually do a few before I am happy, and then send them over to Juls to check she is happy with what I have chosen to do. I also sometimes do a quick rough painting, to work out the colour combinations I want to use for the background.

Then I begin on the detailed drawing, using a combination of references to construct something that is not real and does not exist. There might be a tree from one photo, the sun light over the mountains from another. The castle was created by adapting the basic shape of a real castle, and then making it fit the story better by changing all the details.

Then we have the people! For Sir Gawain on the horse, I just used some photos of horses’ rears, and the basic shape of a person covered in a cloak. Something I have painted before, but shifted around and placed on a horse.

For Robin Hood, I needed something far more detailed. The figures were much closer, and a much larger part of the painting. So I bought a green cloak and dressed members of my long suffering family up and made them pose for pictures. Again, I did not draw them exactly. My thirteen year old daughter became an old lady and I lengthened the cloak and changed the clothes on my husband to make Robin Hood. I also ended up taking photos of the way the cloak draped over the edge of my desk to give the impression of it dangling over the edge of the bridge.

Once the drawing was done, it was simply a case of repeating the process with the painting -flicking between the different reference photos and making a decision about where the light was, so that I could make the shadows reasonably consistent.

In the end I am very happy with how both paintings turned out. They are exactly what I intended to make, even though I can not ever that they turned out how I imagined.

After several months off all things arty (while I have been getting to grips with writing a novel) I have launched back in to the world of painting with not one but two workshops and a completed commission.

Workshops are one of the most exciting parts of my job. I am an extrovert who loves to chat, so although I thoroughly enjoy sitting in my studio, painting (or writing), after a while I find myself craving the company of other humans. And as much as I love them, preferably the company of people who I have neither married, or given birth to.

That’s where workshops come in, giving me both the chance to talk about one of my favourite things, and the opportunity to meet and teach some incredible people. Some of my latest attendees even signed up to this newsletter! Welcome to you all.

At the start of the month, I ran a workshop funded by one of the local groups in my town, to demonstrate how to paint a cupcake in watercolour. This is my third time running this particular workshop, so apart from completing a quick reminder painting the week before, this one did not take a lot of preparation. Except baking the cupcakes. Which as preparation goes is a lot of fun. There were some very serious quality control checks during every stage of baking, mostly conducted by my three children. Thankfully the cakes, icing and chocolate egg decorations all passed inspection.

The workshop took place at The Alexandra Art’s in Rugby. What was once a pub is now a fantastic art venue in the heart of my town centre. It holds exhibitions, is the location of the studios of four local artists, and runs workshops like mine, both free and paid. It all stocks plenty of art work, prints, cards and locally made fantastic-ness of all kinds.

More than 25 people, both adults and children, showed up to paint and then eat their cupcakes. The paintings created were fabulous!

Last weekend I was commissioned to host a children’s art activity for Rugby Food and Drink festival. This one also had to be food related, and would take place in a gazebo, so needed to be something easy to set up and clear down, not too badly affected by any adverse weather conditions (wind, always problematic when painting outside), and needed to be completed in a fairly short amount of time, so that the kids (and their grown up’s) could get back to the main point of a food and drink festival. The yummy edible treats.

I designed some cute ice-lolly characters, to be made either with cardboard for the littlies or painted in watercolour for the older children. I am aware that ice-lollies, even the paper variety, were a brave choice at the end of April in England. They were either going to be perfect or ironic, depending on the weather.

Thankfully the sun shone all day, with 78 paper ice lollies made, and 57 watercolour paintings created.

I love teaching. In my life before having children I worked as a primary school teacher, so workshops definitely give me the best of both worlds; working on art and teaching people new skills.

My next big plan for my art business is to branch out into the world of longer form, pre- booked workshops, rather than the drop in type I have been creating for the past few years. This would give me the chance to really go over different techniques, and paint more complex pictures.

What do you guys think I should demonstrate in my first long workshop? I was thinking perhaps a local building, or a cute animal of some kind, but I am open to any suggestions or ideas.

For now, hope you’ve all had a lovely April and have lots to look forward to in May. I have plans for a new personal painting that has been bubbling away in my head for a couple of years. I think it is time to put brush to paper.

All the best,

Sam xxx

Thank you to everyone who has ordered a commission, bought a painting or print or greetings card, or liked and commented on my work online. Your support keeps my business running, and me at my desk with my paintbrush in my hand (or in my glass of water/under my desk/next to the kettle/behind my laptop/wherever else I have abandoned it!) Thank you so, so much!

I started this year with two resolutions, to write more and paint more, and I definitely managed both of those this year. My novel has 15,000 more words now than it did this time last year, and I have completed more paintings than last year, including plenty of lovely commissions.

I know that write more and paint more, are not exactly the right format for New Year’s resolutions, or for goals at any other time of the year. They are both very vague and little bit fluffy. But I have found that vague and fluffy resolutions suit my brain far more than the SMART goals I learned about in school. SMART goals have too many ways to fail. Vague and fluffy goals, without rules, regulations or heaven forbid, deadlines and routines attached, let me work at whatever pace I can manage, alongside whatever else life is chucking at me at the time. With three kids, who have a rainbow of neurodivergent brains, and a shift-working husband, my routines and deadlines have a habit of being crushed between everyone else’s needs.

So this year, I am looking at more of the same. More writing and more painting. One of the books I have enjoyed re-reading this year was Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work. It was the inspiration for starting this newsletter, and if you don’t already, go check out his newsletter on Substack. Reading it is one of the highlights of my Friday. So, perhaps as well as writing more and painting more, a little more sharing too. I don’t know quite how that will look. Maybe more newsletters, maybe more social media. Perhaps just talking more about what I am doing all day when I am out and about in the real world. We will see.

Happy New Year all.

Sam

That is usually followed by me stumbling through an explanation. I paint houses with watercolours. You know, I make a painting of a persons’ house. Using watercolour paints. Sometimes I paint other buildings, like wedding venues. Or even the occasional pet. But really, I like the houses best of all.

If the poor person who has had the misfortune to ask me what I do with my days (outside of wrangling three kids/teens and attempting to find my house under the mountain of stuff that has taken up residence on every surface), still looks vaguely interested, I might go as far as getting out my phone to show them my latest artwork, which usually clears up any lingering confusion.

I sometimes get the impression that it is a little bit of an odd choice of things to paint. But I love painting houses! I love hearing the wonderful stories about the places we live. I have painted long lost homes from grainy old photos stuck beside google street view shots of the building today, reconstructing how it once looked to the people who loved and lived there. I have painted a stately home, pulled down over 50 years ago from two photos taken just before the building was torn down. I have painted new-build houses, freshly painted and squeaky new. I have painted first homes, childhood homes and forever homes. Every time I do, I wonder at the stories these building have stood witness to.

This week I had a wonderful message about a painting I finished over the summer. The commission was a gift to my customers’ parents. They were in the process of selling the home they had lived in for the whole of their married life, well over 50 years, and she wanted to gift them a painting so they could take a little piece of their old home in to their new one.

The sale of their home went through this month, and after they moved into their new bungalow, their daughter surprised them with the painting. She sent me a beautiful message to let me know how much the painting meant to them.

We can live a lifetime in a place, and never really see it, only taking photos when the estate agents come round, ready to sell. But these places are witnesses to our whole lives. They hold our memories and our hopes. They are where we dream and live and laugh and cry.

I love painting houses.

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Have a wonderful Christmas everyone!

Sam

As a house portrait painter, I spend a lot of time painting windows. Which is fundamentally an exercise in painting something that isn’t really there. I mean, it is there! But, a piece of glass is transparent, so is both there and not there at the same time.

I used to hate it. I left the windows to the very end of the process for each painting. I applied each stroke through gritted teeth. I obsessed over every layer.

Then I watched a fantastic video by James Gurney, where he talked through his process of a plein air painting of a group of buildings. I can’t remember which video - he has many and they are all fantastic. (I also have two of his books; Imaginative Realism and Colour and Light- highly recommend). In this particular video, he was painting a large shop front window, and he said the words that changed everything. Windows are green!

Green!

This is particularly true in England, where I live, where green is the dominate colour wherever you go, for most of the year. There are exceptions to this. On the rare, clear, blue sky day, upstairs windows take on a blue tinge. But most of the time, green is a great place to start.

Now I love painting windows. I still save them to the end, but now that is because windows are my favourite part. I love the mismatch of random shapes that show the light bouncing off the glass. I particularly enjoy big windows, where as well as reflections, you can see some of what is inside the building too. The part I love the most is that painting in the windows is when the building comes to life.

My favourite window! The Grapes pub in Oxford.

Hope you are having a lovely November!

Sam

I also spend a lot of August thinking about what I want to achieve for the year ahead, even though it is not, in fact, the start of a new school year for me at all.

2025 has been a fantastic year for commissions for me. I have had a long list of booked work sitting on the noticeboard above my desk all year. Which has been wonderful, and kept me very busy in house, pet and wedding venue portraits. If you have ordered from me this year I am so grateful. I have painted many lovely animals and buildings.

However, I have not had the time I would like to commit to some personal projects. One very big, important one in particular. I am writing a novel. And because it is me, and I like to over commit to everything that I do, there are a series of paintings and drawings to along with the novel, which I am itching to get started on.

All of this is a very long winded way for me to say, I have made the decision to close my commissions books to new commissions for next few months. If you have ordered from me already, your commission will be completed as planned. I just won’t be taking on any new orders for now.

Don’t worry, I am sure that commissions will be back, as I do love doing them. For now, I will be keeping you updated with the commissions I am working on now, and some of the personal work I am doing.

And hopefully I will also manage to send out my newsletter every month too!

All the best

Sam

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Guys, gardens are really, really hard. The variety of textures and shapes, colours and tones. Light and shade. The detail! It is immense. And the hardest part is figuring out what to include, and what to leave out. What to simplify. Where to just suggest the shape of a petunia, and when to draw it in all it’s glorious technicolour detail.

Lately I have been back in the garden, improving my skills, developing my own ways of showing what I see in watercolour. And yes, I have also been dragging my own children around the odd garden or two. So far they are about as enthusiastic as I was at their age. I haven’t pinched any seed heads yet though, so at least they are spared standing watch out for any grumpy gardeners who might be wandering past.

Currently on my desk, as well as two house portraits and a church, is this little sketch. It’s from a photo I took last August, on holiday in France in the gardens of the beautiful Chateau Chenonceau. The little house at the edge of the walled garden is what caught my eye, but it is the gardens in the front that I really want to show off. This one is a bit of an experiment. I am starting in watercolour, but I am thinking I might have a play around with some mixed media. Perhaps some pastels or gouache on top. We will see. I will let you know how it turns out.

Hope you are all having a lovely summer!

Sam

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2025 is turning out to be a great year for commissions! I have had a list of open commissions up on my desk since January, which has both shrunk and grown, but never vanished entirely. There are 8 names up on the list at the moment. Two sketched out and ready to paint, two who have sent photos and are waiting to have those turned into sketches and four who, for various reasons, aren’t quite ready to get started on yet.

I like to batch my commissions together, so I work on a couple at the same time, usually of the same type. April was a month of pet portraits. I use a slightly different style for these - no pen or ink, just watercolour. I have found these more challenging than my house portraits, but this past month I have really been finding my groove. Both these dogs were absolute joys to paint. Followed by a batch of wedding venue portraits - I can only share one of the three, as the other two are gifts for the bride and groom, who at the date of writing, have not received them yet.

Now we are at the end of May, I am back round to house portraits again. After spending April really missing painting buildings in general and house portraits in particular, I am now really missing animal painting! I have a few animal related ideas for personal work, but with my commission list still quite long, and yet another school holiday for my children, I don’t have a lot of time currently for personal work. I have no doubt that when I have a pile of animal paintings to work on, I will be back to missing buildings again! Does anyone else have this problem? I am fairly certain that it is another version of “Shiny New Idea Syndrome”, where the idea in my brain which is causing me no work at all, is suddenly far more compelling than the thing on my desk, requiring my time, attention and brain power right now.

I am also slowly moving forward on a writing project that I have been wanting to do for years, but again, is often jettisoned as soon as something more urgent (commissions with deadlines), or exciting (painting ideas which will definitely take less time to complete than a whole novel will) comes along.

Speaking of which, I have a chapter I need to finish by next week! If anyone has any tips or tricks for staying focused on the work you need to be doing right now, and not the next shiny idea, I would love to hear them.

Thank you so much for reading! See you next month!

Sam

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At the end of last year, my wonderful and very talented friend Juliette Harrisson, from Creepy Classics, commissioned me to paint a picture for the front cover of her next book, a selection of ghost stories from Ancient Greece. Check out her newsletter here on Substack, search for her fab videos on Youtube where she goes by classicaljg and buy her book! It’s great.

Her brief was that it should have a Greek temple, with beach read vibes but make it spooky! So, between painting Christmas commissions, I busily read a selection of the stories which would be appearing in the book and researched locations, temples, Greek clothing, Greek treasure and pretty coastal views, ready to start designing and painting in January.

I also spent a lot of time photographing early mist and fog, which rather handily appeared regularly in December and January in my part of the world.

Beach read but make it spooky was a lot of fun! I quickly came to the conclusion that the simple solution to this would be spooky weather, as Greek beaches are not in themselves very spooky at all. Juls and I agreed on either dawn or twilight as a great time of day to add to the ghostly feel. So my first task was practise painting mist in watercolour - a challenge in itself.

Next came the design. I needed to include the sea, the beach, a temple and the figure of the ghost from the story. I mocked up four options in my sketchbook and left Juliette decide which to use. Handily she chose the one I liked best.

Then followed yet another battle between me and the colour green. This time in relation to willow trees, which I have to say, I found the most challenging part of this painting. Check out Juliette’s release video to hear me complain more about willow trees!

Finally I did a smaller practise painting first, to check that I was happy with my colour choices and composition before starting work on the final piece.

And here it is, the finished painting in all its glory. Hop over to Creepy Classics to see it on Juliette’s book cover and maybe even buy the book! It’s back to commissions for me. I am a handful of claws away from finishing my latest pet portrait. Happy bank holiday weekend everyone!

Sam xx

March has been a wonderfully busy painting month, with some fantastic projects. This morning I sent off the digitised version of the secret project I have been working on for the past three months. I can’t tell you about it yet, but I am sure it will be the subject of a future newsletter!

I also finished this gorgeous building. Not a commission, but a painting for me of somewhere I found inspiring. This is The Grapes pub in Oxford, which I spotted on my February trip to the city and could not resist turning into a painting. Reflections in windows are becoming one of my favourite parts of the house portrait process!

In the land of commissions however, progress has been annoyingly slow. I started off the month all cocky and relaxed. The next painting on my commission books, other than secret project, was a wedding venue portrait of Coombe Abbey, a beautiful stately home in Warwickshire, just down the road from where I live. I have visited it many times and painted it before, so I had no concerns when I started splashing the paint about. This one would be an easy painting. Relaxing. No problems.

How wrong could I be? I managed to mess this painting up, not once, but twice. That is right! I am currently on my third attempt at this commission. I honestly can’t remember the last time that I needed to restart a commission at all, yet alone twice!

I blame the colour green!

Green is such a tricky colour to get right. It often looks artificial, and the landscape gardens I was painting had multiple shades of green to create. Each needed to work with the other shades of green, appear realistic and not swamp the front of the painting with a lot of indistinguishable blobs.

In the end of I cracked out my sketchbook and went back to basics. I used every blue and yellow I had in my palette, along with sap green and mixed every shade I could. Then I mocked up a simple version of the garden and combined the best of the greens together to make sure they worked before committing any of them to commission attempt number 3. I made many notes and slowed right down. Commission 3 is now well on the way to completion, and the gardens are looking great.

In the end, my worst painting week in goodness knows how long, turned into a great reminder that when things start going wrong, the best course is to slow down or stop. Take the time to practise, learn and make notes. There is nothing you can’t do, if you take your time and allow yourself to mess up.

Here’s hoping April goes a little smoother though. That commission list is not getting any shorter!

Thank you so much for reading!

Sam xx

Not this February. This month I have had my most successful craft fair ever, at the wonderful Snowdrop Walk in Leamington Hastings, which led to the longest list of open commissions I have had since I began (13 at current count- eek!). Which I have to say, is a really fantastic start to my year!

So February has involved rather a lot of drawing! First a little sketch when I was out in the wild, visiting the Oxford Natural History Museum on a rare day away from my studio. Then many, many sketches to send off to my customers. Watercolour paintings are hard to change once you have begun, so I like to make sure anyone who orders a commission from me is happy with the drawing before I get started on the painting stage. Now I have a lovely pile of drawings ready to go and I am itching to get my paints out!

I am particularly looking forward to the getting started on the first wedding venue commission of the year! I love a wedding and the past couple of years have involved some wonderful commissions.

As a master procrastinator, there is nothing like a long list of paid work, all with deadlines attached, to keep me strapped to my desk, pencil or paintbrush in hand, instead of wandering around my house trying to figure out just how urgently I need to do the laundry.

Speaking of which, I better get back to it! Thank you so much for reading. I hope you had a lovely February too!

Sam

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I am also a little obsessed with New Years resolutions. I create a list of them every year. Lots of them, in the belief that the more I make, the more likely it is that a few of them will stick. Sadly this doesn't seem to be how they work. So last year I limited myself to just two.

Draw more.

Write more.

The first one has rattled along swimmingly. As well as plenty of wonderful commissions of house portraits and wedding venues, I have expanded into pet portraits, and completed quite a few personal pieces, which have made their way onto greetings cards, stickers, prints, and even one or two of them into exhibitions.

But the second one, the writing more, that has not gone as intended.

Still a 50% success rate is not bad. And the real joy of New Years Resolutions is that another year has rolled around, giving me the chance for a do over.

So, 2025’s new years resolutions are going to be the same as last years. Write more and draw more. I will keep you posted on how both of those are going. I still have a nice little pile of commissions to be getting on with this month - a house portraits, wedding venue portraits and a book cover. So I should probably get right back to it!

So for now, happy January! I hope your resolutions, fresh starts, and do overs are going well.

All the best!

Sam xx

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