I have a new limited edition print available from the painting Stag In The Glen. Find it in the animals gallery.

I’m on a roll with landscapes at the moment it seems. Here’s one of Scotland. A glorious red stag with a backdrop of Scotland’s wonderful Glen Etive. I adore the Scottish landscape, it’s so breath taking!

What a fabulous excuse for luscious colour! Those reds and purples contrast so deliciously with the greens and yellows. Can you tell how much I enjoyed doing this one? :-)

This is a 16×12 inch acrylic painting on board.

Do contact me if you’d like it to hang on your wall.

Here’s a little bird painting. I watched the jackdaws in the park working the picnic area like real pros! they are such interesting birds, quick and clever. So for one of my daily paintings I decided to try and capture a jackdaw in paint. Here he is.

Jackdaw
8×6 inches acrylic on board

I’ve really enjoyed watching the zebras enjoying the sunny spring this year. They are full of life and feeling frisky. That’s what inspired this painting. The zebras were chasing each other and checking behind them to see who was following.

Frisky Zebra
16×12 inches oil on board

And I managed to get him finished in time for last weekend’s show. Here he is framed.

I’ve been working on this painting of a black panther for quite some time. I went to the Santago Leopard project a while ago and saw this incredibly beautiful black leopard there. I was stunned by the sheer physicality of him! So much more muscular than the other big cats who looked like slender super models . He looked more like a bear! I started off with an idea for the cat to be looking up at a peacock, as both are from India. But it just didn’t look right. So I left the painting for a while and came back to it again recently.

Black Panther
16×12 oil on board

When I looked at it again I realised that the bird had no emotional content. The only thing that had any power was the panther! All along I had been unconsciously exploring my feeling of his size and presence in the painting and the poor bird had become irrelevant. So I cut the painting down to just the panther looking up into the trees and suddenly the painting sprang into life!

It just goes to show that sometimes you think you’re painting one thing, when really you’re painting something else entirely!

Here’s the little zebra painting I’ve been working on. I wanted to capture his profile against a red background and have some fun with colour on those amazing black and white stripes. So I’ve used reds, purples, blues and greens in his black stripes. It makes him glow against the background.

Red Zebra
10×8 oil on board

I loved painting him so much I’m going to start another zebra painting today. Maybe a bigger one for the show I’m doing in June.

These Big Horn Sheep are in the Canadian Rockies. Handsome sheep and a good excuse to paint snow. This is a 20×16 inch acrylic painting on board.

Four pretty girls sitting in the long grass for a bite to eat, watching the world go by. I really like these girls, they have lovely faces and great expressions. This is a small oil painting, a 10×8 oil. I hope to do a larger painting of them soon.

And this is it framed…

The finished painting of the stag in the grassy glade in Ashdown Forest. It’s full of abstract grasses with splashes of wild flowers.

Acrylics on board, 12×12 inches. Here’s a close up of the grasses…

I haven’t thought of a good title for him yet. Any ideas gratefully received!

A sketch of a stag. This is an idea for a painting for the Ashdown Forest show in May. I like the way he’s looking behind him. It’s a great pose and I like the idea of a square format too.

This is a painting for the Ashdown Forest show in May. Fallow deer grazing in the bracken in the woods. It’s painted in acrylics with lots of thick, juicy paint strokes to create the autumn colour in the bracken, I wanted it to be more abstract and colourful than realistic.

Here’s a close up of the paint surface…

This is a sketch for a new painting of an Indian black leopard looking up at a white peacock. I wanted to paint this pose, with the leopard looking up and thought a peacock would make a good contrast to the leopard. They both come from India so they should work well in the same painting. Now I need to create a background for them.