Okay, so I totally missed July

For 2 reasons: 1) I've been preoccupied editing our June Holiday videos and; 2) I totally forgot about the website. Apologies.

Okay so let's start with the artwork then; which requires us going back to May:

St Pope Paul VI.

First off is this watercolour of Saint Pope Paul the Sixth that I did as a Memorial Card for a friend's Priestly Ordination at the end of May this year (2021).

Pentecost 2021.

Then we skip back a week, or so, to Pentecost 2021 for this quick, unplanned sketchbook drawing. I'd been pulling my hair out earlier struggling to do something for Pentecost digitally and it wasn't working out, and then just before, say, 10 or 11 o'clock that night I made this with a black, blue and red ballpoint pens with text highlighters as well. You don't always need fancy stuff to make art.

St Charbel Makhlouf.

And now come to the missing blog month of July with this watercolour of St Charbel Makhlouf, Maronite monk and priest, and a patron of Lebanon.

At the moment I don't know if, or how long, this "pure watercolour" (ie, no ink outlines or such) style is going to stay. I think, on reflection, that it came about for 2 reasons: 1) during a conversation with a family friend whose eyesight is not what it once was, I realised that some of my more ink-heavy pictures (such as St Joseph and the infant Jesus) had no real clarity.

St Joseph and the infant Jesus (2020).

 I knew what I was looking at, but someone with bad eyesight couldn't untangle the mess of black ink from the sometimes equally dark watercolours; and 2) I'd been watching some watercolour demonstrations on Youtube (link here) and there was one where the instructor painted an picture of Santa Claus, for a Christmas Card, in with just Red, Yellow Ochre and, I think, Payne's Grey or Black. So that was an added impetus to change my style: I wanted to also try painting a face with just watercolour. And that is the condensed set of reasons why I painted Paul VI in watercolour (see above).

Now as I mentioned earlier in this post, I've been, and I am still working, on editing and uploading our June Holiday to South Australia videos to Youtube. If you want to see where we went, I've put the first (in no way chronological) video at the bottom of this blog post. As of 12 July 2021, 12:49pm, there are 3 South Australia videos up on my Youtube channel (link here), with much more to come.

So until next time (barring me forgetting again!) God bless and stay safe.