I still measure and break down the year into chunks by the school / academic year, partly from being married to a now retired teacher, and partly from having gone to various adult education classes of one sort or another all my life.

I have gone to Mags Bradley’s water-colour painting class for many years, and we started up for real again in Sreptember, after Zoom sessions during part of Lockdown and beyond. The venue has changed, as the room we used at Caistor Art and Heritage Centre was too small for social distancing, This was a shame as the cafe section provided good drinks for coffee time, delivering them to the room so we could continue with our work, and good lunches and snacks for after the class.

The new venue is a room in the Town Hall, where we have a lot more space and even our own table to spread out on. I no longer have to make sure I’m on the left as I tend to spread out to the left and gradually drift that way as I’m working. The classes more or less follow the school year, but tend to start a bit later in September as folk squeeze in holidays after the children go back to school. They’ve have gone down from six to five, which is partly why they seem to have gone so quickly this half term.

We started with drawing hog weed just to get our hand and eyes back in. Some have been painting and drawing very regularly without classes, and others nothing at all since we finished the real classes in March 2020. I sit somewhere in the middle, but it was good to just observe and draw; also weeds are something that I like to draw anyway.

In the second half of the two-hour session we added some paint. I was less happy with my results and certainly needed to get back into it.

The following week we did more painting, a landscape with hogweed in the foreground. Small sections I was reasonable happy with, but not even croppable to end up with whole picture. It was using a mix of watercolour paint, water soluble crayons and a little white gouache: definitely a learning curve piece.

The third week was hips and haws, starting off drawing in my sketchbook again. I really enjoyed this one. The autumn palette is my favourite to work with, whether in paint or fabric and threads.

I didn’t manage to finish the painting in the session and still haven’t got back to it. There is certainly still plenty of source material in the hedgerows and garden if I don’t leave it too long.

Week four was another landscape with hips in the foreground. Again it needs some more work, but I rather liked this one. The fabrics at the top of the image are the bits I use to wipe my brushes of excess paint and some of them I will stitch into eventually.

The final week was always an experimental / play session, often my favourite of the block and this week’s was no exception. I split my sheet of watercolour into four with masking tape and did four little landscapes. Lots of pigment, the sky wet-in-wet and the foreground dry paper, but having small pieces of cellophane added while it was still really wet which gives lovely textures. You never quite know what you are going to get, but that adds to the fun. The shiny bits are where the cellophane still is, patience is required waiting for it to dry completely. I may work into some areas a little more.