'Studio Chatter' - What has inspired your painting practice lately?

I have been inspired by all sorts and to be honest I always am. My art practice is fuelled by what is going on around me in my life. Ideas spark and I record them by taking photos or making notes in my sketchbook with whatever I have to hand.

Here goes a little list of what has inspired me over the last couple of months:

• beautiful sunsets

• birds and movement

• fluffy cloud forms

• reflections in water

• sunny walks in the countryside

• the texture of oil paints

This is what half an hour of sketching in the car looks like for me!

Whilst I have lots to inspire me, the time I have to paint at the moment isn't as much so many of these ideas will remain in my inspiration bank until I can explore them further.

Over the last few months I have managed to try out oil painting. I mainly work with acrylics, watercolour and collage but I wanted to explore the luscious texture of oils, so here are the results so far! These two little canvases are inspired by collages that I made which were inspired by the local landscape. I enjoyed smooching the paint around the canvas and laying it on thick. After a couple of weeks drying in my kitchen I am pondering on my next moves or not!

The landscape is bursting with inspiration too at the moment. I am loving all the textures, bright pops of colour, strange shaped trees and lots of fluffy clouds.

The painting below is inspired by the windswept tree in the photograph above.

Tree Breeze - Acrylic and Mixed Media on wooden panel

I have also been out to draw, with a focus on birds and animals. I am itching to paint some birds and animals large scale. This is a painting I made last year which i enjoyed and is a starting point for a new collection.

Lazy Monkey Mixed Media Canvas

A few weeks ago made a trip to Paradise Park in Hayle to see the birds and make some sketches. I took all my supplies; paints, sketchbooks, pens, coloured pencils but found that actually just a black pen and sketchbook was all I needed to create very quick sketches of the birds and animals alongside taking lots of photos.

There is so much eye candy here to inspire. Above are a few of my favourites. What I soon realised was that you had to be super speedy to capture many of the birds and animals here, so I went for very quick studies.

Sketchbook drawings of birds

Sketchbook drawings of birds

Sketchbook drawings of birds

Sketchbook drawings of birds

From the notes that I have made I will be looking at creating compositions for my birds, I have had a quick play on the ipad with some ideas but would like to paint these onto large canvases. So before that happens I probably need to paint out some ideas onto large paper and see where it takes me.

ipad sketch of birds from Paradise Park, Hayle

I would love to hear about what is inspiring you right now, leave a comment or drop me a line if you fancy. To finish off I'll leave you with some sunset inspiration from Gwithian, Cornwall.

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