More work from our recent trip to Bournemouth. I had been thinking of a painting of Durdle Door , so we took the opportunity to drive to Lulworth Cove and later to Durdle Door. It's quite a hike to the cliff top from the car park and a tricky set of steps to get down to the beach. Well worth the effort although this painting is the view from the cliff top and not from the beach. Close up the chalk cliffs are grey and marbled with green succulents growing in the cracks. While on the beach and the rocks there was the occasional glimpse of a rock pipit. There must be a painting there! 

We have just been down to Bournemouth for a couple of days.The weather was good so we drove to Lulworth and Durdle Door. I wanted a look at the cliffs from the beach for a painting that I have in mind. It's a long trek down to the beach especially the steps at the end, but well worth it. As well as the cliffs I had good views of rock pipits on the beach and on the rocks. However the best birds were the rooks on the fence posts in the car park at the top. They were hunting for scraps left by picnickers, so a few drawings were the result. The french meeting was good this week we listened to a french pod-cast about the Tour de France and had quite a good chat about it.

Yesterday ,we restarted our U.3.A. French Group after several weeks off, since before Christmas in fact. We listened to a short reading, from the internet. in slow french, about Monet at Giverny. This promoted some discussion about Monet and impressionism and also about visits to Giverny that some of us have made. We were all a bit "rouillés"but every effort is made to try and keep the group talking french. Next week to keep the painting idea going I will try and show a short film about Van Gogh at Auvers. This is the place where he spent the last days of his life and shows some of his paintings in the places where he painted them.

I am doing some drawings of the inside of St. John the Baptist Church, Midsomer Norton. This first drawing is of a pew-end. one of several different designs in the Church. The basic tem-plate for the designs  is an oblong split down the middle with an arch at the top. The two thinner oblongs are in turn topped with an arch and each of the different designs are based on this basic pattern.



This is the finished portrait of William Hill. This painting was painted from a photograph taken at his Golden Wedding in 1930.

William Hill, Sheila's great grandfather,I have done a lot of work on his portrait, especially around the eyes. The eyes were not obvious on the old black and white photograph (circa 1930) that I was using as reference so I have had to use some guesswork to try and make them look right, so I have had to paint them several times, but I think that they may be about right at the moment. There is still some more work to be done on the rest of the painting. Great grandfather Hill isn't done yet.

William Hill, Sheila's maternal great grandfather.

Another portrait from an old black and white photograph. As before I have sketched the portrait, a couple of times in pencil, and now I have blocked it out  in black and white to get the tones right and to create a likeness. This was especially difficult around the eyes as in the original photograph the head was less than 2 inches in size and the eyes were indistinct and lost in the shadow of the eye socket.