Our Jack Russell Terrier, Poppi, snoozing (as usual). At the start of 2020 I began a fun little project which involves creating one sketch per day. A sketch is not the same as a drawing. Sketches tend to be done quickly and are intended as practice or experimental pieces, whereas drawings are more carefully composed and refined, being intended as finished works of art. People often use the two terms interchangeably, seeing how a sketch is drawn and drawing can be sketched out during its preliminary stage. Anyway, here are my favourites from January. One of the plants growing in my studio. A neighbour's Westie, keeping guard in their window. Self Portrait Bananas in a hand-turned wooden bowl. Watercolour sketch of a tree in Birkenhead Park. Best buddies: Emily and Poppi Graphite and watercolour. Sketch of my left hand. Poppi. Richard, with two couch companions. Emily. Beyond the kitchen sink. Well, I hope you enjoyed

Life drawing, 2019. Arriving late at the Oxton life drawing group, the only seat left to me was squashed into a corner. This  offered a severe sideways-on view of the model, Eve. Initially I assumed this would result in a poor pose, but then I realised I could actually turn it to some advantage by using negative space - and so composed the model to fill the lower triangular half of the paper. The end result is perhaps a bit unconventional, but I'm quite pleased with it. What do you think of the drawing? This next life drawing presented a few challenges also. This time I was sitting directly opposite the model, Rob, which meant I had to do a fair amount of fore-shortening on both legs. The hands could be improved, but I'm satisfied with that thigh-knee-foot and raised arm-shoulder. I have maintained a site on Hubpages for some years now, and there you will find a whole series of non-fiction articles written by me. The subjects range from How to Make a Frog Pond , to

Charlotte, 18 Sept 1991 Continuing this excursion down Memory Lane to my art school days oodles of years ago, I'll now share the second batch of my work which captured my fellow students. The charcoal study on rough grey paper is of Charlotte, whose surname I can't remember. I do recall her fondness for boldly-coloured stripy tights, though, which she usually wore with Doc Martin boots. This economical grey sugar paper was routinely used during drawing classes. If I recall rightly, we students were charged only 2p per A2-size sheet, which was a large part of its attraction. (This was some 30 years ago, remember!) James Loftus, 25 Jan 1990 This was a group drawing project set by one of the college tutors, Ian Cameron, who asked us to draw the lamp and imply weight and shadow by use of line only. So I'd drawn this boring lamp, which floated in the middle of a sheet of white paper. What else could I do with the lamp drawing, other than twiddle my thumbs for the rem

Heather Gum, 13th Sept 1991 In this blog post I'll be sharing sketches and drawings dating from around 30 years ago when I was an art student at City College, Clarence Street in Liverpool. The old building we used then has been demolished and replaced with something new. Did it need replacing? Well, probably. Or maybe an extensive renovation would have been adequate to make the premises meet modern health and safety regulations. It's a shame that the lovely old stone staircase with its ornate cast iron railings was consigned to history, though. The lofty painting studios on the top floor, where we Fine Art students were installed, had a distinct character of its own, too, its wooden floors being patterned by layered splatters of paint accrued over the long decades of its use. A strong aroma of turps and linseed oil, coffee, incense and, occasionally, wet coats, filled the air - which was usually fractured by Dave McKay's death/industrial metal tracks. City of Li

You're invited to read one of my short horror stories, Make Do and Mend , which was published in Flash Fiction Magazine yesterday. It's attracting some very lovely comments below it, also. Read it for FREE here: Flash Fiction Magazine 4.09.19 This is the second short story I've had published with this online magazine this year. You can read Whatsername  here: Flash Fiction Magazine 02.18.19

Bride of Dreams by Adele Cosgrove-Bray; oil on canvas; 2019. My most recent oil painting, Bride of Dreams , is a radical departure from the seascapes and shoreline landscapes which I've been creating over the last two or three years. While  Bride of Dreams  depicts a domestic interior, it also has a strong narrative quality and is laced with symbolism. I won't explain this symbolism to others; I'll leave each viewer to interpret it for themselves. The bride was modelled by Rose Mairs, and the drawings for this came from a themed session for the Oxton life drawing group which I attend. Rose won the photography section of last year's Williamson Art Gallery's Open Exhibition. The cat, Bob, belongs to Janine Pinion, who won the painting section of the same exhibition. I enjoyed a lovely narrowboat cruise along the Shropshire Union Canal recently, on a day which turned out to be the hottest on record. Top speed seemed to be 3 mph, which made a refreshing change

If you're a poet or someone who enjoys poetry, and in the Wirral area, then here's a forthcoming event for you. Technically, National Poetry Day will be held on the 3rd October, but this event will be held a day earlier to fit around other activity events within the venue. This open mic event will run from 3pm till 4.15pm, in the lovely surroundings of the Chatterbox Tea Room within Oxton Grange Care Home, 51 - 53 Bidston Road, Oxton, Wirral, CH43 6UJ. The venue is located half way along Bidston Road, offers full disabled access, and has a car park to the front of the building. Several buses service Bidston Road from Claughton or Birkenhead, and there are bus stops very close to the home.

Five cygnets with their parents, Birkenhead Park, June 2019. Regular visitors to Birkenhead Park, here in Wirral, have been thrilled with the successful hatching of five cygnets, which all seem to be healthy. Their proud parents are keeping a sharp watch over their silvery-grey brood, who seem to be growing by the day. I also saw two newly-hatched coots, and a mallard who was chirping orders to her flock of tiny brown balls of fluff, seven or eight in number. I tried photographing them but they were too small and too far away for my geriatric Kodak. (Click on photos to see images larger). Canada geese with two goslings - feeling outshone by the swans, maybe? I did some painting; nothing artistic, though, more a case of putting a coat of paint on the chunky edging stone with runs around the front of our house. I've used Wilko's  Summer Rain , so it matches our front door. It looks a lot like chalk paint but is much more practical. Colour-wise it's hard to descr