Sketching with acrylics

Barry and I have come back down to Cambridge so that I can pick up my portfolio from University and get some etchings framed.  I was hoping for the gorgeous weather we had a week or so ago, but as I write the wind is howling outside and it seems to have rained for three days solid!  I am tired of it now, so could it stop please?  We did manage to get out and paint on Grantchester Meadows, an area so beautiful and full of history, linked to the poet Lord Byron, Virginia Woolf and Rupert Brooke.

 

Taken from the Rupert Brooke Society pages:

  
Poems 1914
Brooke wrote these poems in the autumn following the outbreak of the First World War. Although The Solider is the most famous of these poems, Brooke's favourite was The Dead (IV). They were first published in New Numbers. The Soldier's fame and popularity was established three weeks before Brooke's death in April 1915, when the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral read it at the Easter Sunday service.
The Treasure was the first poem Brooke wrote after August 1914, and it acts as a preface to the five war sonnetts.


                     The Treasure
When colour goes home into the eyes,
   And lights that shine are shut again,
With dancing girls and sweet birds' cries
   Behind the gateways of the brain;
And that no-place which gave them birth, shall close
The rainbow and the rose: -
Still may Time hold some golden space
   Where I'll unpack that scented store
Of song and flower and sky and face,
   And count, and touch, and turn them o'er,
Musing upon them; as a mother, who
Has watched her children all the rich day through,
Sits, quiet-handed, in the fading light,
When children sleep, ere night.
August 1914

I have started painting with acrylics!!  I tried them once before and hated the fact that they dried so quickly, but now I am loving them!  Great for painting outside and much more versatile that I had originally thought and I enjoy the layering that you can obtain with such immediacy.   Below are some paintings taken from my sketch book.  I hope you enjoy them.