The Good Ol' Days!

Ahhh, the good old days! When your iPhone/ iPad had enough memory (storage space) unfortunately the years have passed and now iOS needs most of my memory just to work, for an artist who relies on her photos to blog and paint a frustrating situation, I spend hours trying to juggle this all around but frustration is taking over. Why not buy a new one, well I was promised a new one for Christmas but unfortunately I wasn’t informed about which Christmas …… maybe 2050 when I'm long gone. 

The heatwave isn’t helping either, good weather is fabulous but sometimes you just have a yearning for the smell of fresh rain washing away the dust of dry weeks. Having ordered new supplies I was looking forward to hitting the easel but our humidity is so high that pastel sticks seem to melt in your fingers. Nothing left for it but to head out and do some sketching! 

The pleasant country idyll that is my new home.

The country air, the birds singing (too hot) and the breeze swishing through the wheat …. ahhh, lovely!

I started sketching, this is the last page of my sketchbook, always daunting but I delighted in keeping loose and thwacking on sploshy layers of watercolour, wash pencils and fineliner. 

Two minutes into my sketch and a large combine harvester decided to harvest the wheat in the field in front of me. Yes, I know that the farmer is only doing his job but I was enveloped in a cloud of dust from the extremely dry earth and the chaff that he was chucking out. Undaunted, I carried on  …. you know the saying about things beibg as exciting as watching paint dry, well here that would be very short …. the watercolour dried on the brush! Yes, it was like this in Abu Dhabi but now I' m sitting in a field in Germany. I still enjoyed it though. 

The walk here takes me through a complete fruit basket, vines dripping with grapes, apple trees, damsons, pears, cherry trees, quince and pear trees but this amazed me most! 

A peach tree, a peach tree maybe I'm in the Med or Tuscany and I just don’t know it! 

As a wine drinker, I also feel it’s my duty to check out how this years grape production is going, I hope it’s going to be a bumper harvest because with all the frustration of my ancient technology, I'm going to need a lot of wine!