I'll be on holiday from the end of this week for most of the next three weeks, so my ability to upload stuff to the blog will be sporadic, at best. I'll try and squeeze one or two extras in this week before I go.

This is a sketch I did from an old photo of my father, as a young man. He's dressed in costume for a play, though I don't know which one. This is one of my favourite photos of my father, and sits on our mantelpiece in the living room. It was one of those spur of the moment sketches - the kind where you sit down after returning from work and just pick up a pad and a pencil without any real idea of what you're going to do with it. I was pleased with the result because I have tried - and failed - in the past to do a more careful drawing from this photo. This was relatively quick to draw, but also had a spark that was missing from my previous attempt.

A particularly misty, hot afternoon by the side of Crummock Water nearly two years ago. Thoughts of impending holidays sending me back to memories of past ones this morning ...

Nothing new to upload this week, so I thought I'd upload this old sketch I made of the sunset over our back garden. One of the benefits of living in a very flat area is that you get a lot of sky, and it quite often looks like this in the evenings. As far as the sketch itself is concerned, it's mostly pastel, though the line of the silhouette itself was done using an ink pen to bring out the detail. Look for the bird sitting in the tree.

My first "proper" watercolour. I painted this a couple of weeks ago. Sometimes you have a moment where it just all comes together, and I think this was one of those. On our recent holiday, I took a picture of my eldest daughter, and it was completely out of focus. However, I quite liked its composition, and the most powerful thing about it was this lovely blue eye which served as the centre of the picture, so I cut out all the colour from the picture except for that eye. Suddenly, a bad photo was turned into a more interesting photo, and I figured it would make a nice pastel. Then I was given my new watercolour set, so I decided to have a play with those instead. This is the result.

New sidebar links

Just a quick post to alert you to the fact that I've updated my "Blogs of note" links in the sidebar on the right, to add a couple more of my daily visits. I recommend you try them out. I try and keep this list reasonably small: rather than going all out and listing, say, everything I keep in my Bloglines account, I just like to hand-pick a few of the more unusual and entertaining blogs. Yup, I visit BoingBoing too, but everyone links to them ...