We are doing so well at the moment, as my weather forecasting is well and truly up the spout. A lovely walk today and three days soaking walks on the run! But lets be positive and look at nature slightly differently today.

      

and then a different way again.

The bottom picture first, many say that Autumn is the fungus season, to be fair that's not quite true as they are around all the year round ; but maybe they are a little more up front at this time of the year. Well today I passed about a dozen of these beauties at Hatchlands. Not being an expert I think it is an Orange Birch Bolete, whatever it was, it was about 10 inches high and the same across. I have no idea if it is edible or not but it certainly is impressive.

Now the first picture. A simple fun process,

1  Gather leaves

2  Lightly glue them to paper.

3   Us an atomizer (perfume spray) full of water colour paint. to spray the whole thing.

4   Allow to dry and repeat the spraying, many times, with different autumn colours. Then allowing             time for the creation to properly dry.

5   Remove leaves and glue. You might need a very sharp knife.

6   Do a careful ink drawing on the negative image of the leaf  which is left behind on the paper. Use a          dip pen, Biro, fountain pen, pencil., crayon or whatever.

It takes a little while, especially the drying, but is a super way of capturing autumn in a fun way, which if a little care is taken with; will look impressive.. 

Regards Duncan

 Good morning to you all and what a thoroughly wet and damp one it is. However the forecasters say that in the next hour or two it will start to clear away a little, so Liz and myself will have lunch at home before walking, so rather than taking a picnic out with us, it will have been eaten before setting off out.

When walking in the rain as well as obviously dressing appropriately, I am always very much aware of the intensity of colours. The rain seems to wash everything, so everything then sparkles and the colours glow brilliantly. This works when it is in dull light; but if sunshine appears after a shower, then you are in for a treat. So get out have a walk and enjoy the autumnal slash of colour ,as I will be shortly.

Now the other day I passed quite a landmark in my painting. You will all be aware of pictures of trees which appear regularly on this blog; well they are all apart of a rather large project which I have been involved in over the last two or three years. This is looking in depth at the symbiotic relationship which trees have with their surroundings. Quite a mouth full. It means simply, how trees react with everything surrounding them. The above pen and ink piece is of a near to collapse barn, just to the north of Send in Surrey; it demonstrates aptly how a once grand barn is slowly removed from the landscape and nature regains control and the upper hand. But the significance of the image is that it is number five hundred in the project. Like I said it is a large project. The whole work is stored in archival quality bound volumes and available to be viewed with no sales expectation.

Liz says that this project keeps me quiet, she wants me to continue with the project and aim for a thousand images.

Talking about walking in the rain, don't forget your camera. Keep it dry and with you because amazing images are possible under these awful conditions. Just remember that the colours are sometimes recorded better under these dull or dark days by slightly under exposing your snaps; just about a third to half a stop, not to much.

It seems to be brightening up, so of we go now fro a walk.

Duncan

Hello  everybody and once again we are challenged with the threat of this virus; so now we must respond and try to be positive and continue in life with good expectations and an outlook of thinking positively. not to easy, but we must try. As for Liz and myself walking is a big help; today we walked and laughed a great deal.

We were walking in the fields just to the north of Send and part of the walk went over the marsh flood plain of the River Wye. About a mile of this walk was shall we say was rather boggy and as a result a tad tricky to walk over without getting soaked; then not in my plan, we got caught in a downpour, I realized that my planning was up the spout and that I was in big trouble with Liz. Thankfully the downpour only lasted ten minuets or so! Liz has amazingly toughened up a great deal over the last few months.That was laugh one.

Laugh two. A few weeks ago when out walking Liz told me to listen to that bird. I could hear not bird, so asked which bird did she mean. She replied that bird. The only sound which I could hear was sheep barring. Liz was given an explanation that sheep barr and do not fly, unlike birds. We laughed and from then on called sheep "Lesser spotted bar finches". Now we always chuckel when we see sheep, or should I say lesser spotted bar finches.

Half way round the walk today we saw a small wild crop on sun flowers, lovely. So I have also popped this water colour which I did yesterday in for today.

I am in the middle of such an exciting week; two things, firstly the learning curve and secondly the awesome beauty of autumn. First the learning curve; well with it being Epsom "Love me love my mind week", with whom I work each year, exciting things happened. 

I love judging the art competition and this year there were some very deserving entrants, it was really quite a difficult decision, with two others to to decide the winners; however that all went well. The but, a big challenge, was my workshops over the web, now running that with two cameras was, shall we say, a tad tricky, all new to me and I needed to learn a great deal, with thankful support of the conference tec. team and at my end Mark. Thank you both. But the work shop went well, seemed to be well received and I enjoyed myself.

Now the beauty of autumn; the above photo I took at Polesden Lacey, Surrey this morning, a gorgeous walk with all the autumnal colours just starting to appear. At this time of the year we can all go for a walk, then do the same walk a week later and it is so different. I always feel that there are many more seasons than the accredited four, autumn, winter, spring and summer. Nature seems to be different almost every week. A bonus was a red kite flying very close to us, only about ten yards away, now that was something. 

Below is an ink of an oak on the banks of the Basingstoke canal which we passed the other day.. Getting the water lily leaves to float was a tad tricky, but I thing that the end result is ok.

Oh well, see you soon.