My First Steps I taught my first online class in May 2020. It was about capturing foliage from life in ink and watercolour. The people who attended the class knew who I was, having followed my sketching progress through the years, since my first tentative posts in 2012. Of course, the fact that everyone was…
Last January I announced two urban sketching workshops for the month of August. Each would last two and a half days and would take place in Galway City. The last one I had run was late in 2019, which is a big gap – this one would be just short of three years later. Since…
Endless summer days are meant for sketching. I get many chances to sketch this week, with and without screens.
I spend a few days sketching with my mother, Cinnie, in the Burren, Co. Clare. We have a simply marvellous time.
All about a week of sketching and teaching in the Auvergne, France, at Clermont Dessine, with good friends.
Monday 6th June It’s a Bank Holiday in Ireland and there’s a talk on in the Burren Nature Sanctuary. A guy is coming to talk about barn owls. I ask my family if they would like to come along. “We’re going to meet Erin the barn owl,” I say. My son Paddy (20) immediately agrees,…
Wednesday 25th June I am a believer in “drawing in the cracks” and so I sketch the view from the post office in my village, while I wait for the kids (my girl Liv and her classmate and friend Mattie, who I bring home twice a week) to arrive off the school bus. I can’t…
Monday 9th May I want to paint the roses my lovely family bought to welcome me home from hospital, and I finally get my chance late on Monday evening. I can’t get my view right – on the table they’re too high to see the blossoms, and on the chair they are so low they…
I get a fever, everything goes pear-shaped and I end up spending ten days in hospital.
Saturday 16th April The subject for my sketchalong class is a well that my daughter stumbled upon in a field up the road from us in Kilcolgan. We get it all drawn, but have only got as far as the moss and reflections at the end of class, even though it’s gone over time by…