En Plein Air

I have managed to squeeze in 3 seperate en Plein Air painting days into my easter break. I think its the most fun that I have had paintings so far and will be doing it as much as I can in the future. All of the following paintings are 30cm wide and were done on my little pochade box setup.

The first trip was to Bluebell forest near my parents farm house. It was an interesting day: my debut at doing plein air work in public. It was much less of an ordeal than I had suposed it would be though. People were kind and despite it being very busy i was not interuppted all that much. About 2 hours each on these 2.


My next trip I was accompanied by the excellent Mr Sean Donaldson a fellow concept artist from my team at work. We journied over to Dimmingsdale near Alton (of Alton Towers fame). Dimmingsdale is a mind blowing location and I think we will be revisiting it again and again. We were spoilt for choice but settled down for the afternoon in front of the famous chained oak. It is in a bad way but was a very exciting subject to paint. Sorry for the glare on this photo! I think this is about 5 hours worth of pretty intense painting.

My final trip we got together a little group. Neil F Roberts, Aidan Wilson and Jon Cave (excllent fellow who runs a life drawing group at the Malt Cross on wed evenings in Nottingham) all met in a car park off of the A52 (sinister I know) and then went location hunting in the vicinity of Belvoir. It was an ace day.
Neil got me to take some wip shots of my first piece (i also included a photo of what I was painting):

We then went to a lovely country pub, had a pint of ale and then set off to find location 2, based on the barmaids recommendation! We got a cracking view of Belvoir castle from a nearbye village. Ace! Here is my last one on the easle.