Acrylic on card, just under 3ft by 4ft 

I painted this a few weeks ago at college.  I wanted to see whether I could work as well at college as I can at home.  I learned that I cannot!  College is a wonderful, lively, vibrant environment, but I’m learning that I need peace and quiet to paint.  I need to be able to sit for hours just gazing at the painting.  I’ll then suddenly work out what it needs, and get up and work quite fast to make the changes.   This is actually quite unfortunate, as I’d prefer to make a mess at college than in my spare room!  But I do think it is important to learn to recognise our own creative processes and the environments where we do our best work.  Anyway, just for the record here is the painting that I did at college.  I think it is lumpy and constrained compared to Ring o Roses.  It’s not even finished – the card fell off the wall and curled at the edges, so I can’t put it back up to finish it.   Time to get on with making my canvas!

My intentions for this painting were to play with textures, and to paint a face (just to prove whether I can or not).  I created the ‘woods’ in the background by applying strips of fabric, tissue paper and newspaper, covering all this with white emulsion (I’m economising) and then scraping acrylic paint over the top with a credit card.  I also created texture in the foreground with tissue paper.

The face was a challenge!  The lighting in the original photo is very dark, which is why I’ve used purples and the eyes look so dark.  At least, as a fellow student commented, the whole thing does look cold!

Acrylic on cardboard, just under 3ft by 4ft.

Painted fast in sketchbook (acrylics).