Oils with Elaine.

This is in oils on paper.

Several years ago we spent a lovely holiday in southern France, west of Montpellier on a former vineyard, which had its own chapel alongside the farmhouse, now a series of gites. This is a painting of the chapel. I haven't finished yet, Elaine says: the leaves and branches on the upper left need more definition as does the building on the left. This is the tricky area of under-defining and over-fiddling.

Our palette was restricted to a primary ( in my case, cerulean) and its complementary (orange) as well as white. This is in order to achieve some harmony of colour.

Oil pastels

This was a first attempt at using oil pastels, guided by members of the RGA (Reading Guild of Artists). My Paris pastels, which were thumb-thick and buttery, turned out to be not pastels at all but oil sticks, which are pure oil paint in a stick form: no wonder they were thick and dense and impossible to blend with a dry rag. But I had bought some small Sennelier pastels from an online auction and they supplied the bright , gorgeous turquoise in the background.

It seems difficult to achieve any degree of subtlety but that is probably my lack of skill and paucity of colour range. They are easy to use, though and not as messy as the chalky pastels - I hope to do more with them.