This morning I went to a Pastel Portrait demonstration put on by the Concord Art Association. I loved it and came away enthused to give portraits another go. I am also signed up to do a 6 week class in Portraits in pastel and I'm looking forward to that.

I haven't had a great deal of spare time lately to spend on my art, but I did manage to go out with a fellow artist last week and spend some time at the Old North Bridge in Concord where we spent three hours painting. I have always been nervous to paint outdoors because I was concerned about people watching me. Well, I'm over that! If you don't want people to watch, it's not a good idea to paint at a National Historic Site - there were busloads of people coming through, and often when I turned around there would be two or three people over my shoulder! I've never had my photo taken so often by so many people that I don't know!!

I'm still working on the picture I did and eventually I will put it up here, but I don't expect to get much done in the next three weeks because my sister and her husband will be visiting us from England and I want to spend time with them.

This is a field of Purple Loosestrife near where we live. I know it's an invasive menace but it's just so pretty that I was looking forward to it being in bloom so that I could do a painting of it. this is from a photograph taken from the side of the road. I call it Purple Haze.

UPDATE: On reflection and after taking some instruction I changed this picture and the new version if shown here on the left.