Our place

I love coming home to our place on a sunny morning, the sun and shadows do lovely things and make it easy to ignore the rampant weeds, punctured footballs, scrappy grass and dog dug holes. Even though this is literally my own back yard, I still didn't  do this from life. Shock horror.  I have watercolour sketched it a number of times in the past, but even then the shadows move too fast for me; the sun would have moved around to the other side of the house by the time I had even squirted out the oils.

Sketching it helped though, as it meant I had looked at and thought about the whole shadow/bounced light/tone thing going on under the porch a number of times. Instead of the usual and usually frustrating attempt to use a big brush and simplify , I used a smaller brush this time and held it far back on the handle and tried to be a bit looser that way. Not unhappy with the result, may explore that approach  a bit further.
Within the next two weeks all the kids will have moved out, and it will just be me and P here - wierd and sad.