Travelling sketchbook - beach treasure from Carrick

The sketchbook pages that I was gifted this month riffed off a lovely purple. A royal purple. An incredibly expensive purple, Tyrian purple, a mucous secretion from a humble snail.

I had read about this in Victoria Finlay's wonderful book, Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox. So I started to think about shells and colour. My favourite chapter in the same book had been about the harvesting of lapis lazuli from mysterious caves in remote Afghanistan. We were off to Carrick, in Dumfries and Galloway for New Year and my thoughts were dragged off to the blue hues of the mussel shells that pile up on the beaches there, washed in on rough tides or deposited by gulls after a good feed.

When I looked closely at the real thing, the detail of their patterns amazed me, and I recorded their shapes and colours.

 I tried to use some Transfer Artist Paper to print some of my photographs of shell patterns onto paper, so that I could use them as part of a beach collage, but the printer decided to smear ink all over itself and not on the TAP (what did I do wrong,??), so I was left with no more than a couple of quite atmospheric textural smudges that I ironed onto my paper anyway (see lower picture above), that looked a bit like the kind of silt that gets washed up on beaches.

So I had to find something else to collage mussel shapes from and, surprise, surprise, some Gelli plate cast-offs came galloping to the fore again. Yet another reminder never to throw anything vaguely half-decent away...

I wanted to show the shine of a beach in the low sun of a winter afternoon so I experimented with watercolours overlaid with various pearlescent paints and glitters, to see which sparkled most convincingly and ended up with an amalgam of silvers and golds that seemed to work.

If in doubt, I'm trying to remember to have a good old splash about, as long as it's in my 'back book'. After all, that's what it's for. Not only am I not committed to the final piece, but it gives me my workings in a place that I can annotate.

So the piece that I'm passing on is a landscape version of my back book piece, my take on a chilly afternoon in the January sunshine, beachcombing, finding treasure.

Dumfries and Galloway was flooded over New Year.

It was never clear whether we would be marooned each morning that we woke up. But Carrick's completely unspoiled, windswept and beautiful beach never ceased to be an inspiration.