The Red Caravan residency. Feb 2018

Sarah Furby and I spent a fortnight in Forres living in the Red Caravan and working in Orchard Road Studios.  We were made very welcome by the other artists in the studio. It was great to work amongst them. Thankyou Caroline for enabling the residency and for your help.

We brought a complete print studio with us - including my trusty little xcut xpress shyly peeping out of the back of the campervan.

We visited Loch Morlich on the way and painted some watercolour sketches.

The next day we set up our corner of the studio with a wee print workshop and started making plates and printing them.

This is my watercolour sketch of Loch Morlich and one of the trial prints.

Next we visited Findhorn (ably guided by Rona Maclean) and did a couple more watercolour sketches.

Again sketch and trial print - the seals sang to us from the sand
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This is the plate and the print of looking back across the sand dunes to Findhorn.
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We visited Randolph' s Leap. It was bitterly cold but we managed a sketch each.

This is the sketch with the drypoint I made later  sadly I am not happy with the drypoint so I shall make a collagraph
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We drove south along the B9007 and sketched the Monadhliath mountains. This is the sketch with the consequent collagraph.

We drove back along Lochindorb and painted large very fast acrylics outside - using rushes and snow amongst other tools.

On Sunday 18th we went to Roseisle beach and made some watercolour sketches. I really liked the WW2 installations which were sliding down the dunes. I sketched a pill box and later made a collagraph from it.

On the way home we went to Dufus castle and sketched the Moray countryside.

On the last day I actually managed to make an edition of the Moray countryside. On my trusty little xcut xpress.

We had a brilliant time. We also visited distilleries, the Knockandoo wool mill, Hopetoun, Burghead and many other amazing places We went back to Findhorn and painted acrylics on the beach - whilst chasing the paper and the pallets and rescuing them from the sea - in February - only possible because it was sunny - Sunny Moray

When I got home I completed the editioning of 4 other plates. This is the Monadhliath.

These are the five collagraphs completed so far, mounted.
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