Folio Competition

 Anybody who visits my house will realise that I love books as the the walls are lined with shelves crammed with books. My poor wife wonders where it will end as I keep buying more and we only have a small house! One of my ambitions would be to write and illustrate  books .
 The main reaon that I haven't done a blog post  for a few weeks is because I have been working on an entry for the Folio book illustration competition . Folio are publishers of beautiful hardback books. and to be able to illustrate one of their books would be a great honour.
I recently discovered that they have an annual  competition; the brief for this year's competition was to create three illustrations and a cover for Michael Morpugo's War Horse. I really enjoyed researching and painting the pictures although it took a lot longer to do than I anticipated. The chance of getting anywhere with the competition is slim but it was fun to try.
Here are some of my recent sketches.

 This is a view from town with a covering of snow on Melantee and Lidl's supermarket in the foreground painted last week

 Above is a sketch of the road back from Kingairloch ; the road is squeezed between dramatic cliffs and the sea, it's a single track road with not much room for error .A farmer told me that he didn't get post for 3 days last week because the road ( which has a hill at the end ) was too icy for the postman to get through. Fortunately the weather was much milder when I was there.

Glencoe from a photo taken a few weeks ago.

Kingairloch

View of Loch Linnhe from Kingairloch.

Today I had to go to Kingairloch. The weather was better than the incessant cold rain that we've experienced over the last few days -there were some sunny intervals between showers.
 Kingairloch is very remote and very beautiful . To get there one has to take a narrow single track road with the sea on one side and cliffs on the other. Eventually you reach a stunning bay with a little white church and a few cottages. I visited the church and was to surprised to find some impressive stained glass windows , not what I would expect in a tiny place of worship in a remote hamlet.
 I'm not a Christian but I found the profound quietness in the church moving , an oasis of stillness in a busy chaotic world.
It turns out that the stained glass windows were commisioned by George Herbert Strutt who bought the estate in 1902. The Strutt family made their fortune in the cotton industry and were from Belper in Derbyshire.