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.