I can see the sunshine in this. It was made in my sketchbook some time before the darkness and cold arrived, when there were real shadows surrounding objects sitting on a table. One of many (seemingly endless) exercises in the early stages of OCA Watercolour 1 – this one working with warm colours. There are messier ones in this series; the painting with grey and brown tones had a particularly bad ending.

However this one was made off-piste, away from proscriptive exercises, just for the pleasure of painting, after I had worked out a lot of issues surrounding a begonia and some citrus fruit. Wax resist and masking fluid also feature.