First painting and first Pickings drawing

Essex Country Estate: January
Here is the first completed painting in my new Twelve Months on an Essex Country Estate painting project. It shows the far end of the lake with the frosty silver birch trees, under-planted with red and ochre yellow dogwood.
The painting is 40cm square, on Winsor & Newton canvas board. It is a mixed media piece, with acrylic and oil pastel, and some Neocolour II soluble wax crayon, too.
I’ve also completed my first Pickings drawing. I planned these as pastel pencil drawings of things which I picked up as I walked around the Markshall estate. In my last post I showed you my collecting tin, with an assortment of bits and pieces that I found – larch cones, oak twigs with leaf buds, a broken small branch covered in lichen, an oak leaf and a feather.
I arranged some of these on a piece of white foam board, so that I could see the details clearly.
The drawing is done with Pitt pastel pencils on Daler Rowney pastel paper.
You may remember that I have chosen bright colours for all twelve of the Pickings drawings that I shall do during the year, so that the twelve drawings can be printed as a colourful tea-towel when the project is finished. I was very pleased with how the bright blue shows up the soft greys and browns of these natural objects.
This drawing is in the Small Paintings and drawings gallery, and the painting will soon be available to view in the 2025 drop down menu under Gallery – I am just waiting for my webmaster to fix that up!