Beltane , Mayday, caught me out yesterday. It was a day filled to the brim. Not another thing could have been squeezed into any second of the waking day. So much so that the blog was brief and largely unexplained.

I combined two exercises from Paint Like Turner to create a painting of our local tidal pool.

The first big takeaway was that watercolour painting 250 years ago was not done on paper that was anywhere near white. So the process took about 24 hours as I dyed paper with cold tea.

Then dried the papers in hot bright sunlight, which bleached out the colour a bit. I think I quite like painting on imperfect slightly beige paper. In real life the image has a warmth about it which I quite like.

Then to read the instructions and dig around in my paint store for the suggested colours or as close as I had.

I was working from one of my favourite, very atmospheric photographs of the pool.

At this point I should point out that this is the pool on an excellent day.

And this once again is the painting. Very curious to create art from firm instructions.

I was quite thrilled that the painting more or less has a Turner colour palate as demonstrated by the biography I am also powering through.

But the painting is nothing like a Turner in reality and much more like my photograph.

Which rather neatly brings me to the end of the day. Which was spent with a huge glass of Pimms , celebrating a friend’s success in the London Marathon. 26 miles of determination and endeavour.

This photograph has the colour palate of the sun going down through a glass of Pimms.

A Beltane well spent.