Tell us about your morning routine.

or yesterdays morning routine.

In fact yesterdays morning routine was a monthly routine. Once a month a group of artists get together to chew the fat , plan exhibitions and share tips. We are encouraged to be creative at the same time. Multi tasking, with cake eating and coffee drinking is also integral to our decisions.

I was painting a water-colour layer to enhance a photograph I has taken two days earlier after a really lovely swim in Firestone Bay.

Water colours* combined with a photograph are how I produce my Hybrid prints. The watercolour is how I add emotion, atmosphere and vibrancy to the experience of being there in that specific moment. I also use watercolour to add the complexities of the weather and temperature of that moment.

*I mostly use a watercolour layer but the additional layer can be a monoprint,another photograph, textiles anything that can create the essence of what I am striving to capture.

The photograph this watercolour needed to enhance was good enough in its own way.

But it was bleak and chilly as is entirely normal for 5pm in mid-October. The swim one hour earlier had been unseasonably warm. We had all stayed in longer than you might expect for October. The whole experience felt like a warm summer evening, lots of chatter, a good bit of exercise.The harsh reality of the landscape felt softer and more vivid than it really was.

I trace the point where I will register the two images and then forget all about the photograph. Painting entitely from memory/imagination the sensation of the moment. Everything flows from the register point. In this case it is also the vanishing point but that is accidental

Then I just have to photograph the water colour and stick the two* images together.

*Sometimes I create three or four images to stick together. Nothing is guaranteed, the whole project can be a disaster or turn out nothing like as well as I had hoped.

The Watercolours are not wasted. I can work into them later with pen and ink.

The reason I am sharing the somewhat ponderous technique I am evolving was an on-line conversation I had yesterday with a schoolfriend.

Funny how a chat with a lovely man that I have known since we were both 11 made me distill my thoughts.

Even funnier is the realisation that only came from that conversation.

At no point in my medical imaging life did anyone accuse me of not being a ‘real’ radiographer or not giving them a ‘real’ diagnosis because I was using digital skills.

Plenty of people have exactly that opinion of using digital skills to produce art…

Plenty of people are incorrect.

The finished article.

3pm The Swim zone.

And because digital can change a mood.

5pm An early evening dog walk. Reflecting on an unexpectedly lovely swim.