Book on Kindle Store, Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B5JYU7O

People have had some trouble finding this,but it should be there now, fingers crossed.

The Last of the Titchy-Pics....

Months ago, I bought a job lot of 10 7" x 5" block canvases.  I only really needed one of them, but as it happened they were on offer....

So having painted the one which I'd been commissioned (as it were; brother's birthday present, in fact) to do, I then had another 9 canvases to paint; and whether my eyesight's got worse, or whether it just wasn't a great idea to start with, I don't know: but it's been a bit of a struggle just to see the blessed things.

Anyway!  I've painted the very last one - you can see all three of the last tranche on my Facebook page, but for those of you who wouldn't go on Facebook if paid in gold bars, here's one of them.

It's a rather summery painting for this time of year, but it's so grey and dreary outside that I wanted something with a bit more colour.

And - Stop Press - my e-book, now titled Oil Paint Basics, has now been made available for the Kindle, and is available from Amazon UK.  I also have some work on show in a new café in Upper High Street, Ryde IW: unfortunately - I don't know the name of the café...  Ryde isn't the easiest place to get to from here.  But there can't be that many up there, so should you be in the vicinity, take your cheque book for a nice walk, cup of tea, slice of cake, and a painting to take home.   You know you want to.  You do.  No, really - you do.

Flooded Fields

I was given a tube of Aureolin watercolour made for the SAA (Society for All Artists) the other day, and it cleared up a longstanding mystery.  I have wondered quite why demonstrators of watercolour techniques on the Painting and Drawing Channel (www.thepaintinganddrawingchannel.co.uk) use paints that (like Aureolin, Rose Madder, Alizarin Crimson and several others) are "fugitive", ie not lightfast.

The reason would seem to be that while these SAA paints carry the old names, they aren't the same pigments at all.  Makes you wonder why some manufacturers stick to these old labels when anyone who knows the first thing about paint durability wouldn't trust them not to fade or darken over a few months.  It must surely confuse painters - there's a website called Handprint.com which is full of information about paint characteristics if it's of interest.

Anyway - responding to a challenge to produce a painting in 30 minutes, I did this one - the actual painting took a bit less than 30 minutes, but you can add another 30 to that to allow for the drying time.  It has its points; I'd have preferred to take a bit longer, and iron some of the odder shapes out.  Used Prussian Blue, Yellow Ochre, Venetian Red, Winsor Red, Cobalt Blue - and a touch of that Aureolin.

The cover of my E-book, available (in PDF) on DVD for £10 including postage and packing, or £8 for a download.  Email me at robertjones@ratville.freeserve.co.uk for your copy.  As advertised on Facebook - and indeed anywhere else I can think of....

This is the second and improved version - although those who have bought the first won't find it so spectacularly different that it would be worth shelling out again for it!  If existing customers  really want it though - and who am I to say thee nay? - I will happily send a copy of the second edition for free by download, or the dvd for £3.00 to cover my post and packing.

The cover painting is of Summer Fields at Arreton, Isle of Wight - 10" by 10", for sale unframed at £80.00.

Painting again!

All sorts of things have cropped up to delay me this year, but rather than moan about them as is probably my wont, I shall just post my recently completed acrylic, which can also be viewed in all its multi-coloured splendour on www.painters-online.co.uk, and on my Facebook page.

For this one, I used a canvas-covered board by Pieraccini (www.pieraccine.com) supplied by Jacksons' Arts, and used Cryla Acrylic from Daler-Rowney, a bit of Winsor & Newton Artists' Acrylic, and Chromacolour (www.chromacolour.co.uk) for touches of glazing and detail.  I'm particularly fond of their Naples Yellow - mixes with greens and blues to make a range of different greens: it doesn't behave anything like oil Naples Yellow, but it's a very useful colour in its own right.

Still looking for help with running my website: I've got a bit phobic about it - what I need is a young person to whom these things seem to be second nature.  I shall feel a fool, of course, taking direction from a stripling, but I'd rather feel a fool than continue to be incapable of updating my own site.

So if anyone is out there .... you know where to find me.

Anyway, this painting is provisionally entitled Path to the Marsh, and is 30 by 40cm in size; it's for sale, as all my stuff is; and I have to confess I've forgotten where it was that I made the sketch for it - not that this should really matter very much, because all of my paintings are fairly freely adapted from the scene in front of me anyway.  I know it's either Newtown Creek on the Isle of Wight, or a walk near Emsworth in Sussex ...  must get into the habit of dating and placing my sketches.....

Painted on a red-coloured base, I used Titanium and Chroma White, Cobalt Blue, Raw Sienna, Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna, Prussian Blue, Naples Yellow, Cadmium Yellow Light, and a touch of Burnt Umber.  That's my version of a limited palette in acrylic: normally, I use more colours in acrylic than in oil, and more in oil than I use in watercolour.  

New Followers

Welcome to you - please make comments, add your own thoughts: it gets lonely out here - and I don't remove comments unless they're stupidly rude: a bit of honest criticism never comes amiss.

Those fresh from Comment is Free (chortle, gasp, snigger) on the Guardian will know what I think of as rude.  Insult my opinions as much as you like: but don't insult me unless you know me well enough to do so.

And if you do know me well enough to do so - what kind of friend are you anyway, you git?

Latest on Painters Online

http://www.painters-online.co.uk/Blogs/New-Start/Confessions/_bl284_po2795_pg1

Hope you can find this - at times, blogger baffles me.   At times?   This is the man who can't even manage his own website......  help urgently required to sort it out for me.....

Anyway; look, here; consider; reflect - the purpose of this blog was really to determine if there's a market for lead white oil paint.  There ought to be, if people are really interested in genuine oil painting rather than the miserable substitutes for same offered to leisure painters and hobbyists.

If you're interested in getting your hands on genuine lead white oil paint - Flake, Cremnitz, and Foundation White - please get in touch with me: here or on Facebook.  Then we might be able to secure a reliable supply, and paint in oil to its fullest degree of possibility and achievement.

By the way - my e-book Oil Painting Basics is still available at £8 per download, £10 on dvd.   Email me at

robertjones@ratville.freeserve.co.uk OR

jones-ratville@hotmail.co,uk

If you want to pay for it via my website, go to www.isleofwightlandscapes.net, but, especially if you want the dvd, don't neglect to email me with your address.

Oh, and Happy New Year!

Robert Phillip Jones

(www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk)

Another Milestone (and welcome to new follower)

I have never, in all my extensive and drawn out puff, had a toothache such as that I endured over the last week - even nudging the thing with my tongue set off waves of agony and caused me to wonder if life were really, on the whole, taken by and large, worth all the bother......

Fortunately, the dentist's antibiotics, the chemist's Oil of Cloves, the Internet's suggestion of a salt and bicarb poultice, and the fact that all together caused the foul thing to burst (I shall spare you the details, the rich multiplicity of colours thus produced, wishing that someone might have spared me too) and eased the ghastly agonies sufficiently to enable me to enjoy lunch with my mother, brother and sister-in-law on Saturday at the New Inn, at Shalfleet, Isle of Wight (wonderful fish!) and also lunch today at the Buddle Inn, just down the road, for some of the best roast beef, Yorkshire pud and roast potatoes, courtesy of my friend Mr Skidmore, I've had for a long time.  And today was my birthday.  Yes, no more pretence that we are a mere 39, which seemed to be fooling just about no one; we have entered our 63rd year: and if it could be held free of the gastric haemorrhage, chest infections and tooth abscess we've had this year, I shall be grateful.  I realize that Fate has had a high old time this year, working out what to inflict on me next, but - take a break, eh?  Don't work yourself into an early grave.....  Turn the attention somewhere else......

Interest has been expressed by several people in my e-book; one has worked out how to pay for it and done so; others require the dvd version and will be provided with the same the moment they give me a) their money, b) their addresses.  Hint.  I am not being bowled over in the rush, but that's rather the way I anticipated it - a steady and gentle stream will suit me much better.

Did I say, it's awfully GOOD.....?

Welcome to my new follower, who brings the total number of regular readers up to 11.  Also a slow and steady build-up....

Back to painting as soon as possible - I haven't had the time for a month while I wrote the book, or the inclination since one infection followed another ....  but I hope the last of these emergencies and disasters has, for the time being at least, passed by.  I'm not sure quite how many more I could take.....  But we seem to trundle on, like an old tank.....

Complete, finished, available! Just a pity about me teeth....

My e-book, Oil Painting for the Total Beginner, all 11 Chapters, 21,000 words, illustrations, notes - including suggested colour mixes - and Glossary of art terms is finished, done, ready.

It's in PDF form only at present: I can put it on a CD or DVD for you, at £10 including postage and packing; or send you a download, at £8: just email me at either 

robertjones@ratville.freeserve.co.uk

Or

jones-ratville@hotmail.co.uk


Tell me what form you'd like the book in, and I will reply to you telling you how it can be paid for (preferably via Paypal, on my website - www.isleofwightlandscapes.net, but I also take cheques, postal orders, and dubious services in kind......).  Incidentally, I can also print it - but at 54 A4 pages, I'd have to have a think about costs: I might be able to do it for £10, but would have to add p & p on top.

My warm glow of accomplishment at having finished the thing was slightly tempered when I woke up yesterday with raging toothache; just nicely in time for my birthday, too......  However, I've been able to get an emergency appointment via the NHS Dental Helpline, at 2.30 this very afternoon.  How I look forward to it...........

I have something of a dental phobia, but there are things - like crashing pain every time you so much as hit the tooth with your tongue - that rather get you over that.

For those similarly banjaxed, and seeking temporary pain relief while awaiting the dentist and his sturdy pliers, Oil of Cloves, on a wad of cotton wool, applied to the tooth, actually DOES help.  Just enough to enable one to write and think without whimpering for Mummy......

Finished bar the shouting!!

My E-book, provisionally titled Oil Painting for Total Beginners, is written and illustrated; 20,000 words, give or take, glossary, Notes including sample colour mixes.  It will be available on PDF download (zip file), or on CD (again, PDF - no animation!) as preferred.

I would prefer payment via Paypal, from my website - haven't settled on the price yet, have to work out costs of making the download available as opposed to the CD, but £10 for the download would be about right.

Well, I think it would be about right .... I'm open to outraged suggestions to the contrary....

Anyone interested at this stage might like to email me - this would put you at the head of the ENORMOUS list of persons just waiting to get their hooks into my masterly work.

The download will be ready by the end of this week (November 16th); the CD will have to wait a few days - if it's actually wanted in that form at all - while I actually get some recordable CDs (or DVDs).  

I can also do a printed copy - I'd rather not, to be honest, because it's going to take me a while to churn out some 50 pages on my old printers: I'll only do this by special order: have to give consideration to the binding, otherwise it's going to be a rather shoddier product than the download.  And we don't want shoddy.

Details on request - sample pages available if desired.

Well come on then, what are you waiting for?

New Follower!

Welcome Basil

Being slow, I haven't quite worked out who you are and to whom you're connected, although I've got a sort of idea; a head cold is fogging my intellectual processes.  Which are always a wee bit on the misty side.

No work to post, because it's all been done for other people and is specific to them; in other words, I should  spoil the surprise they're hoping their Christmas cards will cause this year if I go and show my (obviously fabulous) artwork here.

My e-book on oil painting for beginners is nearly finished, though - back, back, patience! - and I shall shortly advertise its availability and wait for those orders to come pouring in, making me fabulously wealthy beyond my wildest dreams.  Although my dreams are pretty wild....  the reality is likely to be somewhat less so.

And in the meantime, I'm still trying to get my Pension Credits sorted out ... the Dept of Work and Pensions thought I was self-employed - until they looked at this year's sales figures....

Lioness for my Landlady.

My landlady, one Pat Mann, was 82 today.  You wouldn't know it: she still gardens, walks for miles, even runs sometimes.  And she has a character to go with her physical vigour.  That, it may be said, of a fairly savage beast, once roused.....

So what better, I thought, than a birthday card featuring a lioness and the legend "Oh Bugger, Another Birthday!  And yes, I do look good, for my BLOODY AGE!!
"And the next one to say so gets MAULED."

Timorously, and yet with extraordinary bravery once you  think about it, I presented the card to her this morning.  And got a glass of her birthday champagne, AND a slice of birthday cake.  So she must have seen the funny side.  Or be planning a horrid revenge ......

We shall see.  Here be the Lioness, in irritable mode.

Painted, by the way, in Chromacolour, from www.chromacolour.co.uk.  An acrylic which can be used as watercolour, gouache, "ordinary" acrylic or, with the use of gel thickeners, even as oil.

The Guardian

A vaguely political one - I had an article published in the Guardian on Friday; and it was online as well.  Now. online you get comments.  This wasn't an issue when I used to write articles in magazines years ago - you'd get the occasional phone call, or Letter to the Editor, but some effort was involved in making a comment, and on the whole people didn't.  They might have fumed impotently and sworn they'd "never have that rag in the house again", but lacking the facility for instant comment they'd at least reflect on what they wanted to say; and on balance, generally didn't say it.

The internet, for better or for worse, has altered things entirely.  Now, it's the easiest thing in the world to see a piece online, go into orbit, and assault your computer keyboard with a rat-a-tat-tat of invective.  And several did - my article had nearly 700 comments when I last looked, and some of them .... well, some of them weren't friendly.

One of the reasons for this - the piece was on the Paralympics, and whether these Games are entirely a good thing for disabled people - was that I am not inspired by or interested in sport.  And I'm no more interested in or inspired by it if the athletes happen to be disabled.  Well, you can agree or disagree about that - it doesn't really matter.  I only mentioned it because I felt I should at least say, if I was having a bit of a pop at the Paralympics, that I wasn't exactly the ideal audience to start with.

However, I should have realized, and probably did - I like to provoke - that to criticize sport in a sports-obsessed country like this one (ie, very many more people follow sport than participate in it) is to run the risk of committing blasphemy.  So I wasn't surprised that a lot of people went splutteringly off at the deep-end, and missed the point by several sea-miles.

What did surprise me - a bit - was that some of them seemed to lose the capacity for reason in the process.  One who responded told the world, or that small portion of it that was interested, that I had "specifically said" that the Paralympics were "designed" to provide a cover for the assault on benefit payments to disabled people.  But I had "specifically said" nothing of the kind; nothing even approaching it; and it would have been a staggeringly stupid thing to have said anyway.  But he, who posts under the avatar Keo2008 on Comment is Free on the Guardian website, had read the piece; read my own comments and that of others beneath the piece; and had quite obviously re-written it in his mind to give him something he could latch onto and object to.  And Keo, though idiosyncratic, is not a complete idiot.  He makes generally informed comments..... but he completely misrepresented the article, and me, on this occasion.

It does make one wonder how rational we really are, when a supposedly intelligent person can make so utterly stupid, and provably stupid, a comment as that.

But there we are.  Respond, Keo, by all means, if you happen to read this.  But - read it first this time, eh?

Just a Couple of Small Ones

I'm aiming to put most of my work on here, and in due course on the website at www.isleofwightlandscapes.net - so much to do at the moment that it'll take me a while; and how I could do with some help from a web expert.... anyone there?

In the meantime: these two are both small oils on canvas, 7" by 5" in their stockinged feet; not brilliantly photographed, but the best I've been able to do.  Colours are either a bit fuzzy or a touch brash: I may well re-post in due course, when I've got a better camera or better camera skills.

One is entitled Castlehaven Lane; the other Path Through the Trees; and I live in hope you'll be able to tell which is which....   Around £40.00 each, for any keen purchaser.  Just email me, and I'll tell you, with obscene haste, how you can pay.  They're on box canvases - don't strictly speaking need frames, but I would frame them if it were up to me: a frame helps to focus the eye.

E-book on oil painting for absolute beginners on its way - most of the writing is finished, just need to finish the illustrations and write the last two sections, plus Index.  I think it'll be priced in the region of £10, in pdf form.  By all means express an interest now - it IS for absolute beginners, but I think more experienced painters might find it of some interest too: does you good to go back to basics now and then.