My Early Watercolour Landscape Paintings

There’s something about looking at certain types of watercolour landscapes that I really love. There is a special sort of luminous ‘glow’ that some artists are able to capture that is just lovely.

Towards the end of 2023 I went on a cruise to Norway with my Mom in the hopes of seeing the Northern Lights. We were lucky and saw them several times which was an amazing experience. But an extra bonus was how incredibly gorgeous the Norwegian scenery was, both out at sea and inland. The light there is just beautiful and has a sort of rosiness to it that really made my heart sing. I’ve never taken so many photos in my life! Just look at this tiny sampling...

On the days we were out at sea moving from port to port, they had various activities on the ship to keep everyone entertained. And one of these was watercolour painting – woohoo! I went along and the teacher, Helen Halliday, got us painting seascapes and the Northern Lights.

I’d be fibbing if I said I was a natural and created some stunning pieces… I was pretty terrible! All the paintings I’d done up until then were more like sketches (like the cottage in my last blog post). This type of landscape painting was very different and I really struggled to get the hang of it. Luckily Helen was lovely and gave me some great tips which helped once I got home to practise a bit more...

Becoming obsessed with painting landscapes…

This really lit a fire inside me - I was determined to figure this out. After I got home I set about practising every day, painting watercolour landscapes from photographs I’d taken and following YouTube tutorials. I really was obsessed. And I started to get a little bit better.

Here are some of my earlier paintings - they're not amazing, but they were decent enough to encourage me to continue, as I was starting to see that luminous glow that I love so much in watercolours...

Although my style of painting landscapes has become a lot more abstract since then, gorgeous scenery is still what inspires me the most. I’m constantly on a mission to find new ways to capture that soaring feeling you get when you look at a beautiful landscape…

Here are a few of my more recent abstract watercolour landscapes, which are available as fine art prints - click on any one of them to buy it in my shop.