My art is on official National Trust merch! The new Chirk Castle souvenir range that I was commissioned to paint a picture for has now arrived in the shop! I'll be honest I didn't really enjoy doing the commission itself due to creative differences and poor communication but I am super excited to see my art on official National Trust products.

The eagle eyed amongst you who have seen the original painting or the image of it on my website may have noticed that it differs slightly from the one on the new Chirk Castle range. The project leader thought that the nymph statue at the bottom stood out too much and wanted me to make it smaller and more muted. Well I spent a good 7 or 8 hours painting that statue, and I think it's one of the best things I've ever painted, so you can bet I was not painting over it! Instead I photoshopped it; I changed the hue to a green and copied some of the bushes around her base to blend her in a bit more.

Personally I think the original looks much better. The statue has more life and the pink brings it together with the pink flowers in the meadow and the tips of the bushes behind her. The edited one just looks old and sad. What do you think?

Over the end of 2025/beginning of 2026 I painted 'Geese Over Castle Stalker' - possibly my most atmospheric landscape to date! This is the sister painting to 'Geese Over Loch Laich Salt Marsh' and shows the view facing the other way towards Loch Linhe and Castle Stalker. 

I took a fair bit of artistic license with the sky on this one. The photos I used for reference had a rather dull grey/white sky but my memory of this moment was a lot more stormy so I invented my own sky. It's partly a sky from another photo of the same area on a different day and partly just me making it up. I think it might be my favourite sky I've painted so far.

I tried a few different techniques out on this painting. I used the same flat brush for all of the sky and background stuff to stop myself getting too bogged down in the details. I also added blue to almost every colour, including the browns and greens to give the whole painting a moody evening feel, which I think worked really well. Painting wet sand was also a new challenge and also rippling water, which I really had to force myself to be loose with or I would still be painting it now!

It was so nice to paint something that wasn't a lot of grass and trees for once. Don't get me wrong, I love painting grass and trees but painting muddy sand was a fun new challenge.

Here you can see it with it's sister painting, and although it is a very different colour scheme I do think the make a nice pair. The geese are the same ones in each painting.
​Imagine you're standing on the bridge that runs over the salt marsh looking at the geese flying over Castle Stalker and then, as they fly over your head, you spin around and watch them fly away over Loch Laich - that is the story that these two paintings tell together.