Over the last year, I’ve been spending some time sketching out ideas for a series of oil paintings, using pencil and pen and watercolour and ink.

Sparrows Over Clouds is the running title of the future series of paintings – although sparrows may or may not appear in all of the final works. Instead, the focus is on a daily-life, eyes-up, view of the sky, the clouds, the light, and, often, the man-made objects that intrude upon that natural visage, encroaching upon them from the edges of our sight-line.

To that end, I used the month of October to participate in #Inktober on Twitter and Instagram, a daily challenge for artists to complete at least one artwork utilizing the medium of ink each day.

Although I didn’t fulfill my end of the bargain, a number of ink studies for the future Sparrows Over Clouds painting project were completed. You can find them under the Recent Works section of this site.

Here are a couple of examples of preliminary pencil sketches from earlier last year, then made again with ink in order for me to have a deeper understanding of light and shadow. There are others.

These are images which will soon reveal themselves in coloured oil paint, illuminating the sky above us and that man made world that seems to incessantly intrude.