Tips & Tricks: July 2025

Welcome to this month’s Tips blog, great to have you here.

Ballet was my first creative love. I started dancing when I was 5 and I haven’t really given up since, I’m even lucky enough to still be teaching it at the school where I originally trained. I was never going to be a ballerina but you don’t need to be to love it and get swept away by it do you?

It’s the same with painting, why do we paint? Is it because we want to be a professional and follow a career or is it that we love the escapism and immersion, shutting out all the noise around us and only concentrating on one thing…that’s pretty rare now isn’t it?

So this month I get to combine two of loves to share how I use charcoal and in this case, tinted charcoal pencils and on watercolour paper too so not your usual paper for this media. I LOVED every single minute of this painting and it’s possibly going to make it’s way into my own private collection or even as a gift for someone.

And I don’t often say that.
Hope you enjoy it and as always, you know where to find me, Ali