Hello everyone, and happy Christmas Eve! Hopefully you’re all getting into the Christmas spirit, but however you’re celebrating this year, I hope the holidays bring you peace and happiness as we draw to the end of 2023. This post is a little later this week, as this past Monday was my birthday, so the end of December is always a time for celebration in our household! We ended up spending the day in Lincoln city centre, where we looked at all of the festive lights, and I even found a couple of art galleries to go and mooch around in whilst the weather got colder. It was a lovely way to celebrate.
With Christmas finally upon us, it’s been a busy season in village life as well – we’ve had carol services, family dinners, Christmas markets, and mulled wine. Plus, some last minute Christmas card deliveries! We even received some cards from slightly further afield this year, which were lovely to read – with Christmas greetings coming from all over the States.
Having been so busy, I’m surprised I got any painting done at all, but I managed to fit in some seasonal watercolour shenanigans alongside all the eggnog and mince pies! Here’s my ‘Christmas Flowers’ painting, inspired by the poinsettia currently blooming on our kitchen table:
I also managed to broadcast live on Patreon this week, with ‘Cup of Florals.’ It was great to see some many familiar faces, as well as some new – I hope you all had as much fun as I did!
This is only a brief post this week with the holidays upon us, and I’ll be back in your inboxes in the new year (which is sooner than you’d think!) But I wanted to take this opportunity to give you some exciting news as to Andrew Geeson Loose Watercolours in 2024 – we’re revamping the website! We’re streamlining it so that it’s much easier to navigate, you can find all the tutorials much quicker, and it’s much more user friendly. I’ve seen the prototype already, and it looks amazing! There’ll be more news as and when it comes, and we don’t have a confirmed date as to when it’ll be up and running, but it will definitely be early 2024. So that’s an exciting thing to look forward to.
I also wanted to give you all a special Christmas present – a seasonal tutorial for you to try out over the holiday season. This year has been a big one for the Loose Watercolour gang, and the support you’ve all given to this Substack alone has been phenomenal – this blog only started in August, and there’s over five thousand of you subscribed, not to mention those of you paid subscribers who make it possible to run this page! Your enthusiasm for the loose style has been fantastic to see, and has certainly inspired me to experiment more and try new things that you might be interested in learning.
With that all being said, I hope you all have a lovely Christmas, and that 2024 brings you all that you want and more. I can promise that Loose Watercolours has some exciting things in store for you in the next year, and who knows? Maybe you’ll get a new set of watercolours for Christmas, and then your resolution will have to be to paint more. Merry Christmas and a happy new year! With lots of love, Andrew and Toby the dog.