David Thomas Longstone Lighthouse, Farne Islands, watercolour, 10½x17in (27x43cm)
David Thomas has lived in Yorkshire since the age of 11. He trained as an architect at Huddersfield School of Architecture and has always managed to develop his hobby of watercolour painting in parallel with his career as an architect. ‘My father, a BBC engineer, moved his family as he achieved successive promotions,’ he writes, ‘but always created a workshop on arrival at each house where he made items of furniture and radio cabinets.’ David has continued this pattern by designing and making furniture in his own workshop. Since retirement in 1997 he has made prototypes of an easel, a browser and a walking frame, which have in common unusual folding mechanisms.
‘Longstone Lighthouse is taken from the TV series Vera. It has a bit of everything - figures, landscape and architecture. I’ve used it as a demonstration for my watercolour class and it also appears as a demonstration on Facebook. I began by turning the board round 180 degrees and laying a graded wash of light red at the horizon and cobalt blue above. There’s no need to paint around the figures. I established some tones for the figures and base of the lighthouse. Patience was required for the landscape, which has a lot of colour and tonal variation. A careful drawing of the shapes helped, and I began to think of it as a kind of loose jigsaw puzzle. A mix of cadmium red and quinacridone violet was used for the lighthouse. I strengthened the grey base of the lighthouse and worked on the figures, adding a hint of a reflection of the lighthouse tower in the pool to finish. Assessing it on the mantlepiece, I made many adjustments and spent some time with the figures, which are an important element in this painting.’