My Darling Clementine

Back to a favourite theme and it's another Ditko/Western mashup.

It's based on an iconic Wyatt Earp pose in My Darling Clementine (1946), leaning back in the chair with his foot on a vertical strut.  Colours today were quainacrinone magenta, French ultramarine, cadmium yellow, raw sienna, burnt umber, Payne's grey and titanium white.  I've also used salt, clingfilm and the corner of a credit card.

Overall, I'm not 100% happy.  The best bits about it are some technical composition points about the three big bands of colour coming down from the top left and about how the darkest bit of the painting (Wyatt Earp) is surrounded by the brightest bit (the lit up bit of the veranda).  But his head is too small and his left foot doesn't look as if it's touching the strut.  Maybe the paint on the chair and the struts needed to be a bit darker, more consistent with Wyatt Earp (but still a different colour, obviously).  And I had trouble with the paint on his left leg running into the background, so had to add in some vegetation to cover it.

Not good.  This one has been cut up to be used as collage material.

New books

I've got some new books to be making my way through over the next few weeks.

Maybe some early signs of what to expect in 2019.

Derek's Dinner

The 2019 collection has started early!

This one's called Derek's Dinner after I got the idea from a friend who posted a picture of some sort of fungus growing in a load of horse manure.  I couldn’t bring myself to name it after her, so I've named it after her husband instead.  I hope he enjoyed his dinner that night.

The colours in there are cobalt blue, raw sienna, burnt umber, Payne’s grey and (making its debut) cadmium red.

This one wasn’t very popular in the Q1 2019 survey but is up for sale.

The Palette

At some point, every artist with a blog needs to disclose what paints he has in his palette.  Artists like to read articles like this just for the adrenaline rush of confirmation bias when they find that someone else has a palette similar to theirs.

The principles behind my palette are pretty simple.  I want at least one warm and one cool version of each of the three primaries, I want a couple of earth colours and I'm too snobby to even think about greens, purples or oranges.

Anyway, here's what I'm using at the moment,  going left to right, row by row:

1. Titanium white.  Never mixed with other paints.  I used to use it for adding sheep as a finishing touch.  Nowadays I only use it for spattering stars in the sky or daisies in fields.

2. Payne's grey.  Mainly for shadows, clouds, silhouettes.

3.  Prussian blue.  A cool blue (i.e. towards green).  It does make really good greens.

4. Cobalt blue.  A middling all-rounder of a blue, neither warm nor cold.

5. Cerulean blue.  Another cool blue.  Should make good greens and skies but I'm struggling a bit with it.  Also supposed to be good for fleshy tones but I've not been exhibiting any flesh in my paintings...yet.

6. French ultramarine.  A warm blue (i.e. purple end).  One of my top three colours.  As well as great purples, it makes great greens.

7. Lemon yellow.  A cool (i.e. greeny) yellow.  And it does make good greens.

8. Quinacridone magenta.  A cool (i.e. purpley) red.  It makes great purples and a little bit of it works wonders in dark clouds.  If you've been looking at my paintings you'll not be surprised to hear that this is another of my top three colours.

9. Burnt umber.  What they call an earth colour.  I think of earth colours like herbs.  You can mix up whatever you want from primaries but you sometime see need a little bit of earth colour to get them right.

10. Raw sienna.  Another earth colour.  There's often a lot of this sitting unnoticed in my skies.

11. Cadmium yellow.  A warm (orangey) yellow.  The final one in my set of three favourites.  It works in greens as well as oranges and it has more zing than lemon yellow.  Lemon yellow still has a role to play in more understated greens.

12. Light red. This is my warm (i.e. orangey) red.

The palette's not set in stone.  Cerulean blue is clearly struggling and might be deposed by cadmium red at some point.  It's another warm red but very different to light red.  Whereas light red is bricky, cadmium red is letter boxey.  And Prussian blue might come under pressure from phthalo blue, another cool blue.  I might even at some point save all this angst and widen out to a 16-colour palette if I ever treat myself to one of those brass hand-made Roberson-style palettes but that's another story.

It Started As The Helix Nebula

22 August 2018
I was still left with one empty picture frame and was wondering what to do with it.  Then I had a great idea.  I was going to pay a visit to my father & thought I'd paint and frame something for him while I was there.  I thought I might try another painting along the lines of the Random Nebula as he'd just bought an expensive telescope to look over the night sky.  I picked the Helix Nebula (known to some as the Eye Of God) as a subject and got to work.

The mistake I made with this one was to not just sprinkle salt on the cloud but all over the painting.  It's given the painting some strange streaky looking starry effects as if someone with a shaky hand has taken a photo.

I'm don't know whether I'd have framed this one if I'd not already decided to gift it.  But frame it I did and it was on my father's wall for his last few years.  After his death in 2022, the painting was taken away as part of the house clearance and is probably now up for sale in a charity shop somewhere.

The End Of Summer Poll

By the end of the Summer I'd ended up with 15 paintings that I was proud enough of to frame.  I was starting to think about selling them later in the year and has this grand idea about making the prices dependent on how good the paintings were.  I had ideas in my head about which ones belonged in the top, middle or bottom baskets but I thought I'd better do some market research.

So I set up a survey on Facebook.  People were invited to vote for up to five paintings.

Here are the results.  They're nothing like what I expected.  Only four people voted for the Random Nebula but eleven voted for Down T'Mill!  I obviously know nothing.  And now that the paintings are selling (eight sold at time of writing) I'm finding that what people actually buy doesn’t match up to what either I think is good or the survey thinks is good.  It's impossible to predict people's tastes.

Jesse James

15 August 2018
Here's a companion piece to go with The Searchers.  It's based on a scene from The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford.  A very good film & worth checking out.  In the painting, he's on the railway track and about to rob a train.  Behind him, the track I see blocked with junk.  In front of him the forest is lit up by the approaching train.  Somehow I've painted Jesse facing towards the train when the closest shot to this in the film has him facing away from the train and towards the camera.

Just like The Searchers, I think this one worked out well.  I especially like the colour of the fog among the trees.  I wish I could remember how I mixed that colour.  If I could change one thing, it would be to colour in the verges and big stones on either side of the track rather than having them silhouetted.

This was sold to the same guy that bought the Icebergs Off Newfoundland.  Two paintings that were worth it just for the colours on them.

The Searchers

1 August 2018
Looking at feedback so far, people seemed to like paintings of outer space or Westerns or paintings with people in them.  So I thought I'd try all three at once.  This painting's also a tribute to comic artist Steve Ditko (co-creator of both Spider-Man and Doctor Strange) who died earlier in the Summer.

The picture that it's based on is a still from near the beginning of The Searchers, a 1956 John Ford Western starring John Wayne.  There's a silhouetted woman staring out of a cabin doorway.

I'm more than happy with this one.  Sometimes I wonder whether the space clouds are a bit OTT and that fewer clouds and more starry background might be better.  Then I realise that the painting as it stands is much more Ditkoesque and a tribute that I can be proud of.

Screw your eyes up and it can look like a pint of lager but that wasn't the intention.

This one has been sold to one of my biggest fans.

Ugly Forest Path

30 July 2018
This was based on a picture on a birthday card.  It was a good choice of subject material.  But, as you can see, the execution was lacking.  There are bits that you could zoom in in that look like Van Gough in closeup, mind.

This one didn't make it into the framing list.

Down T'Mill

16 July 2018
After Stock LinkedIn Photo With Bike Replaced With Dog got such a great reception on Facebook I thought I'd have another go at something similar.  I can't remember where the photo this is based on came from.  It could have been LinkedIn but it could equally well have been the BBC News.

The painting got good feedback on Facebook but it's not one of my favourites.  I like the sky and the guy with the dogs but not a lot else.  Other people seem to think it's great though, so what do I know?

This one was framed and sold.

The Magic Purple Tree Only Appears At Sunset

8 July 2018
This one was created on the same day as the Stock LinkedIn Photo With Bike Replaced With Dog.  This time I definitely remember doing two paintings on the same day.  I'd deliberately tried to use quite plain colours on the previous one and was feeling quinacridone magenta withdrawal symptoms.  So I needed to go straight into another painting and go all out on the purple.  This is the imaginary landscape that I ended up with.

It definitely slaked my thirst for purple.  The colours here are great.  Some people have commented that the clouds in the sky and the hills at the back look like a scary face.  This wasn't deliberate but it definitely adds something.  The more I look at it, the more I like it.

It's framed and up for sale.

Stock LinkedIn Photo With Bike Replaced With Dog

8 July 2018
This one is based on a stock photo that somebody had used to head up an article on LinkedIn.  The original picture had somebody riding a bike but I replaced him with a man and a dog.  He's the first human being to appear on one of my paintings for a while.

This one was really popular on Facebook but I don't know why.  While I like the man and the dog and the mountains, the sky and the river could be better.  And there's all that greenery on the left.  Maybe people just like the colours: the greens here are pretty good.

This one's gone to my kid sister.  She asked about buying it but I gave her a 100% discount.

Random Nebula

2 July 2018

Oh, this was a really good one.  It started out based on one particular nebula (I can't remember which one - sorry) but ended up taking on a life of its own.

There are some killer techniques there.  A bit of wet into wet, the sprinkling of salt over the cloud, some spattering of white to get the stars.

When I look closely at the painting, I can see a map of Texas, a dog, an angry cross-eyed penguin and the flag of Guinea.  Others have seen a fish skeleton, a twerking unicorn with chubby legs and various body parts.

This is the first painting I ever sold.  It was bought by the lady on the stand next to me at my village Christmas fair before the doors had even opened.  She tells me that she can see loads of poppies in the picture.  Later that afternoon, she also bought the Trees Against A Green Sky.

Abstract

29 June 2018
And now a genuine abstract.  What can I say about this one?  I separated the paper out into sections using masking tape.  It made the painting look like an empty room in one-point perspective.  There's a back wall and two side walls, a floor and a ceiling.  The floor has some grass-like lines scraped on using the wrong end of the paintbrush.  The side walls have some alien-like plants made from blue paint on yellow and yellow paint on blue.  Note how the colours on the floor creep into the back and side walls, how the back wall and ceiling link up and the blue that the ceiling and right wall have in common.  These commonalities bring it all together for me, reinforcing the one-point perspective empty room viewpoint.

I delighted to sell this one to a fellow actuary, who says "The kids love it too, they'd never seen anything like it so it's a real talking point for them."  It felt so good to hear that!

Angel Of The North Under Four Different Skies

26 June 2018
I think the idea for this came from a YouTube video.  I watched somebody do four paintings of the same scene at four different times of the year.  I tweaked it a bit.  I painted four miniatures on one sheet (divided up using masking tape) rather than four separate paintings.  I picked four different skies rather than four different seasons.  And my four pictures were from four different angles.

The four skies were very easy to choose.  I like lightning and sunsets.  I quite fancied trying out a foggy picture in miniature rather than taking a risk on a big picture.  And it's probably compulsory to set one of the pictures on a nice sunny day.

I think all four minatures are interesting.  This one is framed and up for sale.

Hadrian's Wall

25 June 2018
I'd had some feedback that I was good at painting trees, so thought I'd better look for a good tree to paint.  A bit of googling of famous trees got me to this one in the middle of Hadrian's Wall.

The painting itself is definitely a return to form.  Tree, foreground and sky are all OK but the walls are quite shockingly good.  I cut a sharp pointed corner on an old credit card and scratched out lots of bricks. This is one of those paintings that you need to zoom in on to see at its best.

The worst bit about the painting was a well in the foreground that I made a terrible hash of.  It's been cropped out from the bottom of the painting.

This one has been framed and is up for sale.

A Mexican Tree

19 June 2018
And it's another bad one.  It's looking like I might be reverting back to my old standards.

The painting's based on a photo.  I can't remember where I found the photo but I'm pretty sure it's a scene in Mexico.

It does have a couple of redeeming fixtures.  The sky in this one looks amazingly good to me, evoking a slight drop in temperature at the end of the day.  And the foreground is passable.  But the tree is naff and the stone wall (yes, that's what it was supposed to be) is one of the worst features I've ever included in a painting.

This has been cut up to be used as collage material.

Time Portal

11 June 2018
This is bad.  Very bad.  I still think the idea was a good one.  A landscape on a nice day, but with a sort of lens in front of it that shows what it would look like on a bad day.  The execution of the idea is unbelieveably bad though.  The beautiful green landscape has turned to mud and I've not got the hang of painting skies in cerulean blue.

It's in the bin.

Lightning Over Henley-On-Thames

6 June 2018
Some more lightning, this time over Henley-On-Thames.

You can probably tell that this painting's been cropped.  There was a car and caravan down there at the bottom and they looked truly awful.  But on its own, I think the sky's fine.  I think the effect is what they call "cauliflowered" and that that's generally a bad thing.  But it works here.  I'm a rule breaker.

This was sold to the same collector as Lighting Over West Wellow.  They make a great pair.  Oh, and she likes purple cauliflower - not a word of a lie.

Icebergs Off Newfoundland

6 June 2018
There's a village somewhere in Newfoundland that enjoys the sight every year of all these huge icebergs floating slowly past.  It sounds pretty cool to me, even if it does get filled up with tourists.

I thought it was worth having a go at painting some of those icebergs after doing pretty well with mountains earlier in the Summer.  I really like the final result.  I think I've captured the majesty of the icebergs.  And the colours are vibrant - nothing muddy.  The blue in the sky is great and so is the colour of the reddish building.

Bad points?  Well, the path is a bit monotone and there's a nasty drip in the sky in the top left but in the framed version, I've cropped the painting down the left and along the bottom and these problems have disappeared.  Some might point out that I seem to have a raw sienna sky and blue clouds but I still think it looks good.

This painting was sold to a second-degree LinkedIn connection.  LinkedIn's great, isn’t it?

Lightning Over West Wellow

27 May 2018
There were some cracking thunderstorms in late May and I thought I'd have a go at painting one.  I dug around on the BBC News website and found some photos that would make good paintings.  This one was based on a photo taken in West Wellow, which turns out to be somewhere down near Southampton.

I pencilled in the lightning, then went over it with masking fluid.  When I painted in the sky, I was careful to make it lightest around the lightning bolt.  Then I took off the masking fluid and painted in the trees and foreground.

I'm happy with the result.  The trees might not be the greatest I've ever come up with but they're just supporting characters.  The lightning is the star.

This one has been sold to a private collector.

Trees Against A Green Sky

25 May 2018
I thought I'd try painting from real life.  Well, I say real life.  These trees are based on a couple of trees just over the fence in my neighbour's garden.  The bottom third of the painting is all made up.

The best thing about the painting is the green sky.  I'll have to try something similar another time.  It's not my favourite painting but I felt it was just about worthy of being framed.

Lucky I did frame it because somebody liked it enough to buy it at the village fair a few days ago.

Unforgiven

23 May 2018
This is based on an establishing shot in Unforgiven, a Clint Eastwood Western from 1992.  I've got a lot of Westerns in my DVD collection and this is my favourite.

The colours in this one give it a good dusky feel.  The pinky, bluey grey in the foreground and the hazy looking cabin have a big say in this.  I like the shape of the tree but I can't claim credit for that - the filmmakers chose this location.  If I could change anything, I'd add a bit of blue to the foliage in the tree to make it blend in a bit more with the rest of the painting but that's being picky.  Oh, and rather than the tree being painted on top of the sky, I painted the tree trunks first with masking fluid, then did the sky, then removed the masking fluid and finally painted in the tree.  It does look better this way.

This is a painting that I've sold.  It's in the hands of a private collector based out in Saudi Arabia.

Schilthorn

21 May 2018
After the success with mountains a couple of days before (Susten Pass) I thought I had to have another go at a mountain scene from that book of Swiss scenery.

And it came out really well.  I can’t believe this is my work.  I think it made a difference using a chunky soft pencil to outline the peaks rather than using a faint hard pencil that's afraid to be seen.  It really helps the peaks stand out against the sky.  Just compare the pencils here to those on the Icelandic Mountains.  Nor even close.

And this one has been sold to a fellow actuary.

Susten Pass

17 May 2018
We've arrived at last at the Summer of 2018, when something clicked and I started churning out some pieces that I could be genuinely proud of.  I’d decided to take a three and a half month break during the summer to recharge my mind and body after two years of back to back contracts.  And I got back into painting after a break of almost four years.

Years ago when on a work trip to Switzerland I picked up a book that was filled with photos of Swiss scenery.  I thought it would provide some good ideas for paintings.  And I had used it for paintings back in the pre-Facebook days, days from which my clunkers were never recorded.  This painting is based on a photo in that book of Susten Pass.

I think the best word to describe this painting is "encouraging".  I was really pleased with the mountains at the back.  And the red, yellow and blue colours work well in a foreground that wouldn't look out of place on the cover of a paperback.  I guess the tree's not a disaster either but the rock behind it sticks out like a sore thumb.

This one's not been framed and I think it's just sitting in my folder.  I may at some point crop out a strip with the mountains, laminate it and use it as a bookmark.

Edit (May 2020): actually, I'm cutting it up to use as collage material.

Icelandic Mountains

25 October 2014
This was based on a photo I'd seen of some mountains in Iceland.  If you compared the painting to the photo, though, you'd not be able to tell they were pictures of the same mountains.

I experimented a bit with clingfilm on this painting, scrunching it up and pressing it against the paint while it was drying.  It seemed to work and I should try it again at some point now that I'm a better artist.  If I could change one thing about this painting, it would be the pencil work.  It needs to be a bit more in your face: pressed harder, softer (darker) and just a bit more straight/jagged rather than trying to be smooth and not upset anybody.  Part of me wonders whether the colours are a bit too silly & vibrant and part of me thinks they'd be the thing that made the painting interesting if the pencil work was better.

In the end, not one worth framing.  I think it's still in the folder.

Random Sunset On Cheap Paper

24 August 2014

I'm confused by this one.  Did I really come up with this on the same day as the Ugly Bay?  Because I don’t remember doing two on the same day.  And why did I do this on some really cheap, thin watercolour paper?  Maybe I was just messing about while waiting for the other painting to dry (which was what happened with Pathside Sheep).

So, how is it?  I think the colours in the foreground are good.  As is the sky, with its dark clouds and sunset colours.  There’s a mark in there that was supposed to be a bit of cloud that instead looks like some buildings on the opposite side of a bay - it ends up turning the yellow and orange colours in the sky into yellow and orange colours in the sea but these things happen.

So I was happy with this one overall, especially in the light of all the recent clunkers.  But because it's on thin paper, it’s not worth framing.

An Ugly Bay

24 August 2014
I don’t think this one has any redeeming features.  The hill at the back covered in trees is just embarrassing.

Tower Bridge

29 May 2014

Now this us more like it.  It's based on a photo that a friend put up on Facebook of Tower Bridge in the fog on a very purple-looking day.

The people and plant pots in the foreground spoil it a little but after cropping them out, this one was worth framing.  A shame that the cropping meant that some of that dome on the right was lost but that’s how I roll.

This one was donated to a local school as a raffle prize.

Ugliest One Yet

8 February 2014

I think this was based on a photo I saw in the Metro.  Someone on Facebook asked whether that was a tiger in the trees.  Says it all really.  This one’s in the bin.

A Moody Sky

19 January 2014
Could there be hope?  This is the best painting for a long time, possibly second only to the Pathside Sheep.  The sky, the pink hills and the green foreground all look good.  I like the colour of the tree trunks (there's a bit of purple in there) but would rather they were a bit darker against the sky, where the clouds overpower them a bit.

This one has been framed and sold.

An Ugly Tree

4 January 2014

I like the colour of the hill in the background.  I was very pleased with that.

The rest of it is awful.

Some Rocks

30 October 2013
Here are some rocks.  The painting is based on a photo of a rocky outcrop in a canyon somewhere in America.  It was another chance for me to do some credit card scraping, but this time I'm not colouring rocks in blue.  I don't think this one was that bad compared to my earlier work but it’s let down a bit by some smudging and by being quite a dull subject.

While this one's never been framed, I've never had the heart to use the B-side for testing paints out.  It sits in my folder, still wondering what its ultimate fate will be.

An Ugly Mountain

29 October 2013
We’re now in the Facebook era and everything I paint is going up there.  This means I get to show off all the clunkers on this blog, providing some proper evidence of just how bad my painting was.

And we start off with this two-tone mountain.  What can I say?  Well, the sky was good.  And the mountain might be good in black and white.  I did get a good textural effect from scraping at the mountain with an old credit card.  But in colour, that blue half of the mountain is just wrong.  And I can't do foregrounds.

This painting was never framed.  It has long since been thrown away.

Two Random Landscapes

I wasn’t very good at painting and not that committed to improving.  I would have a quick burst of painting, then do nothing for three or four years.  Then have another go and be disappointed again.

But sometime in there (somewhere in 2005-10?) I came up with these two landscapes, which I liked.  What I really liked was the colour and the granulation.  And the colour and granulation is all there really is to these paintings.  There's no foreground to distract you from them.  I was a bit afraid of painting foregrounds.

I got these framed and they were both on the wall for a while.  I think there's just the one up there now.

Pathside Sheep

So we finally get on to watercolour.  I've always been hopeless at drawing or painting, so I don't know why it was that I went on the watercolour lesson at Centerparcs sometime around 1997-99.  I found it reasonably relaxing so thought I'd keep it up afterwards.

But I wasn't any good.  I came up with countless clunkers that have long since been used for practice on the back and then thrown away.  The painting here, though, was OK.  It actually started off as some random doodling on a separate piece of paper while I was doing another painting but ended up being better than the one I was trying to do properly.

I like the hills in the foreground in this one, with all sorts of colour going on.  The trees just behind the hill are good too.  But the sky isn't great with those three dark stripes.  And the back of the closest hills is too monotone in a British racing green sort of way.  Back in the day, I used to put sheep in all of my paintings & I don't think they're out of place here.

This painting was framed and gifted to my parents.  Rather than leave it to be given to charity after my parents' deaths, I took this one back home with me.  As my first half decent painting, it has definite sentimental value.

Mad Cow Disease

And here's the final piece of jig-art, made from the leftovers from Virgin On The Ridiculous.

Just like Career Woman, this is framed and on the Sunny Room wall but there the similarity ends.  Career Woman knocks this one out of the park.

Incidentally, someone else is making a name for himself in this art medium.  His name's Tim Klein.  He works with puzzles with fewer pieces and swaps much bigger chunks of puzzle than I do.  His stuff has a bit of a comedy edge to it too.  You can see his work here: https://puzzlemontage.crevado.com/puzzle-montage-art-by-tim-klein

Next up:watercolour.

Career Woman

You're probably wondering what happens to all the pieces left over from the jig-art.  Do the remaining pieces ever fit together into something good?

Well, they do fit together but the results haven't been great in my experience.  I can, though pick out selected highlights and show them separately.

Career Woman (this was the 90s and I could give paintings sexist names like that) comes from some of the pieces left over from It's A Jungle Out There!  I don't think she looks that bad.  She's framed (hence the reflections) and on the wall in the Sunny Room.  We don't call it the spare bedroom.

Virgin On The Ridiculous

Flushed with success I did another piece of jig-art a few years later.  Maybe 1997ish.

This time I went for 1500-piece puzzles.  One was The Virgin by Gustav Klimt; the other was something with coloured cows by Andy Warhol.

You have to be careful picking your puzzles if you're going to do this sort of thing.  There's no guarantee that the guy cutting the puzzles won't put one of them on upside down.  In the 1000 piece work, I think the New York skyline is upside down: it was supposed to be daytime at the top and nighttime in the reflection.  Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that you need to make sure that the puzzles you pick will work out even if one of the pictures is upside down.

This one worked out well but I prefer It's A Jungle Out There.  This one's also framed and on the wall at home.

It's A Jungle Out There!

First up and it's not a watercolour.  I call it jig-art.

I did this back in the early to mid 90s.  It struck me one day that all jigsaws the same size from the same manufacturer were probably cut using the same machine.  So they were all identical puzzles but with different pictures on them.  And that meant that you could mix the pieces.

I went out and bought three 1000-piece puzzles.  One was a New York skyline reflected in the water, daytime on one side of the water, nighttime on the other.  One was something called Mysterious India, with jungle, tigers, old buildings and a big face.  The third one was a car.  The original plan was to mix up the pieces checkerboard style in three different pairs (AB, BC, AC, yeah?) but I found that to be too tricky.  It was pushing too far the assumption that the jigsaws were identically cut, and the pieces wouldn't quite fit together.

So instead, I mixed two jigsaws together in big chunks rather than in little pieces.  And I was very pleased with the result.  Everything blends together really well.

This one is framed and sits on the wall at home.

Welcome To The Artistic Actuary

Welcome to The Artistic Actuary.

I am The Artistic Actuary.  An actuary who paints a few watercolours and has even managed to sell some of them.  Lots of people out there know who I am but I guess some of you don't.  Well, I'm not going to tell you who I am.  That way I might get more honest feedback.  And if you ask around in the office whether anybody knows who The Artistic Actuary is, it spreads the news and gets me more viewers.

People keep asking me whether I have my own art website.  I've decided to finally bite the bullet & write an art blog where people can see all my creations & get into arguments with each other in the comments sections about whether the artwork is any good.

So why not add The Artistic Actuary to your favourites or if, like me, you use Feedly, add me to the list of websites that the app monitors for updates?

<Edit: As of 15 September 2023 I'm no longer a Certified Actuary or Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries, having resigned from the profession a year after retiring.  I'll still be calling myself the Artistic Actuary, though, actuary not being a protected term.>