It sort of started with this photograph of my dad, in his 80s at th time, bowling a ball on Woolacombe Beach I put this image on my facebook page and one of the comments was "why was your dad dancing?", so after a couple of interim sketches, my Dad morphed into a ballerina!!this image was my first foray into using oils as a painting medium.

it started out initially as a pencil sketch, i wanted to add colour, but my preferred media, pencils just weren't up to showing the colours with the skill level that ii had, so i turned to smelly, dirty oils,, id always avoided oils as although they do provide good results, you seemingly have to be bloody good at using them, my initial dawbs with various sizes and shapes of brush werent going anywhere, so i got my fingers out to use which was totally counter iintuitive. i was using a canvas board and one of the golden rules about using oils ( for me, at least) was to avoid getting any on your skin or clothes as they are a nightmare to clean off, so when i thought :hmm, ill just use fingers to try things I was pretty much  freestyling, but it worked out OK, unfortunately the original painting was a victim of my recent house move, i'm not sure where it got stored, or who bagged it, i did photograph it and i intend to to progress the idea into a tryptich of the three figures, i have somr more sketches to progress n a similar way, but they are of cricket fast bowlers