Skomer Puffin and North Wales Open

Skomer Puffin

©Sharon Whitley the Rambling Artist

Not been painting as much recently but did this puffin the other night, it's from one of Gary's photos and my facebook challenge this month is to paint him - so had to have a go myself - there have been some brilliant paintings entered, pop over and take a look if you're on facebook, the link is on the side bar!  

We're off to Skomer Island again on Saturday as the puffin chicks have now hatched and there will be loads of opportunities to get photos of puffins carrying a humungous number of fish in their mouths - amazing how they do that!!!  Tomorrow we'll be visiting the Dyfi Osprey Project and will finally hopefully get to see Monty for real!  And then on Sunday I'll be visiting Clwyd Theatr Cymru where two of my black headed gull paintings have been selected for the North Wales Open Art Exhibition - this runs from 22 June to 30 August - I'm chuffed to bits!!

So what are you up to at the weekend?  

Wonderful Wales

A couple of weekends ago we took a 'glamping' trip to Snowdonia - we've camped before in a small 2 man tent with not a lot of room, no electric hook up - which was all great fun but have decided to upgrade a bit, get a much bigger tent, so we can stand up!, electric hook up so we now have heating, a fridge and a kettle - wow what a difference!  We had quite a relaxing weekend, without our usual big mountain walks as I'm lacking in energy quite a bit at the mo - especially after the tougher than tough mountain marathon we did the weekend before!! Anyone who has iron deficiency anaemia will understand where I'm coming from! - anyway, the weather was glorious - we visited the Ugly House which I don't think is ugly at all, where I was thrilled to meet the lovely Huw Jenkins of Natur Cymru - see last post.

our one walk was up Yr Eifl on the Llyn Peninsula - just glorious

We visited the Glaslyn Osprey project but didn't see any ospreys unfortunately - I did get my paints out though while we were there and did a quick sketch of the view over to the Snowdon Horseshoe... the other painting below that is of the view from our glampy tent looking towards Moel Elio.

I'm delighted to say that the painting of Ceulan did get sold and has raised over £100 for the Dyfi Osprey Project which I'm absolutely thrilled about - they do fantastic work there and I'm looking forward to visit in a couple of weeks - the painting should be arriving in his new London home today. Here he is again...

On Sunday we travelled down to Skomer Island for the day and as well as the expected puffins we were thrilled to see short eared owls - more about Skomer in my next post..... have a wonderful day!