old ruin near home with artist Renee Walden

old ruin near home

20 August 2024

Urban sketch of old ruin, Pyrenees, Spain.

Sketching an old ruin near our home. Listening to the sounds of sawing and hammering from our place. It certainly is not as tranquil as it looks in these photos. But these are happy sounds!

We've finally started the restoration of our very old house and the first step is a new roof.

We're one month into the project already and we've been living in our cellar. But today the big beams went up and it feels like our ruin is turning back into a house again. Hopefully before winter we'll be on the way to creating a home.

My plein air setup for watercolour painting

A free lesson for you!

One of my all-time favourite paintings of a stormy day in a ruined Roman town in Spain.

You can do this! Let me show you how. Join my community to receive this free video tutorial.

Join here

painting the valley of the red gods

28 April 2026

There's something particular about returning to a place you loved when you were young. The Valley of the Red Gods, tucked into the Western Cape of South Africa, is one of those places for me — and f...

a bluebell forest in watercolour (without painting a single bluebell)

11 April 2026

There's something about bluebells. That hazy, glowing carpet of purple-blue that appears for just a few weeks each spring, always in the kind of light that makes you want to stand very still. It's one...

how to paint primroses without getting lost in the detail

2 April 2026

Aren't primroses just made to be painted? That deep violet with the yellow centres, and if you look closely, so many beautiful colour variations within each petal. They're the first really intense col...