Peter's Travel Blog

We’re back at sea, which means back to work for me. Today, I had them painting winter trees, in preparation for painting summer trees tomorrow. As we sail the Atlantic, heading for South America, the work doesn’t stop after the last class. From today, my new regime means spending all afternoon in the cabin painting scenes from where we’ve been....

  To our surprise, we discovered before going to bed last night that we were down for escorting duties in Mindelo. That rather put paid to our plans for a chilled out day, but weren’t entirely unhappy about it, since we got to go up Mount Verde… The tour was billed as ‘A Glimpse of the Island’, and our instructions...

Today’s classes were full again; I had them painting a boat scene, with an emphasis on the Rules of Reflection. It all seems quite simple at first, but soon throws up a few tricky little challenges, one of which is having to encourage the paint to flow in two different directions at once. Not a lot else has happened. This...

It’s been another day at sea. Today’s class was ‘Puddles’; a much simpler exercise than the Belem Tower session the other day. In many ways, it felt like an antidote to that perspective challenge, or a gift for persevering through it. Either way, everyone seemed to enjoy it; there’s nothing more satisfying than a room full of happy punters. There...

Today, we arrived in Funchal, Madeira. Since we had no tour escorting duties, we decided to just catch the complementary shuttle bus into the town and potter around for an hour or so. The only thing on our agenda was to find a supermarket where we could buy a couple of large bottles of water. I’ve been to Funchal lots...