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"Two Most Precious Things" was painted for the Literary theme for the 133rd Dublin Painting and Sketching Club Exhibition. The brief was wide open, so I chose to illustrate a scene from Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince". I used a watercolour base and added paper collage with textured paper, and added some parts of the text of the story throughout the imagery. The challenging part was the angel, as I wasn't sure whether to make the face look real with flesh colours, or to portray him as a sculpted stone angel. I decided on the latter, but added some tear stains to the face to 'melt' the stony texture.

I first became attracted to watercolour over 30 years ago on a painting holiday in Cornwall. I loved the immediacy and fluidity of the medium. When I painted the old rooftops of the quirky yet beautiful old buildings, colours ran together giving an organic feel to the moss and old slates. I felt like I'd discovered a magic colouring book! The watercolour captured the essence of my subjects in an ethereal way. Enchanted by the possibilities of creating a new, dream-like reality within my paintings, I developed my style with an emphasis on the effects I could achieve with Watercolour, by letting the paint and water form patterns in their own way. I love to break the old fashioned rules of the medium, pushing it to its limits. As...