Fleet Pond

Fleet pond is Hampshire's largest freshwater lake.  It's located next to the station and along with the surrounding area of heath-land and marshland forms a nature reserve that the residents of Fleet are justifiably proud of.  My parents live a couple of minutes walk from Fleet Pond and my Dad is an active member of the Fleet Pond Society.  When my parents go on holiday I park my car at their house so I can water the garden on my way home from work.  A couple of years ago, as I was walking back to their house after work a rainbow could be seen from the jetty at the end of their road.  I couldn't resist stopping for a few photos thinking that one day, this would make a nice painting.  It's taken me a while to actually paint this.  Rainbows aren't easy and I never quite figured out how I could make it work in watercolour.  In the end, I decided to try with pastels instead and I'm reasonably happy with the results.  It's one of those pictures that I think looks better in real life than it does in a photograph but that's probably a reflection on my photography skills more than anything else.  It took a long time to get the clouds right and once I'd finished the picture, there were several weeks worth of tweaks added before I was happy enough to put it in a frame.  Part of the reason for eventually putting it in a frame was to stop myself from fiddling with it any further as I was in danger of over-doing it.

The jetty wasn't in my original photo as that's where I stood to take my pictures.  I went back another day to take those pictures as I thought it would make for a more interesting picture.  The person with his camera wasn't there either.  Someone did walk past a moment or two after I took my photos and took his phone out of his pocket to try and catch the same picture.  Just as he did that, the rainbow vanished and the rain started.  I decided to rewrite history a little in my painting and allow him the opportunity to arrive a minute earlier and catch the picture.  It was quite a lovely sight and it's a shame he missed out.