Alan Reed, a watercolour artist born in Northumberland. His love for watercolour was discovered at the young age of 15. He trained Art and Design at Newcastle College and afterwards spent the first few years of his career doing artist impressions on new building projects for architects. By the age of 18, Alan had his first exhibition, which was held at the local library in his hometown.

Over the last 35 years, Alan Reed’s career has thrived due to his unique painting style which he developed. He specialises in both cityscapes and landscapes. His paintings captured the eyes of many and he has grown to become one of Britain’s leading watercolour artists. Alan lives with his wife in Ponteland in Northumberland, where his gallery and studio are situated. He has been married for 20 years, a proud father of two children and three grandchildren. Alan has travelled around the world due to his work, to countries such as, Italy and Oman in the Middle East.

As he is responsible for painting beautiful pieces, Alan’s wife, Susan helps along with the business. She takes care of the marketing and PR side, while trying to find different scenery around the world for Alan to paint. Alan explains how today, it is considerably hard to sell his paintings in the North East. As the number of watercolour artists has increased, this makes the whole process of selling paintings more competitive and challenging. However, Alan believes that challenge is a good thing as it makes him become more creative to produce different and unique pieces.

For the first 25 years of his career, Alan's work was focused on landscapes and cityscapes. However, in the past few years he started experimenting with oil paints and portraits.  He found that doing portraits is a fresh and new challenge that he really enjoys. The difference between oil and watercolour painting is the technique. Watercolour is probably the hardest medium to use as there is little room for mistakes. ‘You can mess oil paint at any stage and still be able to fix around it, however, a small mistake with watercolour during the early stage means that you need to start all over again’, Alan explained. At the moment, his favourite artist that he is doing a lot of studying on is John Singer Sargent, an American artist who lived between 1880-1925 and was considered as the leading portrait painter of his time.

Being an artist is not like an ordinary 9-5 job, as much as Alan enjoys his job as an artist, it has both its advantages and disadvantages. For him, one of the best things about what he does is the opportunity to travel around the world, to visit all the spectacular sites. Alan explained how his job is also very rewarding ‘it is a nice feeling when you do a piece of work, either it wins an award or someone pays a decent amount of money for the work I have done’. The challenge is that you never know who will come to the gallery and when you will sell a painting. ‘No matter how famous you are, you still need to sell your paintings to make a living',’ said Alan.

‘Blogging is almost like a snapshot of your work and quite an interesting process’, when asked about his opinion on blogging. One of the main reasons why Alan started to blog was because it would be a tool to help him reach a wider audience. He uses his blog as a platform to promote his main website, in addition to posting all his paintings. Through blogging, he has a more personal relationship with his readers as he is able to communicate and discuss their opinions and views about a particular subject or topic.

Alan enjoys blogging, because as soon as he posts something on his blog, he can immediately find out what others think about his paintings. He believes that his blog is a good online diary to store all his works on it. ‘I am an artist that wants to make my career a successful business, I have to sell my paintings and work, and actually blogging is a good way to get my work out there to a wider audience, not only in the North East but around the world’, Alan said. Today, he has two to three blogs active at the same time.