Rain, Birds and Greg Poole

It is a bit of a birdy post this week. It took quite a while to get the colours right for this one. The colours seen on the screen are often not the colours you see when the piece is printed.

I am always thinking up new ways to decorate trees. I really like this pen and ink with digital colour.

I used some hands from a magazine picture for this pen and ink drawing. I think I have mentioned before that I cannot draw hands to save my life. This is entitled "Falling Leaves".

This is a digital piece called Ladder Birds for obvious reasons. I so liked the design of the birds with the pink tree in this post that I decided to use them for this drawing as well.

I thought you might like to see these delightful ceramics by ceramicist and sculptor Paul Smith. Lovely quirky items.

I found another very old and deliciously gnarled tree for those visitors, who, like me, love trees. This reminds me of the trees in Fangorn Forest in LOTR.

I have a great love of winter ploughed fields in the landscape. This is a local scene and a great draw for dog walkers.

We have had some beautifully misty mornings lately. They may be decidedly awkward for driving but they are great for landscape photography. The following images are all the work of UK artist and illustrator Greg Poole. He has a lovely and huge website here. You can find more information about him at the bottom of this post.

Apparently we are having the wettest winter in the UK...ever. Not sure how far back "ever" extends, but it certainly sounds as if it is unusually wet. Being a water sign I don't mind water on the whole. I am not too keen on walking in it if I haven't got a waterproof on though. A nice warm waterproof jacket, waterproof over trousers and a pair of sturdy walking boots and you can walk for miles in the rain. It does amazing beautiful things to winter trees. Sparkling drops on the ends of dark branches etc. The only trouble with photographing them is that the camera is likely to get a bit wet. It also brings a huge number of wild birds to the garden bird tables and grass. The blackbirds are particularly amusing - chasing each other out of the garden when there are worms aplenty for all.

My featured artist this week is a multi-media English artist called Greg Poole. I have seen Greg's work exhibited for many years at the Society of Wildlife Artists exhibition at the Mall Galleries in London. He has a huge interest and love of birds and nature in general and especially conservation. He has also illustrated books and magazines. Whenever I visit the SWLA exhibition, I always make a beeline for the printmaking section where his work is usually to be found.

His website is here and you can find a huge amount of his work there. I have posted a selection of his work but mainly prints. He produces silkscreens, monoprints, paintings, drawings and collages. His work has a lovely graphic spontaneity. He admits to creating bird art as an aesthetic rather than a scientific appreciation. Whatever he does, he does beautifully anyway.

Christmas Is Fast Approaching

This is the coloured version of my pen and ink drawing posted last week. It didn't take too long to colour either. Not sure why blogger is making it blurred. You may need to click on it for a larger version to see it better.

I love the old retro cloche hats of the 30s. I wish they were still popular today. These two are definitely over-the-top but I think the idea is ok.

This is just a quick fantasy drawing I did today. I love these colours and may use them for other pictures. This piece is entitled The Headdress.

This is another Christmas card design using the same tree I posted previously under a different guise. I am not too sure whether the gold star looks right but otherwise I think it is quite a pretty image. This is an actual London tree.

This is the finished Christmas card which I am using for my brother's cards this year. Quite minimal but wintry I hope.

Lovely contemporary image of deer by Caroline Gardner cards. Lovely modern palette.

This was a previous Christmas card from Caroline Gardner cards but far too nice to send to anyone...lol.

This is an Oxfam Christmas 2008 card. Not sure who the designer is but it is beautifully detailed and full of inspiration for those of us who love trees and leaves. Oxfam seem to have gone over to much more contemporary cards this year and I think the designs are a great improvement. I overheard one of the elderly ladies who serve behind the counter saying she hated them though. Still you cannot please everyone.

The following images are paintings by the English artist Clare Shepherd. You can find here website here.

Christmas is getting ever closer and I have been on the lookout for new and interesting Christmas card designs. There was a time when I used to buy lots and lots of packets of cards, usually charity cards. But times is 'ard these days and now I only purchase the designs I cannot live without and leave the others on the shelves for wealthier members of the population. I find greetings cards on the whole to be extremely expensive, especially when you think that they cost mere pence to produce en masse. I don't mind if a decent amount of the profit goes to the charity concerned, but sometimes I wonder if that is the case. Why am I buying cards anyway, I can hear you thinking, when I have the means to produce my own. Don't ask. I think it is something to do with the grass being greener on the other side of the fence or perhaps other designers' images being better than mine.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I have long admired Caroline Gardner cards and I have posted a couple with deer images. One is this year's and one is from a previous year but was too nice to send...hah hah. I don't think you can beat a nice coloured deer at Christmas. You might want to check out her website. She is another person who seems to revel in lots of lovely colours.

How many sketch books do you possess? I have a few and some of them have pristine pages. Why? Because I find it very difficult to sketch in a sketch book. I tend to sketch and draw on lots of odd bits of paper and old envelopes etc and then I may stick those in the sketch book. Alternatively, I will do my first sketch on rough paper and then produce a slightly better sketch in the sketch book. I find it nearly impossible to do a completely new sketch in the right place first time. I think it has to do with not wanting to mess up lovely white pages and also worrying about filling up the book too quickly as I produce a huge amount of sketches at a time. My brother's partner, Lesley, has just given me a lovely sketchbook with beautiful quality paper but this time I am determined to draw in the right place. Hmmm.... we'll see.

My featured artist this week is Clare Shepherd who is an English artist living in Dorset. She also enjoys teaching art. She has a wonderful colour sense and her paintings are very contemporary with lots of light and colour. She uses shapes to advantage and these veer slightly toward the abstract. Her work covers a very wide spectrum and on her beautiful website here you can find a huge quantity of artwork. I especially enjoy her landscapes of Dorset and Exmoor.

SWLA And The V & A

This image is inspired by a fashion illustration book I have been reading. It is entitled "The Cool Breeze". She certainly needs her pashmina.

This is a "work in progress" pen and ink drawing. It will have a lot more elements when it is completed and I will post the finished version. I am enjoying drawing it but I am not sure where it is going. That is part of the fun though.

I got the idea for this one from one of prints at the SWLA exhibition. I like the naive quality.

You will probably have to click on this one to enlarge it as it has come out quite small. I think blogger likes square pictures best and most of mine are portrait. I enjoyed doing the buildings at the top of picture. I may try a few more of those.

These are two of my latest Christmas card purchases. I like the contemporary one on brown recycled card. A really nice design. The santa one is by Clare Madicott. I love her cards. They are so bright and eye catching. She has a nice website but it is off line at the moment

The following images are the artwork of master wood engraver Colin See-Paynton. What an incredible talent he has. I would love to own one of his engravings.

Goodness, how time flies. It doesn't seem a minute since I last did my blog and now here I am doing another one. Does anyone else think time has speeded up somehow...? Impossible, I know, but it does feel like it.

I treated myself to a day out last Tuesday. I enjoy going up to London every few months just for a bit of window shopping. I made my once yearly visit to the Society of Wildlife Painters Exhibition at The Mall Galleries. It is a wonderful treat for anyone who loves animal, bird and nature art. All media are encompassed but my favourite section is definitely the printmaking part. None of it was to be rushed over and I spent over an hour in there but part of that was spent drinking coffee of course. One of my favourite artists was exhibiting - Carry Akroyd. The past years I have visited have been slightly disturbed by very noisy and enthusiastic childrens' school parties but they were absent this year.

In the afternoon I made my way to another favourite spot. The Victoria and Albert Museum, better known simply as the V & A. It is a huge museum devoted to decorative arts and crafts and is totally wonderful. There are rooms crammed full of old sculptures, wooden statues dating back to medieval times, 20th century English and American artifacts, fashion, ceramics, textiles....you name it, it is in there. There are a lot of exhibits from churches all over Europe - not sure how they got there. They also have a wonderful cafe and a mouthwatering shop which I tried to keep out of but didn't quite succeed. I bought a small book on contemporary bird art which will provide lots of inspiration for my artwork in the future.

The only downside is the poor light in some of the exhibition rooms makes photography difficult. If you use flash it whitens out the subject. There were so many things I wanted to photograph too. Some people have managed it because I looked the museum up on the Flickr site and there are some great shots. The textile and tapestry rooms have very subdued lighting to prevent the textiles losing their colours. There is so much to see that you can only ever see a tiny proportion at each visit.

All in all I had a lovely day in London and my return travel arrangements even fitted in nicely, not something that usually happens I can assure you.

On Saturday I popped into John Lewis to check out their range of Christmas cards. I love buying cards because I love to see other peoples' designs as well as my own. I usually buy a pack and save one of each design for myself. I often buy greetings cards specifically to keep because I like the image so much. I have posted a couple of new ones that appealed to me.

My featured artist this week is Colin See-Paynton. He is a very well known and respected English wood engraver. He is totally self taught so we have that in common if nothing else. He always works in black and white and the detail he achieves is unbelievable. The work must be very painstaking and imagine how mad he must be if he is almost at the end of a very complex piece and suddenly realises he has made an error. He doesn't strike me as the type who would make mistakes like that though. Have a look at his work on his website here. He has published several books and one I borrowed from the library a while back costs well over a hundred pounds on Amazon.

My artwork this week is more illustrative and is mostly pen and ink work with a touch of colour here and there. I am going to London for the fabulous Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace on Thursday so I should have some interesting pictures next week.