Eye Candy

This is a digital drawing titled "Peaceful Birds". I think perhaps it could be improved with smaller leaves and bigger birds....ha ha.

and this is the sketch of the original idea. I liked the design even as a really rough drawing.

These are pen and ink drawings which were originally designed for handmade greetings cards but I never got around to putting them on the cards. I think they look nicer as a montage of coloured trees in a very surreal landscape.

This is a pen and ink drawing with a bit of digital red. It took ages to do all those feathers.

Stripey Hats - a very quirky digital drawing

I love this gorgeous pastel. It is called Butterfly Boy and is by Sharon Yamamoto. I met Sharon some years ago at a craft fair. She is a Japanese American artist whose work is delightfully mystical and magical. She produces some of her images on ceramic art tiles and the colours are vivid and vibrant and much more intense than paintings. I recommend a visit to her lovely website here.

Sunrise Voyage - Sharon Yamamoto

Some tulips and apple blossom to get us in the mood for spring. I am hoping the apple blossom will be out soon as I want to take some new photos. The forecast predicts a very cold week though, so perhaps we shall have to wait a little longer for spring to arrive.

It is March the first today so it must be St. David's Day. So to all the Welsh people all over the world - Cyfarchion - which I hope, translated, says greetings.

I found these delightful geese on the internet the other day. They are the work of mixed media artist Kathleen Mattox who has a blog here.

I had a lovely gift in the post from Catriona Millar. You may remember that she was my featured artist on December 13th 2008. She emailed me about the blog post and said she would send me a copy of the recipe book which features her artwork. I received it the other day and it is a wonderful book called Fun with Spinach by Mike Robson. It has lots of beautiful paintings by Catriona. So thank you very much Catriona and the best of luck with your delightful art. Catriona's website is here if you want to pop over and have a browse.

I have decided that this is my absolute favourite of Catriona's paintings. I just love the theme and the pastel colours she has used.

The embroideries and artwork below are all the work of English textile artist Audrey Walker. She is the daughter of a Cumbrian embroideress and produces textile work which is almost painted on the cloth by her stitches. She originally trained as a painter in Edinburgh and has always been particularly interested in figurative work. Her work is layered with fabric and millions of machine or hand stitches. Her sense of colour, shade and tone is incredibly subtle and beautiful.

I have met Audrey at the Knitting and Stitching Show in London in the past and have also visited exhibitions of her work and it is truly lovely. Some of her pieces are huge and you have to stand back quite a distance to appreciate them fully. It must take hours and hours of painstaking work to put in so many tiny stitches but what she produces is well worth the effort.

I love the way her subjects gaze at each other and into the distance; speaking without words. There is a quality of mystery and stillness about them. Most of the pictures are from a Ruthin Craft Centre book that I bought some time ago and also the superb Diana Springall book called Inspired to Stitch which has to be one of my favourite books - but that is another story.

Temptation

Study for Woman at Window

Adam and Eve

Hear No Evil

Who's There

Beach Woman

Study For Temptation

Gaze 1v

This image shows the detailed stitching in Audrey Walker's work. Close up the stitching is very visible but she has such an comprehensive knowledge of shades and tones, that if you stand away from the art, it all gells together to make sense of the form. You will probably need to enlarge the image to see the stitching properly.

I have had a good week drawing on the computer. Birds have made their appearance again...don't they always. If it wasn't for birds my repertoire would be very much smaller.

After posting a picture of an Anita Jeram kitty last week I am now thinking about drawing cats. Cats are easy to draw in pointillism but that style takes months to do so I will have to think of a different technique of making a cat look like a cat, or I may just draw a stylised cat. The wonderful thing about stylising images is that no one can look at them and say they are wrong. They can be whatever you want them to be as long as they vaguely resemble felis catus. Having two cats in our house and family and neighbours with cats, there is no shortage of inspirational material.

A Big Welcome To 2009

Hello Everyone. Nice to be back after the holidays. I hope you all had a lovely time and enjoyed Christmas and the New Year.

Here is my first offering of 2009. I so liked the little angel dog on the woman's shoulder in the picture below that I decided to give them a whole page to themselves.

I received these lovely little fabric collages in the post after winning them on Colette's giveaway. Colette makes wonderful printed and fabric items and collages from her own designs. Lots of lovely birds too. Have a look at her great blog here.

She also has a delightful Etsy shop here which is well worth a peek. Thanks very much for these pretty items Colette. I am very lucky to have won three giveaways now. Unfortunately this image won't click to increase the size. I find that Blogger always does this at least once in every post, but you can see Colette's work more clearly on her various sites.

This is just a quick fun drawing I did on the computer while messing around in PS. I liked the result. Pen and ink and digital colour nearly always produces an interesting result.

I really enjoyed doing this pen and ink and fibre tip pen artwork. I like the cute little dog too. Not any breed I recognise though.

This is Princess Lily. I decided, quite by chance, to use a different colour scheme here, and I must say I quite like it. It is a little like a brown paper collage on blue backing paper, but it isn't. One of my all time favourite films is Ridley Scott's "Legend" with Tim Curry as the evil devil and a very young and crooked toothed Tom Cruise who falls in love with Princess Lily. This picture doesn't resemble Mia Sara at all but it gives the general idea. The film is full of forests of improbably huge trees (where did they get them?) elves, fairies, unicorns and wicked goblins and butterflies and blossom drifting on the air. Delicious escapism.

The pictures below are from this new book about embroidered textiles of the world. It is a huge, beautifully illustrated book with sections devoted to geographical areas such as India, Eastern Europe etc and also cultures, past and present. There are oodles of gorgeous photos and pen and ink drawings of patterns. Very inspiring. You may need to click on the pictures to get a clearer view. Tons of inspiration to be had here. Very glad it came to live with me..lol.

These are three of my winter tree photos to illustrate stand alone trees, although technically speaking this one below is a two together tree. Just a minor point.

The following images are the work of printmaker and artist Hannah Firmin. Her work is very popular and well known and I have posted a couple of links below where her work can be found or just type in her name in a search engine and you will come up with lots of hits.

Well I hope everyone has had a lovely Christmas and New Year and has come out the other end unscathed. It has certainly been a cold one in England. We have had lots of frost at night and lovely, sparkly white mornings. I love hoar frosts when all the trees and bushes are covered with white sparkles. Makes lovely photos if you can get up early enough before the frost disperses.

I love the trees at this time of the year. Spring and summer trees are beautiful of course, but skeletal winter trees are so interesting because you can see their form much more clearly. I really enjoy seeing their individual shapes and the way each species' branches grow. I think I prefer to draw winter trees, partly because they are much easier...ha ha.

There are lots of wonderful tree groups on Flickr where you can immerse yourselves in tree photos to your hearts' content. One of my favourites is the "lone tree" group which, as the name implies, illustrates lone trees in the landscape. Wonderful. I have included a few of my winter photos which you might like.

My artist this week is Hannah Firmin. She is a very well-know English illustrator and printmaker who has illustrated many products, magazines, books etc. She is probably best know for her illustrations of the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency. I expect everyone will recognise these artworks from the bookshelves. Her work is colourful, detailed, graphic and dramatic and covers a huge range of subject matter. A selection of her work can be found here and here.

I actually met Hannah at the Art In Action event at Waterperry in Oxfordshire a few years ago, where she was demonstrating printmaking. She is very interesting to watch and listen to as she knows her profession really well and can impart lots of useful titbits of information which is useful to us "less than perfect" linocutters. She made it all look so easy and of course it isn't...lol.

Sorry about the quality of some of the scanned images as my scanner is really playing up.

50th Blog Post Giveaway

This giveaway is to celebrate my 50th blog post. I am giving away sets of eight handmade greetings cards to the lucky winners. There are one each of the four bird designs below and four of my white deer with trees design which I posted a couple of weeks ago. Go down the posts to the 2nd of November to find it. If you would like a chance of winning just leave a comment on this post before Sunday 30th November and I will put your name in the hat. If you are not a blogger you will need to let me know your email address.

These are the greetings cards for my giveaway. There are eight in total - four bird designs and four of the white deer design. All the cards are blank and will arrive with white envelopes and in cellophane wrappers.

I was trying for a dramatic costumed look with this drawing.

This image is called Victorian Necklace

I absolutely adore this wonderfully vibrant and stylised tapestry by Lilian Hill called Crested Birds. If I owned it it would have pride of place as a wall hanging where I could admire it every day.

Beautifully colourful tapestry called Sheep Among Flowers In A Meadow woven by Miriam Bawden The following artworks were all created by the multi-talented Mark Hearld and are a mixture of paintings, collages and linocuts.

This is my 50th blog post. Amazed that I have got this far really. I haven't actually been blogging for nearly a year because to start with I used to post several times a week. I gradually reduced it to weekly for convenience and time really. A weekly post suits me fine at the moment.

I have decided that my blog giveaway will be a set of eight handmade greetings cards featuring some of my new artwork and some of a previous piece from a couple of weeks ago which seemed quite popular. I had a lot of fun producing the four white bird designs but they took quite a long time. I hope whoever wins them will be pleased with their prize. I used to make a lot of handmade cards at one time but they do take quite a while as I print the image and then mount it on the cards. My computer printer isn't up to printing on stiff card so this is the only way I can do it.

I had a birthday lunch with three good friends the other day. It was quite a surprise, but a very welcome one. It took about 20 minutes to eat the meal and then 3 hours to gossip about all and sundry. We used to all work together at one time but three of us have gone on to other things. It was lovely to catch up on what everyone was doing and have a good laugh into the bargain. The world would be a duller place without friends.

My artist this week is the talented English artist Mark Hearld. He produces work via linocuts, collages, paintings and ceramics. He is inspired by the natural world and animals and birds play a large part in his work. He doesn't appear to have his own website but his work can be found at various sites including St Jude's Gallery, and The Yew Tree Gallery which shows some of his ceramics.