Hannah Cole and The Industrious Art of Blogging

This is simply called "Arches" for obvious reasons. I fiddled with this design for ages adding circles to represent fruit etc but in the end I decided to keep it simple.

This is a pen and ink drawing with a background of digital colour to make it appear more "apple" like. If you haven't already guessed - it is Eve and the Apple.

This is my black tree digital image. I originally made the tree and the bird white but they got lost in among all these colours so I changed them to black to make them more prominent.

I liked the above design so much I took the bird and branch out and redid them for a greetings card image. This is my "Neopolitan Bird". I think I prefer this colourway.

And this is the box where I got my colour palette idea.

This is the second design I did for greetings cards

This is a beautiful mermaid relief print by unknown artist. It is a greetings card with an original etching or linocut - not sure which. It is initialled but I am unable to read it. I love mermaid images and have produced quite a few of my own over the years.

Another delicate mermaid etching which is also a greetings card. Unusual to find an original etching card. Needless to say, this one will be staying with me also. It is by Mark Crowther. I love the way the colours bleed into one another.

Pretty jewels from my bead box. I love running my hands through these tiny glass beads of every conceivable colour. I have used them for a couple of projects in the past but I don't think I could ever use all these up if I beaded from now till domesday. Lovely to look at though.

If you are an owl, or a bird, or a rabbit fan, (or any other animal come to that) check out UK artist Helen Musselwhite's website here. Or her Etsy shop here. She has lots of delightful cut paper sculptures and collages which she mounts in display boxes. Her work is very colourful, graphic and folky. The papers she uses are lovely and it must take hours of patient work to cut and assemble the artwork. Hats off to Helen.

A quirky white rabbit

A delicious blackbird with flowers

I found this beautiful textured leaf a while back. Usually I press leaves inside heavy books to flatten them but I am glad this one got forgotten because it has dried into a lovely shape all by itself.

My featured artist is Hannah Cole who hails from North Devon in the UK but now lives in Brighton. Her images of the British seascapes are very well known but she also paints landscapes and other work. Her painting style is extremely popular with the buying public and I have bought quite a few of her greetings cards in the past as I really enjoy her work. She has a great love of the English countryside and seaside and this is reflected in her lovely paintings.

Her paintings are built up in layers of colour in which she makes marks. Her views are often her response to a scene rather than an actual representation of that scene. I love her soft, gentle, almost pastel palette and the almost naive quality she imparts to her work. She has the ability to produce a beautiful scene without lots of decoration (not like me..ha ha) oh, and I love the quirky dogs which often appear in her work. Hannah has her own interesting website here where you can browse her work, or you can find more images at the Seascape Gallery or her greetings cards at The Whistlefish Gallery. I was in John Lewis yesterday and saw some beautiful seascape pictures and thought they looked very much like Hannah's work....and they were!

Moroccan Pink

Watching And Waiting

Red Boat, St. Ives

Moroccan Memory

Ditchling Beacon

By The Windbreak

Winter On The Downs

Waiting To Play Ball

Low Tide, Polperro

Devon Fields

I wonder how many trillions of blogs there are out there. I was checking out the next blog feature on blogger the other day and was amazed at the number and variety of blogs in every language under the sun. Whatever your interest in life you can publish a blog about it. I am drawn to art and craft blogs myself and there is plenty of choice to immerse myself in. Blogger has nearly 60 different blog categories and some of those have sub-cats. There are even blogs about....well, blogging. Where did all this spare time come from to keep our blogs up to date? There is no doubt that blogging is very time consuming. Some of the bloggers I have come across recently have several blogs on the go...one person has ten. Amazing. One thing I have noticed is that I am inclined to pass over very wordy blogs for those with interesting pictures. With everyone rushing through their blog visits at speed, it is vital to have great images to catch the attention and slow people down. Just off to take some new photos....!