Art In Action 2009 (Part One)

The is the first of my posts about Art In Action at Waterperry. Hope you enjoy it.

This is a digitally coloured drawing called Freedom. I found the deer image in my copyright free book of animals.

I am really into boats at the moment. This is The Navigator and is a pen and ink drawing. Probably not a terribly sea worthy vessel. If you enlarge the drawing you will see that she is holding an owl. The navigator is, of course, the cockerel.

This is called The Butterfly Collector. Of course she only collects butterflies to draw and paint them and then she sets them free. No nasty pins and glass cases for this lady.

Here it is in detail

I was very pleased to be able to get to the Art In Action event this year. The weather was quite kind to us too. Art In Action is an art and craft show where nearly every artistic discipline is demonstrated by experts. There were 250 artists present at this year's show. Sadly I didn't get a chance to see everything because there were over 35 huge tents and marquees to visit. You would have to take advantage of the 2-3 and 4 day tickets. If I lived closer I think I would have definitely gone back for another day. There was so much to see and experience. What I did see was wonderful and I hope the photos below give an indication of how great it was. This is my first post on the show and I will do a second next week.

One of the first marquees I went into on reaching the fair was the Illustration area where I met Jackie Morris. I have featured Jackie's art in a previous post and I was very keen to see some of it first hand. I was not disappointed. Her work is beautiful when reproduced but it is even more superb when seen in real life. The colours are quite incredible. Jackie was just as I imagined she would be. She was very busy with book signing and answering questions about the piece she was working on etc. Her husband was also present to lend his support. It was quite difficult to get close enough to see all her work as there was quite a press of interested people examing the pictures and books. The photo is of Jackie chatting to an interested spectator.

These are two Jackie Morris cards which I bought. They show her technique really well. Her ability with watercolour is amazing. They are handmade by Jude Howells.

This is the stand of Rosi Robinson who is a batik artist. Rosi was in the "Market" section of the show which meant she had a display stand for sales but didn't have to demonstrate her craft. She has a website here.

This is the Italian artist Michele Del Campo who was giving a painting demonstration. His work is bright, colourful and super realistic and he produces huge canvases. His website can be found here. I wish I could have had so much more time there in order to stand and watch all the artists and craftspeople demonstrating their art, but there was just so much to see.

This is the fabulous beaded African Crucifix. It was created by the Ubuhle artists. They are a group of African women who use tiny beads to create wonderful images on cloth. These ladies live a very poor lifestyle in rural Natal in South Africa and put their heart and soul into their craftwork. This piece was an incredible 7 and a half by 4 and a half metres and the detail of the beading was incredibly beautiful. If you enlarge the picture you can see the size of the piece by relation to the people below.

The story of Ubuhle is a wonderful one whereby many women have been taught to bead and make jewellery and other items in order to create an income for themselves and their families and to improve their lives. You can read all about them on their website here.

Detail of African Crucifix

This is a close-up of the beadwork but you will need to enlarge the image to see it properly.

In amongst all the art and craft it was necessary to feed the parts that need feeding and here is a shot of the afternoon tea table. All very yummy.

These are views of Robert Race's stand. Robert is a designer/maker of toys and sculptures made from wood. His work is delightful and I loved those quirky little birds. You can see some more pieces on his website here.

Jane Hickman was displaying her wonderful collection of batiks and cards. She is such a talented artist with a brilliant sense of colour. I posted earlier about my little collection of her beautifully batiked birds which I have prints of. I mentioned a new one which I really wanted and guess what... here it is. So beautiful. I love these colours. You can find Jane's website here.

Purple Partridge

The Mexican marquee was full of bright colours as you can image. It was a wonderful display of the native arts of the country.

Arturo Sosa Perez is one of the best crafters of tin ornaments in Mexico and was demonstrating his art. He had a wonderfully bright display of his craftwork. The colours were amazing as you can see here. The cut paper work above is by Adriana Amaya and the art is known as Papel Picado.

These sculptures are by Miriam Ladron De Guevara. She had some lovely work on display. She told me that she had only arrived in England a day or so ago and had come straight to AIA to demonstrate her work. I bought these two images below on cards but I had to help her out with the currency.

Juan Alcazar was another artist in the Mexican marquee. He is a painter and printmaker and his etchings are quite beautiful. There were quite a few I would have liked to carry off home with me. You can see more of his work here at the Davidson Gallery

Hojas al Viento

Nocturno

Caminando con las Miradas

Illustration Inspiration

I said I would use these lovely umbellifer trees on another drawing and here it is. I don't think the deer shows up as well as with the red version, but on the whole I prefer this one I think....although the red one is nice.

This is quite a humorous image in pen and ink with a couple of dabs of digital colour. I love drawing figures with birds on some part of their anatomy.

This was produced by cross hatching with Staedtler fibre tipped pens. I loved drawing this piece. It has a very organic shape and I love the colours. I will definitely do some more of these. Cross hatching has to be the most relaxing art technique there is.

You can see I have been going through my red and black phase this week. This is a semi abstract drawing of tree forms and can be read either way up. It is partly painted but I think it would look a lot nicer when coloured digitally which is something I will probably do next week. I like the graphic quality.

This is the red painted version of the stylised deer and the original copyright free artwork from my motif book.

The following images are the work of illustrator and writer Christina Balit. They are from the books "The Lion Bible" and "The Twelve Labours Of Hercules".

Well, the new computer seems to be working well. Unfortunately the old computer decided to crash its hard drive before I had completed the removal of all the files. Everything was backed up to one month ago but the drawings I have done in the past month were lost sadly. I have hard copies of them but no image file. Some of them were too time consuming and complex to repeat and there are always so many new things to draw and paint that I think I will just write off the loss and carry on. A lesson well learned. Always back up your work.

I was musing today about how much inspiration I gain from things around me. I just have to catch a glimpse of a combination of colours in a magazine or, often, a particular pattern on someone's skirt. I try and memorise it until I get home and can commit it to paper. I have never yet approached anyone and asked to take a photo of an item of their clothing although I have often wanted to. I am not too sure how it would be received. I was looking through a book I borrowed from the library today with a picture of a red deer leaping in a snowy woodland scene which had been painted on 1930's china, and that gave me the inspiration I needed to produce my deer in landscape images. The actual deer artwork is from my dearly loved motif book with copyright free images. I often use images from this book as the basis for my drawings and paintings. I have posted a picture of the bird and animal motif book but I would like to get the plant and flowers book in the same series.

My multicoloured leaves drawing was also inspired by a retro china plate. I did the leaf motifs too large to get many rows in. I may well do it again and make the motifs small so that I can get all the colours of the rainbow in the picture. That would be more me.

My featured artist this week is Christina Balit. She is an English author and illustrator, primarily of childrens' books. She has an enchanting and vividly colourful style which is part naive, part contemporary with a little bit of folk thrown into the mix. I love the way she renders her trees and the hair of her figures. She uses masses of colours but her artwork never looks overdone, although it is very decorative. She doesn't have a personal website and it is difficult to find any of her artwork that is not just book covers on Amazon etc. The best way to appreciate her work is to buy the books she has illustrated. I have two which I have shown in the post. Both are full of the most amazing illustrations even if you don't want to read the stories. Her illustrations which I have posted are all from these two books....so browse and enjoy.

Vintage Greetings Cards and Small Designs

Fantasy flowers in watercolour

A pen and ink design I did some time ago but which I really like

This is a greeting card design with watercolour and digital colour

A very stylised sun design with spiral overload

Pen and Ink mermaid with digital colours

The bright little piggy really can fly

Pen and Ink stylised heron and decorative tree

The following are a selection of vintage greetings cards from my collection. Click on the cards if you would like to see them in large format.

This was my most expensive card. It has flowers painted in watercolours on the front and extensively inside the card. This must have taken someone a long time to create.

Violets are a very popular theme for vintage cards. These are all handpainted with watercolours.

These cards are all handpainted. The two bottom ones look as if they been made at home.

I don't collect many things but one collection I have been adding to over the years is my collection of vintage greetings cards. I started it about fifteen years ago and it has grown quite large now. At one time they were very cheap to obtain but prices have gone up these days but I think they are still worth it. My oldest card is dated 1884 and I have quite a few others of the late 1800s but the majority are early 1900 and some are around about the time of the second world war. It is possible for an expert to tell the age of a card by the style but I prefer to have the date inside - much easier. It is lovely to find cards which have the magic date but the majority are just signed. I must admit I never write the date in Christmas cards and birthday cards that I send.

The recipients of most of these cards seem to have mounted them in scrap books and therefore, when you buy them, most have the remains of glue on the back. I have seen entire scrapbooks full of these cards for sale on Ebay and in antique shops. I have even bought them at car boot sales.

My favourites are the hand painted ones, and surprisingly most of them are commercially produced and are not handmade at home. I can just imagine rows of ladies (it has to be ladies) sitting at benches and painting the designs in watercolour. I suppose in a way we have come full circle these days with the enormous interest in handmade greetings cards.

I have a few with distinctly art nouveau designs and some with images which became popular in the 1920s and 1930s. One very interesting one shows an image of a swastika and the card says "good luck". Quite a surprise really until I found out that the swastika image was in use in ancient times. It was hijacked by the Nazi's in the late 1930s and its original meaning was forgotten. This is obviously a card dated prior to the 1930s.

I hope you enjoy having a look at my collection. This is only a very small selection and I am always keeping my eye open for new (old) cards. I love to look through them every so often and read the notations and imagine the senders carefully penning their names. The cards come up quite large if you click on them.

I have been drawing and painting quite a few small designs this week which I hope you like. I was digitally colouring one of my large cockerel drawings and enjoying it immensely when the computer died on me and I lost a good half of what I had done. The moral of the tale is save, save, save your artwork in case the compu