First Year Blog Anniversary Giveaway

I have now been blogging for a WHOLE YEAR....taa daa. Time for another giveaway to mark the occasion. If you want to enter a comment on this post I will draw three people out of the hat (or other receptacle) on Sunday and send each a copy of my print below.

These are the three prints that I will be giving away. Although this is a photograph of them, the colour on the computer is always brighter than in real life.

This is the actual digital image of my folk angel. This drawing has been waiting unfinished on my worktable for several months because I didn't know what else to do with it, but it does look well in colour.

Pen and ink oystercatchers with a hint of digital colour. I love oystercatchers. They are such pretty birds and lend themselves very well to artwork

A fishy tale in watercolour and ink

The images below are the artwork of illustrator and artist Stuart Kolakovic. I love his folk art style and his wonderful palettes. I was inspired to create my folk angel with a similar palette to his but mine is quite a bit brighter. These are very contemporary but also traditional. I love his work and you can find more on his website here. He also has an Etsy shop here.

These lovely papier mache creations are by Julianna Bollini who has pages full of them and other delightful creature on her Flickr site which you can see here. She also has a website called Barco de Papel which the Internet translates from Spanish as "ship of role". No idea what that means but it must be good. She has a lovely blog here if you speak Spanish, or you can just look at the great photos.

Nancy Nicholson is a English collage and embroidery artist and she produces some lovely work. These contemporary embroidered birds are stunning. Unfortunately there is very little about her on the Internet.

Cannot have spring without some sheep and lambs. I love the little black faced fellow in the second picture. He looks as if he should be the black faced mum's lamb but she already has two pristine white ones. I am sure he was reunited with his real mum though.

Aren't the spring flowers wonderful at the moment. Forget-me-nots don't look very much from a distance but if you get the camera lens really close, they are very special.

If anyone wants a real treat, listen to Andrea Bocelli and Hayley Westenra singing Viva Per Lei whilst two amazing skaters are performing on youtube. I love listening to youtube music when I am writing my blog.

These delightful ceramics are by Kazakhstan artist Natalya Sots. Natalya lives in Chicago now and has a shop on Etsy where I first saw her work. Her modelling, colours and sense of humour are such a treat. Her Etsy shop is here. She also has a website here and a Flickr site here with lots of pictures of her work. I love the cat with a bird on its head.

The images below are the artwork of Geoge Birrell. George is a Scot who trained in Glasgow and started painting full time in 1989. Much of his subject matter relates to the buildings and fishing villages of Scotland. His beautiful paintings are bold, graphic, well designed and very colourful. His work also seems to have a stylised and slightly naive quality about it which, in my opinion, is much nicer than a exact rendering of the subject. It is amazing how many exceptional artists come from Scotland. There are masses of sites on the Internet showing George's work but the following sites here and here and here give a good display.

Autumn Garden - this is definitely my favourite of his work. I love the explosion of gorgeous colours.

Chateau Ecossais 2

Blue Mill

Boats and Tarry Wall

Castle Saltire

Harbour Blues 2

Mill and Moon, Orkney
Net Profit

Five Boats

Crowsteps

I cannot believe I have been blogging for a whole year this week. That time has simply disappeared I know not where. I must say I do enjoy it, although it takes up a lot of time and quite a bit of effort. I am always amazed when I read blogs which were started in 2005 or 2006. Those people must have great dedication to have carried on so long. Regarding mine, the pictures come easily, it is the words I have to search for.

I expect everyone in the whole world knows of Scot Susan Boyle by now. How to go from being unknown to becoming so famous in just one evening. What a mad, mad, world we live in. I think she deserves it though. She seems a really nice, down-to-earth person.

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