Christmas Chickens and Giving A Kittie A Good Home

This is "Lady With Birds". Quite self-explanatory really. Love those colours.

Here is the lovely kittie picture and card I received from Sandy Mastroni as the winner of her blog giveaway. I am a great admirer of Sandy's wonderful artwork and I am really pleased to own these two characters. The kittie has such a sweet, appealing expression.

This gorgeous image is a greeting card of Rene Gruau. I love the simple, clean palette and the graphic quality. It loosely inspired my lady with birds image above.

I went slightly mad with flowers with this drawing. The flowers are watercoloured. Love that mad hair.

This is a drawing which will be digitally coloured when I get a spare moment. My favourite birds, of course, and I fancy they will be brightly coloured when completed. Hopefully they will be ready for next week's blogpost. These are examples of a variety of images on the flower theme made famous by the very talented Orla Kiely but in my own designs and colours. They make lovely greetings cards when mounted singly.

This work was created by Shirley Isaacs who is a fellow blogger and can be found here

She has some lovely creations on her blog so pop over and take a look.

Here are the Christmas chickens. Not looking too Christmassy at the moment but that will change soon.

This is the Christmas card that I am using for inspiration for my chickens drawing. The background of the chickens will be similar to this lovely snowy scene. This card is a linocut by Robert Gilmorr who will be one of my featured artists soon.

The following images are from Suzanne Gyseman. Her website is a delight and can be found here.

My lovely blog giveaway kittie has arrived in England and found a very welcoming home with me. He has a lovely folksy look to him and he is sitting waiting to start his tea and cupcakes. I love him to bits and thanks very much to Sandy for giving him away to a new home. I love the greeting card she also sent of the humorous lady with the lovely woolly cardi. You can see the pictures above.

Christmas is fast approaching and I recently started deciding what to draw for my 2008 Christmas card. I make these for my brother to send to his customers and have been doing so for many years now. They are always pen and ink and nearly always have an animal or bird as the central image. I love chickens so I decided this year to have a poultry theme. You can see the start of my effort above. It will eventually have a field and hedges and trees covered in snow behind the chickens and will have quite a graphic look to it rather than the naturalistic pointillism I have done in prior years. Of course snow is easy, just leave the paper white...lol.

I have included, this week, a peek at the creations of a lovely blog lady called Shirley Isaacs. She is a beader and knitter and is very interested in textiles and colour and art. She has a lovely blog here with her own work and she also features the work of other artists and craftspeople (myself included). Pop over and have a look at her blog.

My featured artist this week is Suzanne Gyseman who lives in Scotland. She originally trained as a botanist and has worked in a variety of jobs before turning to full time art. I have been following her work for several years now and I find it quite enchanting. I think she could be called something of a visionary with a great interest in folklore, myths and legends. She is also very interested in nature and the natural world and this interest shows very clearly in her work. Her images are very colourful and intriguingly stylised. Her website here is definitely worth a visit as she has lots of her artwork on display.

I have been quite busy drawing and painting myself this week and I am particularly pleased with the lady with the birds and the stripey dress. I like the palette I have chosen for that one although it is quite bright. I don't think you can ever go wrong with stripes. See what you think anyway.

Lapwings and Digital Colours

A pointillism lapwing drawing which I used for a Christmas card design a few years ago. These runner ducks are one of my favourite motifs and I have used them in lots of drawings and paintings. I think they are just a lovely little composition.

A digitally coloured sketch of a tree which started out as a pen and ink drawing until I played around with colours.
Digitally coloured sketch of a very colourful, stylised tree

Two versions of "Flower of Friendship" - not sure which one I prefer.

I have been doing a bit of doodling with digital drawing this week. I have to be in the mood for drawing on the computer. It is very time consuming as everything has to be so large and can take hours to produce anything. The white runner ducks on blue drawing is a proper artwork but the others are just playing around with shapes and colours. I do like the matt effect of pantone colours and enjoy looking at work other people have produced digitally.

The pointillist picture of lapwings is one I did for Christmas cards a few years ago. I have always been fascinated by lapwings with their little feathery headpieces. I was lucky enough to see some in real life a few weeks ago whilst out with friends in Oxfordshire. It took my brother to point them out though, but once I knew what they were I recognised them...if that makes any sense. They were quite annoyed with us for walking in the vicinity of their nests.

The flower of friendship drawings were ones I did sometime ago which never quite got off the ground. I am sure everyone has some of these tucked away somewhere. I still like the design and will probably eventually complete it but I am not sure which colourway I prefer....decisions, decisions.

I also noticed today that my "love in a mist" flowers are about to bloom. I love these flowers and hope to get a few nice photos of them when they are in bloom. I have nurtured them from seedlings and they have done very well. The garden is very wet at the moment due to all the rain we have had today. Summer seems to have deserted us for the moment. I daresay it will return one of these days.