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.

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.