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 I originally made the tree and the bird white but they got lost in among all these colours so I changed them to black to make them more prominent.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

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

Dr. Who and the fickle hand of fate....!

This is a mermaid watercolour sketch I did recently. I do enjoy drawing and painting mermaids. I think I may have elongated her body a bit too much . Probably wishful thinking in my case. I am not sure I like the colours in the sea though. I may need to rethink that part.

This is Magda and she is just a figment of my imagination but I do have plans for her in a "proper" drawing at some stage. I like her hair and her rather fancy flower adornment. Definitely a stylish lady.

I enjoy producing pen and ink landscapes with very stylised trees. They are surprisingly quick to draw and have a lovely graphic feel to them.

This is a statue series which I photographed at a local garden centre and then photoshopped for some added drama.

I am a great fan of cats and really enjoyed drawing this pointillist tabby cat some years ago.

I watched a fascinating episode of Dr. Who yesterday which was all about fate and what could happen if we did one little thing differently in our lives and what huge changes there could be. Some of you won't know who Dr. Who is. It is an extremely long running (over 40 years) childrens' (and adult) series about a Time Lord who has control of a time machine and he and his assistants go whizzing through space and time doing good deeds. This episode featured his assistant Donna making a right turn in a car instead of a left turn and it resulted in changes on a global scale and the death of the doctor and many others, not to mention invasion by aliens. Very dramatic stuff. Can't wait for the conclusion next week.

I am sure that any changes which could have occurred in my life would not affect the earth but it is very intriguing to wonder what would have occurred in your own life if you just did one very small but very important thing differently. For instance where would I be now if I had decided nursing wasn't for me all those years ago. What would I be doing and where would I be? For some people it could the decision not to attend a party where they were destined to meet their future husband or wife, or even just deciding to walk along a different path from your usual and meeting someone you would never otherwise have met. So many possibilities and totally fascinating to think about them. I am a great believer in destiny and I think the really important things in our lives are meant to be and they will happen whichever path we take, whereas the smaller and lesser important things are left for us to decide. Anyway that is my theory and I am sticking to it. Nothing to do with art of course but I have been doing a bit of drawing and painting and the results are shown above for your perusal. I think fate and art make a good combination.