Internet Inspiration and Nicholas Hely Hutchinson

I really enjoyed drawing this very simple tree and bird picture. It was also inspired by a ceramic design but I cannot remember where I saw it. If it turns up again I will post it.

This image is called "A Bouquet of Tulips" - pretty self explanatory really. It is pen and ink and digital colour.

I have been meaning to post this image for ages. Do you remember a couple of months ago I said I was doing a linocut? This is my first proper linocut and I must say I am quite pleased with the result. The cutting is easy - the printing is very difficult. I take my metaphorical hat off to those people who can produce perfectly printed linocuts.

Can't have Christmas without an angel drawing. I decided to make this one very non-traditional.

She is pen and ink and coloured fibre tip pens.

This is one side of a design for gift wrap by Penny Kennedy. Lovely modern leaf motifs. Irresistible.

This is the other side of the gift wrap. Two designs for the price of one. Very nice indeed.

This Flickr upload by allerleirau really caught my eye. Presumably it started life as a pen and ink drawing. It can be found on the Flickr group Mid-century modern ceramics and table ware. I would love to own a set of these Danish designs.

I love this graphic ceramic design. It is another mid-century design but wouldn't look out of place on contemporary crocs. It was uploaded by allerleirau on Flickr.

This is an example of mid century ceramics. A lovely fun design uploaded by Flickr user littlelollylittlelegs (great name).

The paintings below are all the work of Nicholas Hely Hutchinson whose website can be found here. I recommend clicking on the pictures to enlarge them to get the best view.

I was thinking the other day how the Internet has transformed our lives as artists and craftspeople. It has opened up so many new avenues of inspiration. We have so many sources of great art and craft images on places like artists blogs, Flickr, Etsy and just typing in, say, printmakers in a search engine brings thousands of websites to our notice. What a visual feast. There are so many individual sites that we never need look at the same site twice, probably for the rest of our lives. Prior to the Internet, my personal inspiration favourites were art books and I must admit I still love them. Nowadays most of them tend to come from charity shops rather than be bought new though. It is amazing what wonderful books people give away: some of them big, glossy coffee table books originally costing £30 to £40 with fantastic photography. Most can be picked up for less than £3.

Flickr has so many art sites including drawing, painting, illustration, printmaking, doll making, cross stitch. The list is endless, with thousands of pictures on each site and most being updated daily. Before we bought our family computer, my brother wet my appetite with a fantastic tapestry site and I was hooked for life.

Nearly every artist these days seems to have a presence on the Internet from the humblest amateur to highly regarded professionals. I found a Flickr group on mid-century ceramics the other day and it opened up a whole new world of designs on cups, plates etc. Nobody can make the excuse these days that they are short of inspiration. The Internet can be a very harmful and damaging place if used unwisely but like most things in life it has a positive and negative aspect and we have to employ balance to make the best use of it.

My featured artist this week is one of my all time favourites. He is Nicholas Hely Hutchinson, an English painter living in Dorset. When you look at his work you enter a magical, surreal world of beautiful colours, delicate landscapes and supremely elegant people and animals. He uses the English countryside as his inspiration but adds magic from his own imagination. You can easily imagine elves and fairies peopling his landscapes. His work covers a broad spectrum of subject matter but my favourites are the glowing hillsides and trees which he does so well. Have a look at his extensive website here. You will be glad you did. I have a couple of old exhibition catalogues of his paintings which I treasure. Now if I could afford an original.....!

Christmas Is Fast Approaching

This is the coloured version of my pen and ink drawing posted last week. It didn't take too long to colour either. Not sure why blogger is making it blurred. You may need to click on it for a larger version to see it better.

I love the old retro cloche hats of the 30s. I wish they were still popular today. These two are definitely over-the-top but I think the idea is ok.

This is just a quick fantasy drawing I did today. I love these colours and may use them for other pictures. This piece is entitled The Headdress.

This is another Christmas card design using the same tree I posted previously under a different guise. I am not too sure whether the gold star looks right but otherwise I think it is quite a pretty image. This is an actual London tree.

This is the finished Christmas card which I am using for my brother's cards this year. Quite minimal but wintry I hope.

Lovely contemporary image of deer by Caroline Gardner cards. Lovely modern palette.

This was a previous Christmas card from Caroline Gardner cards but far too nice to send to anyone...lol.

This is an Oxfam Christmas 2008 card. Not sure who the designer is but it is beautifully detailed and full of inspiration for those of us who love trees and leaves. Oxfam seem to have gone over to much more contemporary cards this year and I think the designs are a great improvement. I overheard one of the elderly ladies who serve behind the counter saying she hated them though. Still you cannot please everyone.

The following images are paintings by the English artist Clare Shepherd. You can find here website here.

Christmas is getting ever closer and I have been on the lookout for new and interesting Christmas card designs. There was a time when I used to buy lots and lots of packets of cards, usually charity cards. But times is 'ard these days and now I only purchase the designs I cannot live without and leave the others on the shelves for wealthier members of the population. I find greetings cards on the whole to be extremely expensive, especially when you think that they cost mere pence to produce en masse. I don't mind if a decent amount of the profit goes to the charity concerned, but sometimes I wonder if that is the case. Why am I buying cards anyway, I can hear you thinking, when I have the means to produce my own. Don't ask. I think it is something to do with the grass being greener on the other side of the fence or perhaps other designers' images being better than mine.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I have long admired Caroline Gardner cards and I have posted a couple with deer images. One is this year's and one is from a previous year but was too nice to send...hah hah. I don't think you can beat a nice coloured deer at Christmas. You might want to check out her website. She is another person who seems to revel in lots of lovely colours.

How many sketch books do you possess? I have a few and some of them have pristine pages. Why? Because I find it very difficult to sketch in a sketch book. I tend to sketch and draw on lots of odd bits of paper and old envelopes etc and then I may stick those in the sketch book. Alternatively, I will do my first sketch on rough paper and then produce a slightly better sketch in the sketch book. I find it nearly impossible to do a completely new sketch in the right place first time. I think it has to do with not wanting to mess up lovely white pages and also worrying about filling up the book too quickly as I produce a huge amount of sketches at a time. My brother's partner, Lesley, has just given me a lovely sketchbook with beautiful quality paper but this time I am determined to draw in the right place. Hmmm.... we'll see.

My featured artist this week is Clare Shepherd who is an English artist living in Dorset. She also enjoys teaching art. She has a wonderful colour sense and her paintings are very contemporary with lots of light and colour. She uses shapes to advantage and these veer slightly toward the abstract. Her work covers a very wide spectrum and on her beautiful website here you can find a huge quantity of artwork. I especially enjoy her landscapes of Dorset and Exmoor.

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.