Blog Anniversary Giveaway Winners

The winners of my first anniversary blog giveaway are Pamela of From The House of Edward blog, Dolores from True Blue Canadian blog and Robyn from Art Propelled. If you could let me know your mail addresses ladies I will send the prints asap.

This is a digital piece entitled "The Place of Dancing". It was from the title of a song I heard a while back and liked.

I must say a big thank you to Caroline for this great blog award I received a little while ago. Pop over and have a peek at her lovely blog at Caroline's Studio and say hello. I have a very healthy clutch of awards now from some great bloggers.

I had a nice little sea poem to post with this pen and ink drawing but in the end it wasn't applicable. It mentioned ships and my little boat is anything but. This is called "Safe Harbour".

This is a pen and ink drawing with digital colouring. Originally I was going to keep it all black and white but a tiny bit of colour crept in - like it does.

The cherry blossom is in full bloom locally and looks fabulous. So pretty when the sun is shining on it which it has a lot lately. I think summer has come early. I noticed today that another favourite of mine, the lilac, is out. Such a plentitude of flowers in spring.

Four lovely linocut prints by Robert Taverner who died in 2004 after 50 years as a printmaker. There is a lovely collection of his prints here.

Pollarded Trees and Houses

Pony and Paddock

Cottages and Reeds

Flint Barn

I really like these beautiful, contemporary sculptures by Australian, Sally Curry. So simple with lovely textures. Sally handbuilds her figures using earthenware terracotta. You can find a lovely display of her work at The Handmark Gallery.

One World

Gift From Crete

Flora

I have just discovered another treat from Mark Hearld. This is called St. Paul's Pigeons and is a collage. Love the bright colours. Pigeons are such common and humble birds but some artists have the ability to make them appear special, and Mark Hearld is one of them.

These little sculptures are delightful. I love the colour combination of the turquoise and yellow animal. They are by Allen and Mary Dee Dodge and they produce lots of interesting sculptures and figurines which can found on their website here.

The lovely images below were created by Suffok painter and printmaker Penny Bhadresa. She uses mainly linocut techniques but also collage, mixed media, acrylic and watercolour. Her subject matter reflects her love of nature, landscape and architecture. Her style is bold, colourful and graphic and she imbues her work with lots of shapes, texture and patterns. I love stylised art and I find her work very compelling. The hares particularly seem to have a sense of myth about them. She is a very successful artist and can be found in many galleries, among them St. Judes Gallery and Cambridgegallery. Penny's own website can be found here. The two acrylic paintings were from an article about Penny in "The Artist" magazine in 2004.

Harvest Hares

When The Boat Comes In

The Wild One

The Boxers

Guinea Fowl (Acrylic)

Snow Sprinter

Apples and Pears

Snow Fowl

Black Hens (Acrylic)

I decided to visit our local car boot sale as it was a lovely spring morning. I have watched as this boot sale has grown over the years from just a few stalls to a whole field full and it is now one of the most popular ones in the area. This sale is very organised as all the stalls are in neat rows which make it easy to know where you have been. Occasionally you can come across an absolute gem for next to nothing but most of the stuff is, frankly, tat. There seems to be a huge market for other peoples' tat. It makes me smile to see what dreadful things people have given house room to. I wish I could have taken some photos for you but I thought that might be frowned upon. A couple of classics were the dachshund crudely made of straw with bits of string tied at strategic points to stop the animal falling apart, and the huge pink metal flamingo with a light attached to the body like a huge, walking lamp. Just a couple of items that should have been consigned to the rubbish tip many moons ago. Did I buy anything?...well yes I did. Three brand new little glasses for 60p (ours keep getting broken) and a DVD of Pan's Labyrinth for £2. It is a wonderfully bizarre, creepy film with very dark undertones. Definitely not your average fairy tale. I am very satisfied with my purchases today.

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....!