Watercolour Trees and John Blockley

I decided to go a bit colourful and unrealistic with these watercolour trees but I think they look quite nice.

A pen and ink group of very well dressed ladies wearing some rather unusual hats.

I thought you might like to see what I am sketching at the moment. I love peeking into other peoples' sketchbooks. A lot of my sketches never actually make it to finished drawings and sometimes the ones that do are completely unrecognisable from the original sketch. I decided to stick to a gold and magenta colour palette with these. It is a combination that I think looks really good together.

An attempt at a watercolour tree sketch "a la John Blockley".

These gorgeously colourful textile pieces are by the very talented Sherrill Kahn. I love her fabric doll necklaces which have a wonderful graphic and native look to them. Sherrill is another multi-talented craftswoman who paints, weaves, quilts, beads, sews, knits, crochets and draws. Wouldn't it be lovely to do all that, but where does she find the time? I have a couple of her books and they are a delight. You may need to click on the pictures to enlarge them to get the full details.

The images below are the work of the late and much lamented watercolourist John Blockley. I love the way he rendered his trees with a watercolour wash roughly tree shaped and then the branches stroked in. I would have loved to have seen him working. His pictures are full of texture and beautifully subtle colour.

We have had some very cold (for the UK) weather for the past three weeks. Nothing in comparison to the weather some of you are getting of course, but everything is relative isn't it? What we have to put up with in the freezing tootsies department we make up for in the beauty of the countryside. A hoar frost which covers the trees in white crystals is utterly stunning, to my mind anyway. It is almost more beautiful than pristine snow, and we have had quite a few to admire recently. Unfortunately, the downside has been pavements and roads like skating rinks. I had to assist several women in picking up a poor elderly lady who had lost her footing the other day, and she was far from the only one. Makes me wonder whether we should all have shoes with spikes on the soles in winter. There would be far fewer people in A & E departments with fractured limbs. Like everything in life there is an upside and a downside - keeps the balance though!

My artist this week is no longer with us but he has left some wonderful art to remind us that he was here. He is the well known watercolourist John Blockley.When I first started drawing and painting back in 1990ish I found his books on watercolour landscapes a wonderful source of inspiration. A lot of his work is of the Cotswold area of England and I had found someone who also loved trees, if his paintings are anything to go by. His work was his personal view and feelings about a place, rather than a literal representation and he also produced more abstract work. I have only posted images of the more realistic work as I am not really a fan of abstraction in art. I love his pencil sketches and the shapes of his trees. I tried very hard to emulate his style back in the 90's before realising that I had to find my own. I treasure his books that I own though and often browse through them. I wish I had his talent with landscape. Some of his work can be found here at the Manor House Gallery site and elsewhere on the web if you type his name in a search engine.

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.

Last Post Till The New Year - Happy Christmas Everyone

Time to wish all my friends and readers a very Happy Christmas and a wonderful New Year.


This is called Co-ordinating Leaf Bird for obvious reasons.

This is a picture I painted in watercolour when I first started my blog but I have since altered it and changed it to digital colour and I think it has improved it a lot.

This piece is called Contemplating A Sunflower.

A simple, sweet little white cat among flowers.

One of the Victorian monumental angels I enjoy photographing with a tiny touch of Photoshop

The following Christmas decorations (except for the ceramic ladies) are all ones that I made about 20 years ago. I used to have time to make things in those days.

I cannot take credit for these cuties. I found them in a shop a few years ago. They were surprisingly inexpensive. I love the little partridge and the goose. The ladies even have long, gold metallic hair.

These three pictures are of ordinary metal bangles which I have wrapped around with wool (hidden) then very thick, glittery tape and finally various coloured ribbons. The ribbons are wrapped so that the glittery tape is visible in some cases. I then sewed on co-ordinating tiny glass beads and star sequins. They also need a piece of ribbon to hang them up with. The best bangles are the childrens sized ones as they look very dinky. They look lovely suspended from the Christmas tree. The middle picture is of two tiny bangles intersected. You have to hold them in position as you wrap them.

These decorations are simply walnuts which have been opened up and the nuts eaten (very important). The outside is sprayed with gold paint and various items are laid inside one shell. In this case I have used gold beads threaded on wire, strung glass beads, pine cones, ribbons and everlasting flowers, but there are many other things you could use. The trick is to neatly arrange the items whilst at the same time glueing the edges of the walnuts together. The amazing thing is that the dried everlasting flowers have lasted so many years being handled without falling apart. Don't forget to add a little piece of gold thread to hang them from the tree.

These are felt stars filled with fibre and stitched around with very wide, glittery thread and sequins applied with transparent thread. I had great fun making these in different colours.

The following images are the artwork of Welsh artist Dai (David) Harding and his extensive website can be found here.

Time for the last blog post of the year as I won't have time to blog till after the New Year. Christmas is busy enough as it is without extras added. I think I have finally managed to get all my Christmas letters and cards posted and the presents wrapped. What a rush it has been. But it doesn't have to be if only I could arrange my time better. I promise myself every year that this time I will start the preparations earlier and get everything completed before the last week before Christmas, but everytime I am foiled...by time, or rather, lack of it.

Anyway, enough of that. I thought I would post a few pictures of my "crafty werks" this time. I used to make lots of things once upon a time and I really enjoyed the creative process. These are mostly Christmas decorations which I made for a hospital bazaar many moons ago. If fact they are over 20 years old but they only make a brief appearance at Christmas so that is probably why they are still in good nick.

My artist this week is Dai (or David) Harding. He is a Welsh artist with an amazing talent for different styles of art. You can visit his website here. I don't think I have ever seen a website with so many images on it. A lot of his work is semi-abstract or contemporary. His figurative work has a primal, mythic quality. I particularly like his colourful landscapes. Definitely landscapes of the imagination. I also enjoy the pieces of text he combines with the artwork. He has a collection of very diverse commercial styles as well. A very talented and adaptable artist.