Women In Boats And Nicola Slattery

This is a straight forward pen and ink drawing entitled "Crossing The River". I loved doing the cross hatching on her dress. Very therapeutic and relaxing. Sorry this image cannot be enlarged. Just one of the really annoying things about blogger is that it picks at least one image in each post that it refuses to enlarge and for this post it just happens to be this one.

This shows the magazine photos which provided the inspiration for this drawing.

This is a combination of watercolour and digital colour. She is meant to be hiding in the long grass but I think she is trying to attract someones attention with the bright yellow balloon which the bird is holding. A digitally coloured image. This picture is called "The Visitor and started off as pen and ink and was then coloured digitally.

Doesn't everyone just love Etsy? So much variety and so much talent in one place. I discovered the creator of these lovely fabric pieces on the site the other day. She is Jane and is the owner of The Seventh Magpie etsy shop where she sells these lovely door guardians and lots of other delicate textile pieces. I think the idea of a door guardian is a lovely thought. Jane also has a blog which is well worth a browse.

The following images are all by English artist Nicola Slattery. Her extensive website can be found at http://www.nicolaslattery.com/ I love all her work but I particularly like her ladies and fish images. Some of the pictures below are of prints and some are paintings. I have collected quite a few magazine articles about her work over the past few years and even attended one of her drypoint etching workshops which I loved. My etching didn't turn out brilliantly but that was due to me and not Nicola's teaching...lol. I would love to try another drypoint etching class one day.

A Good Catch - Nicola Slattery

All At Sea - Nicola Slattery

Seductive Pool - Nicola Slattery

Gathering Fish - Nicola Slattery

Showers Of Flowers - Nicola Slattery

Exchanging Spires - Nicola Slattery

Companion - Nicola Slattery

Woodland Woman - Nicola Slattery

Lighthouse People - Nicola Slattery

Naming The Animals - Nicola Slattery

Gifts From The Sea - Nicola Slattery

Green Girl - Nicola Slattery

Hallowed Cat - Nicola Slattery

I was hoping to be out and about taking some winter photos this week but it has just been too inclement. I know, I am a coward where bad weather is concerned. I don't mind wind or rain or even wind and rain but I don't like being cold. No different from anyone else really. Driving past in the warm car I watch guiltily the brave, active people trotting off down the road. Perhaps this coming week will be warmer....!

My featured artist this week is a lady who I have mentioned before but I haven't posted any examples of her art. Nicola Slattery is very well known in the UK art world and her work is extremely popular with the buying public. She has a very interesting and extensive website here with a lovely array of her art and details of the art courses she holds.

Nicola is a painter and printmaker and her mainly figurative work has a lovely, contemporary/folk look to it. There is always more to see than what is represented on the surface, and the images are very thought provoking. Her beautiful, gentle ladies can be seen floating amidst dreamy scenery stroking wonderful animals and birds. Oh to live in a beautiful world like that. Well, one can dream.

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.