Sharing and Thankyous!

Thankyou so much for your lovely messages for the arrival of my little grandson. It's lovely to share my excitement here with you. :) 

Now talking of sharing and thankyous,

I was very surprised and very happy to see that I now have 800 followers on my Facebook page! 

Wow! 

I think a giveaway is in order don't you?

(flowers drawn with gel pens)

I'm going to pick 2 winners using a random generator who will each receive an original watercolour painting of mine, each one is painted on 300gsm watercolour paper. 

Here they are:

The Big Red Cat, 11 x 9 inches (29 x 22cm)

Paisley Girl, 9 x 12 inches (23 x 30cm)

All you need to do to take part is to leave me a message in the comments on this post telling me which of these paintings you'd like to win. If you'd like a second chance to be in the draw, you could go to this post on my Facebook page and (if you're on Facebook) share and like the post, then leave me a comment there to say which painting you'd like.

EASY PEASY! :)

So tell me, 

which one would you like? :)

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 Did you notice the primroses at the top of this post? I was sat in the garden this morning looking around at all the new growth. Isn't this time of year lovely?

The Corkscrew Hazel looks pretty with its yellow catkins doesn't it?

And these sweet little daffodils. They always surprise me where they pop up!

This pot has hidden surprises too. I tend to forget what I've planted from season to season  so it's constantly changing throughout the year. One of these days I'm going to paint them from life but for now, here's a sketchbook page with flowers from my imagination. :)

Oh, and of course a bird!

Thank you for visiting! xx

New Baby

Thankyou for all your lovely messages. I'm feeling a little better each day and gradually getting back to normal. :)

So what should happen in the middle of all this? If you follow me on Facebook you might know already.

I have a new grandson!

He was born very unexpectedly, my daughter wasn't due until next week and he arrived looking so perfect!

♥ Baby Harry ♥

Big sister Maisy is going to have a new little playmate! :)

˙·٠•●♥ Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ ♥●•٠·˙

Time Away

Hello I'm back in the Bloggesphere again! I've had some time away from the world over the past week because my cough and cold turned into something really nasty. I had a fever for several days with severe pain and couldn't eat or move very far. I'm still not exactly bouncing around the place but I am slowly getting better each day and for that I'm very grateful ♥ because it was very scary feeling that ill.

These journal pages were made on the day before things took a turn for the worse. I've no idea why the top image popped out of my head but looking at it a week later, I think she looks like a sort of 1930s maid doesn't she? The one below started with a sketch of a daffodil. Isn't it lovely to see the daffodils out now? However cold and rainy it gets, they're there to remind us that the season really is changing!

I'm sorry if you've been to visit my Etsy shop this week and found it closed, I've just reopened it and it'll be business as usual after the weekend. :)

Now I feel a lot better, I'm getting back into drawing and painting again and will have some more to show you very soon!

Thankyou for visiting! x x

A Handy Tip For Beginning a Painting

Thankyou for your lovely comments about the changes I made to my vase painting. It seems I did the right thing! :)
I've started a new painting. This one's done in a similar way to the 'Broadsands Baby' painting I made last week. Because I had a good idea of how I wanted the painting to look, I began by drawing the the main shapes of the image in pencil onto the canvas.

When I began to paint over the pencil lines, I realised that the paint would become mixed up with the graphite of the pencil, making it muddy. I know at this stage many of you would spray it with fixative but I find it quite expensive and don't have any.

What to do?

Cover the areas you want to protect with tissue paper glued in place! It's so see-through that the layer underneath can still be clearly seen. I used pink tissue paper here but if you prefer, use white tissue if you don't want to add colour at this stage.

Once dry, (I used a hair dryer to speed things up) you can easily paint over all these areas without any pencil being disturbed at all. :)

(cropped close-up)

I painted a lot of the areas in detail but left other areas with the collage elements showing. Although I love artists who make detailed precise work, with my own painting I don't feel right tightening up the whole painting, I like to leave some areas for the viewers' imagination.

So here it is, the finished painting, complete with jewellery and cakes.

I'm calling this one 'Chocolate and Cherry' and it measures 30 x 40cm (12 x 16inches)

It's been very stormy and dark the last couple of days so I haven't been able to photograph it properly yet but when I do, I'll list it for sale in my Etsy shop at £80 (other currencies welcome!) :) If you'd like to buy it before it gets listed, or have any questions, please message me here on the blog or email me. :)

I hope you're not affected by these awful storms, it's very bad here at the moment in the south west but my house isn't near the coast, no we don't have really bad damage like the Dawlish trainline that collapsed this morning!

Keep safe xx

**UPDATE**

Now available to buy here. :)

New Things on a Monday

Monday morning, I hope you had a lovely weekend! Mine was filled with family visiting but now the house is once again quiet, it's time to show you what I was working on just before the weekend.

Thankyou so much for your lovely comments about my beach baby painting! As I had some time left at the end of the day that I finished it, I decided to work some more on a painting that you might remember from last year? Do you remember this one?

I've had it hanging up on the wall at home and so each day it would catch my eye and after time, I knew I wasn't happy with the face on the yellow vase. I felt it looked unfinished and at first I was going to put more shading in it to give it depth. Something else happened once I had my paints out!

Not only did I change the face, I painted over it completely and added some birds and some more spots. (If you look closely you can see the masking fluid I put on around the edges of the vase so that I wouldn't ruin the background. I have a tendency to get paint all over the parts where I don't want it!) Once I'd changed the yellow vase, the purple one looked odd having a face so that face had to go too!

I didn't originally plan to change both vases but hey. I like it a lot better now. :)

Butterfly and Bird Vases, acrylic on canvas, 40 x 40cm (16 x 16inches)

What do you think?

I've made this image available to buy from Fine Art America, where you can order it as a print in a size of your choice, framed or unframed, on paper, canvas or metal or even as a greetings card or two!

The original painting is now available to buy here.

Thankyou for looking! xx

The Making of my Beach Painting

Thankyou so much for your helpful comments about phones in my last post. I'm still a little wary of taking photos on mine to upload straight to the web but I'm sure I'll get used to it in time!

I've just finished this painting that I'm calling 'Broadsands Baby.' There's a beach in Devon I've been to many times and it's filled with so many memories of my children, from when they were babies and later when they'd play in the sand or the sea. It wasn't always quite as serene as this painting shows ;)  but I wanted to create the feeling I have when I go there.

I thought I'd share with you my thinking process from sketches to the finished piece. :)

I had in mind using a palette of pale blues with little hints of orangey red. This is the first sketch, I always like the first sketch so much more than anything I do after that. Do you artist painters find that too?

I hadn't yet started the painting on canvas at this stage so the next day I did another sketch with the same idea in mind of the beach with the beach huts and a mother in the foreground. Although I didn't use the idea of the girl and the boy in the final painting, I liked the huts and the stone wall with the hills behind.

I collaged randomly at first, then decided to use some nice ziggy zaggy patterned giftwrap as dress material for the mum.

I hadn't used paper like this before with masking fluid and learned very quickly that it's not strong enough to withstand it. When I pulled the masking off it took some of the lovely pattern off with it and the baby's poor thumb too! Next time I'll make sure I seal the surface with PVA or gel medium before I paint any masking on it!

 I managed to recreate the pattern of the dress again, the colours were quite easy to match and soon the painting was in full swing again.
The hairstyle I left until almost the end. I wanted it dark to offset all those pale colours in the rest of the painting. A bright hair ornament completed her outfit. :)

I didn't want it to be too obvious that the baby was a girl or boy so I opted for a grey and white babygro (or as they seem to be called now, a 'onesie!)

**UPDATE** I've now listed it in my Etsy shop. :)

It measures 12 x 16 inches (30 x 40cm) and will be £80 

Thankyou for visiting me here today, I hope you enjoyed  reading about my painting process!

See you again soon. xx

Smartypants Phone

 Here are 2 of my most recent journal pages.

I scanned and uploaded these in my usual way. (My usual way is to scan the sketchbook, upload to Photoshop to resize it and then upload to whichever website I need it) but yesterday I tried to send them  straight to Facebook using my shiny new Smartphone. 

That's my new Samsung Mini on the left and my sad old Nokia on the right. It might be called mini but it looks pretty big to me. The idea is to make it quicker for me to take pictures and to upload them.

Yes at last I have joined everyone else with a phone that can do all things I've been longing to do to save me time.

Or so I thought!

My first uploads looked like this and this. I have a bit of a way to go before it becomes easy peasy for me and so far I've spent even more time online than ever finding out how to make it work. Don't worry I'm getting there slowly! 

Do you use your phone to upload pictures? Do you find it quicker and easier? (once you know how to do it that is!) I'd like to know if I'm right in thinking it's quicker!

:) x

Watercolour Designs and my New Shop

Thankyou for your kind comments on my last post, it seems that I'm not alone in loving lots of colour! Yarn, paint, pencils, you name it, I can't get enough!
You might remember from a previous post that I hunted for a long time looking for nice colourful cushions (pillows) and it was the online shop Society6 where I eventually found the perfect ones for me! This gave me the idea of starting up my own shop on the site with just a few of my designs to begin with. I'd like to show you some of the items I'm selling.
At the top of the post you can see my watercolour painting appearing as a cushion! It's also available as...

I quite like how my Buddha sits quite nicely on the phone case. :)

T-shirts for big people...

and little people...

Here are a few examples of my mug designs...

and tote bags...

It's so fun seeing my paintings appear on different items! The ones I've pictured here are only a few of the designs, there are many more items such as ipad cases, tank tops (vests), hoodies, kids' T-shirts and of course high quality giclee prints framed and unframed. Please have a look if you'd like to see more by clicking here.

Thankyou for looking, :)

Have a great weekend! xx