Month: April 2015

52 Stories

This weekend it was my turn to take part in 52 Stories which is a fantastic project thought up by Cherry Hinton’s Spinney Primary School together with the surrounding libraries. The idea is that each and every Saturday for a whole year a different reader comes into libraries and reads stories to children. The readers can be anyone with a love of books and this Saturday it was my turn. I had great fun reading Ready, Steady, Ghost! by Elizabeth Baguley and Ping! by Chae Strathie and showing the children my original illustrations for the books. Afterwards the children did some drawing and created a character who was naughty, stripy and had red hair and wings – you can see a few of their brilliant drawings below.  It was a lovely morning and I’d like to thank all those from Cherry Hinton Library and Spinney Primary who organised everything and made me feel so welcome!

character1

character2

character3

This is a drawing I did after the session was finished, the idea was to leave something behind for the library to put up on the wall - it was rather fun collecting characters from different books and putting them together in one drawing, though I'm not sure if they'd really get on very well together...
This is a drawing I did after the session was finished, the idea was to leave something behind for the library to put up on the wall – it was rather fun collecting characters from different books and putting them together in one drawing, though I’m not sure if they’d really get on very well together…
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I won!

I am absolutely thrilled to bits that my entry to the Make it in Design testimonials competition has won me a place on the next part of the course! My picture was created with water colour and I used a dip pen for the fine lettering. I loved doing the first module in the Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design course and it really has changed the way I look at the world, so it felt right to use bright spring colours to express that. My testimonial was one of two to have been chosen by course leader and design guru Rachael Taylor and fellow winner was Kevin Brackley who is no doubt feeling every bit as chuffed as I am!

mariflowers

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Watercolour and FW ink love

I have been away from my studio recently and travelling light with just my tiny water colour set to keep me company. I had forgotten how lovely water colour is and how different it is to acrylic ink, which is what I use most of the time for illustrations. I love both mediums in different ways; FW inks are incredibly vivid and very versatile, but water colour has a beautiful quality to it. The colours are subtle and each one seems to settle on the page in a slightly different way. I am by no means an expert but I do like to play – here are some patterns I’ve been working on, the first three were painted with water colour and the ones beneath that are FW ink.

House and Bat pattern

P-P repeat

pets

jellyfish and seaweed

Fishies

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