Art Journal Flowers + Bonus Card

If you follow me on Instragram, you will have seen the inspiration behind this page and a sneaky peek of it finished. I received a beautiful bouquet of roses for my birthday and the colours just screamed at me to be captured on a page! I splashed some watercolour paint down and when it was dry I quickly sketched the lines of the flowers on top. It came out so well!

I was feeling inspired, so I scanned the image in and was able to quickly make up some notelets to send to family. I added some pearl paint to the yellow roses just to add some interest. I really enjoyed this project - I must remember to experiment more with painting flowers like this, and also to play around with making notelets - there is so much potential!

Pua Sketch [Moana]

We're a bit Moana-mad in our household. No, we don't have any children... But who can resist songs as catchy as "You're Welcome" and characters as adorable as Pua the pig?! Not us, that's for sure. Though personally I'm more of the village crazy lady!

Anyway, when deciding on a Birthday card for my husband I couldn't resist doing a little sketch of Pua for him. I drew it in 2B, which is basically my favourite pencil ever, and added some colour with some very old WHSmith colouring pencils. They still do a good value pack of 36 colouring pencils, but I find my old ones have softer leads.

Alternative Christmas Card || Flopsy & Toffee Sketch

I used to make cards for my husband, for all those events that occur throughout the year. But you know what would happen to them? They'd sit on his desk for a week, before being lost into a pile of "stuff", never to be seen again. And so I started doing something different... I started drawing for him every year, quick sketches which could go in frames and continue to decorate our walls all year round. It's been a win-win for us! This Christmas, his "card" features our gorgeous little bunnies, Flopsy and Toffee...

Pet Portraits - Gilbert the Rabbit Sketch

When I heard recently that a friend's beautiful bunny rabbit Gilbert had passed away, I felt inspired by one of her photographs of him to produce a quick sketch.

I feel so rusty with a pencil in my hand at the moment, but this loosened me up a wee bit, and was also gratefully received :)

Linocut: Extra

I thought you might like to see some of the other prints that emerged when printing My First Linocut the other week... 

I love seeing the texture of the paper come through the print.

One of the earlier prints. We had to build up the padding behind it slowly, so as to apply the right amount of pressure and get a decent print.

 I like how the texture of the lino still shows through, as there isn't quite enough padding behind the linocut yet.

This one's quite clever - it's the same way round as the original linocut! After inking up the linocut, we printed it on to the roller, before carefully inserting 2 sheets of paper to be printed - one printed straight from the linocut, and one from the copy on the roller!

You can check out my final image on the original post :)

My First Linocut

You may have to excuse my sheer level of excitement when it comes to this... When I was printing with my Dad the other month, he lent me the equipment to try lino cutting. And the other day? I eventually got round to trying it!

My inspiration was this sketch of a yellow poppy that I did last year:

I found the tools somewhat easy to use with the lino, although there are a few cuts which aren't quite meant to be there!

Because I've never tried this before, I did a test run with some acrylic paint I had out, to see if I had cut the lines deep and wide enough to show up...

It's obviously not great, but it showed what I needed to know - that it could work!

So I took it to my Dad's press (I think it's the proofing press we used) and we got this amazing print!

I can't wait to go back and experiment more, I'm hoping to do a whole run of greetings cards :)

The lino cut itself also looks quite pretty!

I'm really not sure what my next design will be, but one thing I do know: I love this process!