Card Making

It's my mum's birthday in a few days and I've been working away on a card for her. Ever since I was old enough to hold a pencil I have been making home-made cards for my family. As the years went on and the workload piled up - be it homework, high school portfolio, uni dissertation or design overtime - I started to whittle down on the amount of cards I made. Now I reserve the 'honor' for new arrivals in the family and for my mother who keeps every card I make and displays it proudly until the event the card was created to celebrate has long passed. Sweet. (With the exception of last year, when for the first time in years I sent her a shop-bought card. Poor health + heavy workload = no time management. Sorry mum!)

A few Saturdays ago my good friend Mark and I wandered around Fred Aldous in Manchester to get some inspiration and gather materials. This shop has really come on since I first stepped foot in it 2 years ago. It's so refreshing to see a traditional arts & craft shop keep up with current trends. There were so many vintage style pieces alongside kitsch gifts and oddities. I was really impressed and must have spent close to an hour in there. Seeing the quirky nature of some of the items I then decided to go recreate my own quirky piece.

Here's my latest handywork. You might recognise it...

The beautiful pearlised and laced effect craft pieces from Fred Aldous,
the little silver raindrops reminded me of my Rain Bird illustration.

The templates: My Rain Bird infuriatingly but lovingly printed from Illustrator

The finished product! I cut the artwork out in layers and built up the images piece by piece.
Difficult to see the decoupage effect and 3D raindrops due to my ancient camera
refusing to accept there is any light source in the room and insisting on using a flash at all times.

The silver raindrops and 3D hearts were painted with Chroma acrylic paints to match the graphic,then glued
on to the background. I decided not to add the lacy edging and the pearl drops - less is more!

The inside graphic :)

Does it meet my perfectionist standards? No. This is actually the third attempt at making this card. But I'm sure my mum will love it for what it is.

That's all for now... for tomorrow I bake the cake!! :D

New artwork!

Introducing some new characters to my portfolio, Wowls.

I sell my artwork on Red Bubble under my professional name. You can see my portoflio here.
Anything can be ordered from postcards & stickers to full size canvases. I haven't enabled printing on clothing yet but I'll make it available soon! Also on the way will be iPhone cases :)

Here's a preview of my quirky Wowl series...

Get Out of My Tree!

Where are all the Wowls?

Wowl One

Full of Wowls

If you're a budding artist trying to get your work out there I would definitely give Red Bubble a go - it's incredibly easy to sell your stuff and templates are available for the tricky things. There's quite a community spirit too and you promote your work as much as you wish.

Sod Off November + Unexpectedly Nice Photo

Unhappy November everyone!

No offence November, I just don't particularly like you. Once Bonfire night has passed you are a bit of a bore and you never break the monotony with bank holidays unlike precious April. Face it, all you do is blow draughts into my house and make me feel guilty for not starting my Christmas shopping already. And to make it worse you go and begin your tirade of a misery month on a Tuesday. I hate Tuesdays -and Wednesdays a little- But more so Tuesdays.You know that November.

Anyway, to distract from being a Tuesday I used my lunch hour to rummage through and clear out* my phone's memory. I found one of my unexpectedly nice photos. I have a lot of these.What is an unexpectedly nice photo? An accidental gem. Perhaps the light was bad, perhaps the camera was rubbish, perhaps I was drunk. I don't know. Cue photo.

It is a nice lamp

This is a lamp.

It is my mum's lamp and was (and I believe still is) situated in her livingroom along with myself and my brand new phone. I had just bought it that day and was buried in being that person who takes photographs of everything...anything...while others desperately dive out of the way to avoid a serial Facebook tagging.
I had been lying on the floor playing Scrabble with AJ when my mum decided it was time to break her electrical  boycott and save us from eye strain / blindness. The result was a soft directional light which fell on the chairs either side and created a nice light-dark gradient in the fabric of the shade. So I took a quick snap.Considering this is a phone pic I quite like the way it came out, especially as no filters or specials apps were used. It is unexpectedly nice. Now you get it. Har har.
Voilà. The talents of the HTC Desire HD, my mum's lamp and a bored Saturday evening.

*Deleting one photo still counts as 'clearing out'. It does. I'm claiming it.