2011 - The Story So Far

Yo blog, long time no see.  How's things?  Crikey, where's the time going?

4 months into 2011 and this is my first post of the year.  Stuff has happened in that time which has forced my hand professionally but hopefully in a good way.

For family health-related reasons, it's now no longer a good idea for me to be out of the house doing a 9-5 job.  I could see the day coming and maybe that's why I've been a bit reticent about throwing myself into applying for jobs.  So I'm no longer prepared to compromise, it's becoming a home-based freelancer or nothing.

Money has always been the stumbling block stopping me from going for it.  Hopefully that's about to change as the government is about to introduce an updated version of the old Enterprise Allowance Scheme (which helped me start my first business in the late '80s).  This should offer more of a financial cushion to support me with materials, marketing, etc, if only for a few months.  The trouble is nobody knows when this scheme's starting or exactly what it's going to offer!  So right now I'm badgering the Job Centre every time I visit and I've been booked in with a new business support group who will hopefully be more use than all the other idiots I've been shunted off to see over the years!  Ah well, we'll see.

In the meantime, I'm giving my online shops a spring clean and over the next few weeks I'll be adding new designs and products for your purchasing pleasure.

First up, I've taken some designs I originally submitted to T-shirt design competition site Allmightys and added them to my Zazzle store.  They're inspired by 3 of my favourite animals and are bound to turn heads as part of your summer wardrobe.

(The following images are mock-ups.  The finished products are available in a variety of styles and colours although I have presented them on the colour I feel suits them best.)

A mean-looking red deer stag confronts his opponents with his vicious antlers, ready for the rut.  Shirt available in light and dark formats.

Hundreds of individually-drawn feather details on this glorious peacock, strutting his stuff for the hens.

A salmon makes a death-defying leap up a raging waterfall to reach its ancient spawning ground.

The shirts cost from $22.95, giving you a practical, hard-wearing garment and also a unique piece of artwork you will never find anywhere else.  So if you enjoy reading this blog or my Scrapbook, or if you like to follow me on Twitter or Facebook, please do what you can to support my shops and spread the word to new followers.

Next in my shop spring clean I'll be adding new products to my Café Press stores, putting some of my Zazzle designs onto new items and also unveiling some new additions to one of my ranges.  Watch this space!

Spring Fair 2010 - Part 2: Beef Up Your Walls

The thing I like to do most when I visit Spring and Autumn Fairs is to just wander up and down the aisles and take in an overview of what the season's design trends are. Last autumn was brightened up by huge colourful flowers. The flavour for this season is...

...beef.

It seemed like every other art stall was overflowing with paintings of cows.

Spotty cows...

Brown Cow? by Jennifer Brereton at Collier and Dobson, prints from £105

...hairy cows...

I Spy by Thuline at Alpha 1 Marketing, £99

...cheeky cows...

Friesian Orange by James Bartholomew at The Mill House Gallery, prints from £95

...moody cows.

The Black Angus by Angela Davidson, prints from £50

If cows aren't your pick of the farmyard, there were plenty of other tasty animals to choose from.

Cocktail by Mary Ann Rogers at Alpha 1 Marketing, £66

Grazing Sheep by Timmy Mallett - yes, THAT Timmy Mallett - at Buckingham Fine Art Publishers

Foxes were also popular...

The Fox by Gary Benfield at Buckingham Fine Art Publishers, giclée print £153

...hares even more so.

Brown Hare by Nigel Artingstall, £395

On The Run by Kate Osborne at Artreo, giclée print £82.25

But mostly it was cows.

Cliffs and Cows by Michael Embden at Artreo, giclée print from £70

All images are for illustrative purposes only and link to the site of origin. All copyrights respected.

Dusting Off The Archives

I've got artwork floating around on various sites around cyberspace, so this is a good place to pull them all together, either linking to them or reposting them for your benefit.

You'll notice I've added a DeviantShare widget, which you can see scrolling away on the left of the page. This has samples from the college work I've posted on my DeviantArt portfolio. Click on the widget's link and you'll be able to see the rest. It's a great showcase of the different styles I can create and I've added quite detailed descriptions of my working methods. You can also buy many of the images printed onto canvas, mugs, mousemats and other products.

I also have some personal projects archived on my cobwebby old MySpace page, so I'm bringing the best of them across here. A group of them are T-shirt designs, which I'll keep for their own post. Here are the "bits and bobs", personal projects and one-offs.

WATERGLADE

Photo restoration - personal project

Adobe PhotoShop & Nova Art Explosion clip art, 2003

I was lent this postcard by my auntie in 2003, who had been quoted a small fortune to get it restored professionally.

It shows an allotment by a local pub called The Waterglade and is dated 1911. The woman and the man on the right are my mum's parents, and the baby is another one of my many aunties.

Tatty, torn, faded and stained by old Sellotape, the only way to rescue it was to hack it to pieces using PhotoShop (I think I was running version 5 at the time) and recreate it in the spirit of the original. The sky, path and bush on the left hand side were taken from clip art and blended in.

The postcard was a black and white photo hand-coloured in a limited palette. Therefore I had to reduce the image to greyscale, brighten it up and colour it all in again. The colours had to be a flat wash of one shade, matching the original palette as closely as possible.

Minor creases were easily ironed out using the Clone tool and the text was recreated over the original.

The final piece was printed on good quality photo paper, framed and hung with love on my auntie's wall. :)

415

Illustration - online art project

PhotoShop & Bryce, 2008

In April 2008, a guy named Adam Box launched The Count High Project, with the aim of making a film. It was to consist of illustrations of numbers, running sequentially from 1 up to however many submissions he could collect in exactly 12 months.

Anyone was welcome to have a go. All you had to do was Email Adam and he would send you your number (issued in strict first-come-first-served order). You could then illustrate it any way you wanted - drawing, painting, modelling, photography or just scribbling it on a piece of paper. Talent wasn't the important thing, he just wanted to see the variety of ideas and people (from professional designers to schoolkids) his wacky project would attract.

The target was 100,000 but I don't believe he received anywhere near that. Indeed the website disappeared before the 12 month deadline expired. I still like my contribution though, so here it is.

I was assigned 415 which, when I researched it, turned out to be a very boring number! The most interesting thing I could find out was it's the telephone area code for San Francisco. So somehow that led to this earthquake-inspired illustration.

I created the ground and sky in the Bryce 3D landscape generating software. I'm not an experienced user though and I couldn't find my manual. I'd forgotten how to import a greyscale image and turn it into a landscape, so instead I did the 415-shaped holes in PhotoShop. Adding graduated browns and a grain effect gave a convincing 3D appearance.

HUNGARIAN PULI - A BEGINNER'S GUIDE

Personal bit of daftness

PhotoShop, 2007

Finally for now, something I did in one of my silly moods! I'm a bit obsessed with Hungarian Pulis and I found this amazing photo on Wikipedia. I thought people might like a bit of help working out what it was!

Winter Wonderland

Being stuck at home isn't all bad, if you can gloss over how feeble you feel when you can't make your Job Seekers' Allowance cover all your bills, along with all the paranoia about how you must have written a subliminal "DIE YOU SCUM" message into all your CVs and THAT'S why no potential employers are ever getting back to you.

Ho hum.

Anyway, today is a day I can positively relish not having to go out in all that slippy-slidy snowy stuff. I'm here with my tea and biccies, wearing an unfashionable big jumper and still able to plug my shops and do my networking.

There was the unexpected surprise of the BBC changing their schedule last night, replacing football with a repeat of New Tricks. Not just ANY episode, but Father's Pride, the one with The Beautiful Rasmus Hardiker (high on my list of favourite Midlanders).

Then my artistic eye turns to the scene outside. It's not the superficial Christmas card prettiness of it, but something about the way the snow reflects the light back up and changes the whole atmosphere of the place.

In particular, I'm haunted by a sight I saw on Tuesday night. We'd had quite a heavy blanketing and there were still snowclouds covering the whole sky. I'd dozed off earlier, meaning I was bolt upright after everyone else had gone to bed. Sometime after 2.00 am I went into the kitchen and looked out into the garden. There's no artificial light covering that area so normally it's pitch black. That night though, the combination of the heavy clouds and the snow on the ground, reflecting what little light there was back and forth between each other, meant that the whole scene was almost as clear as daylight. Every little detail of the garden could be seen, but the whole thing was bathed in a strange pale orange glow.

Absolutely stunning.

I only wish I had some sort of highly expensive camera that could capture the scene and do justice to the colours, but I'll just have to draw something from memory.

So anyway, I've taken some daytime pictures for reference and here are a couple of them for you to enjoy. It also gives me a good excuse to tell you how my little feathery friends are coping.

A wide shot of the garden, taken at about 10.00 am today. The camera struggled to cope with the sheer whiteness of the scene, which makes the sky look darker and more dramatic than it really was. In the centre of the picture (between the bird table and ornamental well planter) you can see a little dark dent in the snow. This is a plastic bucket lid I've had to lay down to put extra food on. Some birds, notably the blackbirds and dunnocks, refuse to come onto the bird table so I have to have some method of putting food on the ground. They get some mixed seed, peanuts, sunflower seed hearts and - only in freezing weather because they're expensive - dried mealworms.

On the right hand side, in front of the shed, you can see the little stone birdbath with a green plant pot tray next to it. Providing water for the birds in this weather is just as important as the food but it's extremely difficult. I'm out with a kettle 3 times per day. I can normally get the big bath on the bird table clear at least once a day, but I've had to give up on the little one. It was just spilling over and freezing on the path. So I've added the plant pot tray as an alternative because some birds like the lower height and being undercover of the shed.

The bird table and the 4-part planter to its left stand on drain covers. We have the sewers running under our garden and the heat from them is keeping the covers clear!

Not much sign of the squirrels during this snowy spell. We have 3 regulars (2 of which I think are mother and child but she hasn't bothered kicking Junior too far out of the drey) but last week, on a clear but frosty morning, I actually saw 4! The regulars didn't put up with the intruder so I don't know if it'll come back. I really wish I could put little coloured tags on them to tell them apart.

Frozen birdbath, snowy bench and trees.

The pampas grass has taken a bit of a battering under the weight of the snow. About half of the stalks are broken. Still, if I tear off some of the fluffy plumes and leave them in the corner of the garden after the thaw, the birds will take them to line their nests. Something nice and cosy for their bums.

Winter. We moan about it when it's here but we kind of miss it when it's gone.

An Alternative Thought For Armistice Day

I found this through Twitter and it seemed kind of appropriate for today.

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Scary S*** For Halloween

Never mind ghosties and ghoulies, this is what scared the b'jaysus out of me when I was little:

UK Public Information Film, 1973

Happy Halloween. Just don't come knocking on my door.

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The Most Inspiring Thing In The World

So here it is.  The thing that inspires me more than anything else in the world.

It gives me a routine and responsibility.  It makes me laugh and gasp and go all squidgy inside.  It makes sure I get some fresh air every day, even when I'd just rather shut myself inside with a double bill of Jeremy Kyle (damn you, ITV2!)  It gets me looking and thinking and dreaming and learning.  I'll literally spend my last penny on it.

*Cue imaginary drum roll.*

(Although, actually, if you don't need to scroll down past this bit you'll have already seen what it is.)

Teatime at Café Val

My bird table.

I've always loved animals.  Even the little ikky ones no-one else likes.  Although I draw the line at headlice, tapeworms and anything else that would want to use me as a hotel.  I'm not able to keep pets for various reasons, so my bird table's the next best thing.

As you can see, there are dozens of different birds that come and use our garden.  We get house sparrows, starlings, collared doves, woodpigeons, blackbirds, magpies and a robin.  About 6 weeks ago, I noticed that 2 birds which I thought were female sparrows actually weren't.  They were plainer and behaved quite differently.  Thanks to the good folk at the British Garden Birds website, http://www.garden-birds.co.uk/ I was able to find out that they were called dunnocks (hedge sparrows) - a bird I'd never even heard of before!

I'm no twitcher, I don't know much about the birds but I love watching how they relate to each other.  There's a definite hierarchy in the garden - they don't call it a pecking order for nothing.

If anyone tries telling you house sparrows are dying out, they're wrong.  They've just all moved up to live by me.  We must have about 50 of them, at least it's very common to have over 20 in our garden at any one time.  They always hang around in large flocks and are very skittish.  At the slightest disturbance they all fly back to the tree, but then they'll come back to the table after just a few seconds.  I'm sure they use up more calories than they eat doing that!

Woodpigeons have a strange idea of tolerance.  If, say, there were 6 of them, pigeon A won't put up with pigeon B.  Pigeon C won't put up with pigeon D.  Pigeon E won't put up with pigeon F.  But they're always one-on-one disagreements, they never get involved in each other's arguments.

Pigeon and dove mating behaviour is hilarious.  The males will puff their chests out, strut after the females, do elaborate bowing and chase their competitors off.  The females don't take a blind bit of notice of them and just carry on eating.  You go girl!

The starlings are like a football mob.  They flock down in their dozens, squawk their heads off and completely take over the garden.  They're one of my favourites though, their seemingly drab feathers glint with iridescent flashes of purple, green, blue and gold.  They also give me my favourite sight in the garden (sadly not easy to photograph)...

Shake a tailfeather, baby

There's nothing more enthusiastic than a starling in a birdbath.  It gets its head and wings right in and splashes water everywhere (as above, you can see all the spray in the top right hand corner of the picture).  Then it puts its bum in and gives its tail a darn good shake.  Then its head, then its tail, then its head, then its tail.  Repeat for minutes on end until there's no more water in the birdbath or the poor sparrow standing underneath the table has drowned.

There are other birds who don't like coming into the garden but still bring their wonderful characters into our lives.  The crows who test the breaking strain of everybody's TV aerials.  The white lovebirds who may still be someone's pets or who may have escaped, sitting on the corner of next door's roof watching what I'm putting on the table but never coming to get any.  All the different types of seagull who've made their home as far inland as you can get in the UK, scavenging off the bits of junk food the kids drop on their way to and from school.  The pied wagtail risking death by dashing into the road for squashed bugs.  The swifts darting about acrobatically through the sky chasing flies, making their "scree scree" call that's like a soundtrack to the summer.

Then there are the other supporting characters.  We have solid fencing or walls all round our garden, so we don't get things like hedgehogs or foxes (although I did find a frog last year and that was the first one I've seen in there since about 1990!)  Underneath the bird table lurk various different types of slugs, snails and worms, polishing off the husks and nut skins the birds leave behind.  I don't mind the insects, if they're at my table or in my compost bin they're doing a useful job and it keeps them away from the important plants.

There's one animal I DON'T tolerate though.  A skanky bird-murdering cat that lurks behind the ornamental planters and pounces on anything having a nice quiet feed at the table.  It's all black, so it's well camouflaged under there, but if I see it I walk into the garden and it jumps over the fence.  It actually got a woodpigeon the other week, I only noticed because there were loads of feathers on the grass.  My mum and I went and had a look and found it behind the planter with blood all round its neck, freshly killed.  It was well hidden from view and if we hadn't noticed it there and then it would have soon attracted rats and maggots - yuk!

Last, but by no means least, the bird table attracts this little lady...

Friendly neighbourhood nut thief

She lives in the tall tree a few houses down the road.  She has a boyfriend who lives across the road who also occasionally visits.  She tolerates him sometimes (i.e. when she wants babies) but normally she chases him off.

It's a real battle of wits between me and my squirrel, but I can't help but love her.  Suet balls have to go in a holder or she'd just nick a whole one.  Peanut holders have to be all metal and this one had to have the perch reinforced because she soon bit off the original plastic stoppers, pulled out the perch, making the bottom fall off and unleashing the peanuts.  My brother had to take the holder to work and make two special metal stoppers which she can't get off.  The coconut is a distraction for her, I spoon in some suet treat and stick peanuts to it.  If you want to buy a filled coconut and you have a squirrel, WHATEVER YOU DO MAKE SURE THE COCONUT HAS A SOFT FILLING!  I've made the mistake of buying ones with hard fillings and within a couple of days she's managed to work out how to get the whole thing out in one go!  So I'm there shouting "I hope you get a belly ache from it," but I can't help laughing at her cleverness.  It's just up to me to do better next time.

When I see really interesting behaviour from the birds or other garden visitors, I take a mental "snapshot" of it.  It's a big ambition of mine to be able to get all these ideas down on paper some day, I could probably have enough to make an exhibition.  They wouldn't be cute, either, they'd be tales of life and death, sex and power, a feathery soap opera being acted out in our gardens every day.