alot of rabbits

abbits are everywhere at the moment.....could be the fact that there are already easter eggs in our local Tesco's and the latest challenge at spoonflower is rabbits! Got out the watercolours yesterday and ignored the washing, ironing and hoovering (Health and safety are really going to shut us down soon!) and painted a load of rabbits, a sort of family tree of a rabbit family - will paste them altogether into a montage and post the results soon!

Beautiful Typography

eautiful sketchbooks always take my breath away- and Christine Buttner's is no exception. Christine is the most talented typographer i know ! Even her handwriting is spectacular... Here are some images of the sketchbook that she has been keeping these past couple of months and she has transfered some of her typography onto a cut-out bit of perspex- the idea being to create a contemporary and modern christmas wreath. Oh such talent...

alot of torn paper

n a vain effort to inspire me the lovely Di Foster sent me some treasured printed tissue papers so that I could at least bash out a couple of collage style illustrations, and after an awfully long time I managed to produce a very large pile of torn paper and some rather pathetic looking greetings cards....oh well, at least I started!

miserable january

truggling to find inspiration this very grey miserable January, although no excuse really as my friend Christine, who can make the simplest things look stunning presented me with these 2 delightful hearts made from french vintage fabric, which I love....and then I found this gorgeous tin at our local flea market, and it was full of buttons, all for a fiver! I then got very excited about the potential of our local antique shops and came home with this beauty (!) of a victorian armchair which just needs to be upholstered in some chic stone coloured linen and given a lick of farrow and ball paint...........

Margaret Harvey

ast weekend was great because I got to visit Margaret Harvey's lovely home and wonderful studio where she showed me some of the stunning work she has been churning out recently.....I first Margaret at Kingston uni where we were studying Graphic Design, and then worked with her at the BBC....many moons ago!
The small needle felt is the eg of the 'Impressionist Felting' courses Margaret will be teaching at Make me craft and lifestyle workshops at the lovely Medicine Garden in Cobham,Surrey. info@makemeworkshops.com
The Wooden collage blocks , mix media collages and jewellery are exhibited at Fire and Iron Gallery Leatherhead Surrey.

paper doll printable downloads

his week I have been working on an illustration style for our website, so that we can do some printable downloads for children that log onto to the website. The paper doll idea is always popular and easily printable onto thicker paper.....the illustrations above were done by using the illusrator programme on the mac to trace the watercolour painting, and create gradients in the vector shapes....while the painterly style is prettier, the clean lines of illustrator is more in keeping with the rest of our products...if you want to see all the dolls in the range you can log onto the budkins website

internet inspiration

ooking for illustration styles at work today got me looking at these fabulous designers and drooling over their wonderful sense of colour and strokes.....from the top - sarah Jane, Frederique Bertrand, Julia Denos and Helen Dardik

gauguin

appy New Year to all of you who have found yourselves here! Desperate for some kind of inspiration after the flu ridden festive period, the family and I took ourselves off to see the stunning Gauguin exhibition at the Tate Modern here in London. What is so wonderful about retrospectives such as this one is that there is always a painting that you had never seen in any of the art books pored over in the past, and we all decided that the beautiful painting above 'the little one is dreaming' painted in 1881 was the one we would all want to take home. What also stood out was the flatness of colour and shapes and the lack of depth, making it possible to focus on some gorgeous figures in the backgrounds....I love the woman crouching near the house....