That’s how I felt when I met up with a friend of mine last week – Samantha Johnson – who is a very talented Interior Designer with nearly 20 years experience of designing amazing homes. Sam recently moved house to a lovely cottage in Buckinghamshire and asked me to draw it for her so that she could use it for her business materials. Well, I wouldn’t class myself as an ‘artist’ so whenever anyone asks me personally to draw something for them I am over the moon. Big smile inside… I love drawing but really struggle with what to draw so this takes that worry away!
As I drew Sam’s cottage last year sometime I had totally forgotten and assumed it wasn’t good enough to use – so was incredibly chuffed when Sam showed me her new business cards and postcards with my design on the front – cool or what?!
Here they are – in a gorgeous grey with a thin stripe of yellow around the edge of the cards. Since then I have decided that drawing buildings is the way to go for me – I’m always obsessed with every little detail, from brickwork around windows to pretty chimney pots. So I’m starting to put together a collection of drawings of my favourite buildings in Maidenhead and the local area. More on that coming soon…
Well, it’s a new year and I’m feeling good, I hope you are too!
Why am I in a good mood? I’ve been thinking and I put it down to:
A break in the rainy weather (the sun is shining even if it’s cold out there!)
I’m a big fan of starting something new and I love the fresh feeling that a new year brings
I’ve discovered yoga! Well, I’ve been going to yogalates for 6 months or so but I recently signed up to a 30 day yoga bootcamp and am on day 5 now. It’s with ‘Yoga with Adriene’ – who was recommended in an Instagram feed of a Swedish fabric designer I follow. Watch the introduction video on YouTube here. She’s great – young, pretty, relaxed and fun too. Luckily, I have a part of the day when I’m kind of ‘in limbo’ – kids home from school, too early to cook dinner – so it’s the perfect time to ‘get on the mat’ (if I had one!) for some yoga. I fully intend to make it to the 30 days and am going to treat myself to a mat and a nice yoga outfit at the end – something to look forward to! (It’s the small things you know!) 😉
Finally, I adore my boys but it’s good to get back to some balance in my life after the school holidays – I have totally made the most of my freedom this week (including wandering round the shops yesterday and some serious clothes shopping today, as well as some much needed exercise, cycling to work, oh and the yoga every day of course!)
I don’t really have any new year’s resolutions but there are definitely some things I want to do more of (drawing, having fun, traveling, relaxing and generally doing things that make me happy, including buying new clothes, made a good start on that today, watch out credit card!) Plus some things I want to do a lot less of (stressing about silly things mostly).
So, that’s my start to the year – the kids have been back at school for a week, I’ve been back into work and everything is back to the usual routine which is refreshing for me after 3 weeks of lazing around (which was great too, feeling very chilled now!)
I thought I’d share this drawing I was asked to do last year as a commission for a couple who got married somewhere a bit different – a big teepee! Drawing commissions are my absolute favourite – it’s so nice to be asked to draw something by someone who likes your style (I had previously drawn the client’s house for her). We’ve never met but she found me on the web and trusted me to draw the wedding venue for her friend as a present, no pressure! Anyway, here it is, with my signature patterned sky print. Happy New Year everyone! 🙂
I didn’t realise how important logos were or really think about them much; until I had a go at designing my own a few years ago. And when a couple of friends were looking for logos for their small businesses I offered to help them out – it’s lovely to have a bit of a project to work on and as I still struggle with deciding what to draw this takes away that decision.
So, first there was my logo – at the top of this page of course.
I wanted it to be clean and simple but a bit quirky and fun too. And to reflect that I draw as well as make lampshades. It was my second attempt and I still really like it. It just goes to show that you need to make sure you are really happy with a logo before you go ahead with it; even if you’re just a small business.
Below is a logo I designed for Louise from Simply Sewing. It was a while ago too but I don’t think I ever shared it on here:
Louise already used the flower shape on her website and Facebook page and just wanted to play with the font and colours as well as add one of my drawings somewhere.
I had a play with some ideas and really liked the one below but we decided as she makes amazing curtains and handmade soft furnishings it didn’t really reflect her skills!
I drew some curtains for Louise too, which are on her website front page:
It’s great to look back at this work and see how I came up with the designs, I really like them and luckily Louise did too…
Next, I worked on some drawings for the menu of the Italian cafe on Furze Platt Road in Maidenhead, Palmieri’s. They make amazing pasta dishes and bread as well as selling scrummy Italian ice-cream. Plus they do a roaring trade from the local mums meeting for coffee.
Here are a few snapshots of the menu with my drawings; the curly pasta is my favourite (and to eat!) I can’t take any credit for the design including colours and font though – that was the very talented Chris Isted at Three Sixty Design.
Last but not least, the most recent project I have worked on, maybe I should’ve shared this first really – designing a logo for a friend who has just qualified in reflexology and set up her own practice in Maidenhead. Hanne wanted the logo to incorporate one of my drawings and had some of her own ideas on how it should look. It took a bit of playing around to fit my foot drawing into the logo but I think it worked out really well in the end and the customer was very happy so that’s what counts! I painted the toes yellow towards the end of the design process and I’m really glad as it really lifts the design.
Hanne is in the process of setting up her website but you can like her Facebook page and book a reflexology treatment here.
That’s it for now… I have managed to complete another machine embroidery picture today, this time of a bird which is a first for me (no teapots in sight!) I’ll share that with you another time, enjoy the sunshine! 🙂
I love drawing but always feel as though I should take up painting or go back to screen printing or something to bring my work to life and give it colour and depth. The only problem is I think I’m a bit too lazy to get the paints out and I don’t really have a space dedicated to messy screen printing equipment just yet; as much as I love the effects it can produce. I’m, much more likely to have a play with my drawings in PhotoShop which is fine, but sometimes it feels a bit like cheating to me.
Anyway, I haven’t been completely lazy and have been really enjoying working on my drawings with lots of machine embroidery lately which is great fun.
I was inspired to get my sewing machine out of it’s cover when I visited the Affordable Art Fair at Battersea earlier this year. When I walked into the show the first thing I saw was an artist sitting at a sewing machine and I had to go and have a look. Harriett Riddell was artist in residence for the evening and was surrounded by ‘spectators’, avidly watching as she casually machine embroidered portraits for just £40 each in half an hour. I loved her quirky free style and couldn’t believe that she did it all without drawing anything first!
Harriet Riddell of InStitchYou portrait at the Affordable Art Fair
And now for the machine embroidery lesson…
I’m not quite so brave… yet. I like to draw on paper first, then, if it’s a drawing I really like and I think it would look good on fabric I prepare for machine embroidery by tracing the drawing onto some fabric using a washable pen. I starch the fabric first – this makes it easier to sew using a sewing machine and means you don’t need to use an embroidery hoop which can be a bit cumbersome.
You need a special foot for machine embroidery – see the photo below – it has a kind of ring foot so that you can see where you’re sewing. It’s also vital before starting to lower the sewing machine teeth – this means that you can move the fabric freely, rather than sewing in straight lines. Set the sewing machine to a normal stitch and don’t go too slow. Just practice on a scrap of fabric first; try writing, it’s very liberating once you relaxand un-hunch your shoulders!!
Here’s a picture I took when I was working on my first machine embroidery flower picture – dried poppy seed heads. The blue lines are from the washable pen and have to be washed out after sewing. I like the way machine embroidery gives the drawings a sketchy feel and I’m getting better at accepting the fact that they can’t be perfect (and it’s actually best that they aren’t!) I’m on my third flower drawing now and I have become much better at drawing the outline first but then filling in a lot of the detail as I go; using the needle as if it were a pencil.
Once I have stitched the outline of the drawing I get out my stash of fabrics and choose 2 or 3 I think would work to add some colour and pattern. I attach the fabric by ironing on Bondaweb – all a bit fiddly but it stops it moving around and means you don’t have any messy glue or sharp pins in the way. Then you can get sewing again. It’s definitely not something to do if you’re in a rush or not feeling very patient!
Sometimes I add paper too – here’s the same drawing a bit further on:
And here’s the final piece. I think it’s my favourite one so far and that’s because it’s very simple and I really like the colours (grey and yellow always a favourite) and shapes of the flowers. Watch out for more on the other drawings in future blog posts.
For now though, my latest project is to cover some foam on a window seat in our new dining room, hopefully edged with contrasting binding (arghhh!) A bit of a challenge as I haven’t made cushions for a long time; I think I’ll have to watch that video on inserting a zip again first!!
Since this I have started a gilhoolie embroidered lampshade collection – you can see them here, available to buy or commission now.
Okay, so I don’t have any new year’s resolutions as such but I do know that I want to be more creative again this year. I’m reading a positivity book for my ‘other job’ and one of the things that I liked the sound of was doing more activities that give you ‘flow’. They can be anything you enjoy doing that help you escape and lose yourself. So it could be walking, drawing, swimming, writing, knitting, reading, or even work if you’re really lucky! For me I really escape when I’m drawing, or making a lampshade, or teaching a workshop or doing some machine embroidery, or writing this blog. So that’s why I intend to do more of these things in 2014.
Sometimes it’s just hard finding the time to be creative, but I thought I’d start with a look at my favourite printmakers to get some inspiration. I already have a piece of lino and some tools so I’ll be having a go really soon, it’s just deciding what image to print – always my stumbling block (that and aiming too high to start off with – I want to be as good as these straight away, wow, I love them!!)
I think there’s a common theme in terms of subject and colours I seem to be drawn to which is good, now my turn… (You can get to all the links for these via my Pinterest page).
I don’t know about you but I feel as though Christmas was a life time ago, or was it all just a dream?! Not a bad thing I guess; good to get on with a new year and all that. I don’t have any new year resolutions as such but I do have plenty of things I want to get on with as soon as possible. One of them is writing on here regularly again as I know I neglected it in the second half of 2013. So here’s my first post of 2014, hopefully the first of many!
I have a list of the other things I want to achieve and I was about to put them on here but then decided not to, all will be revealed as the year goes on (as long as I get on and stop procrastinating!)
Anyway, back to Christmas – below are some of the house picture commissions I received at the end of last year. I still get asked to do these occasionally and of course it’s always a pleasure. I still love looking at and drawing houses…
If you live in Maidenhead you’ll probably know ‘Palmieris’, the lovely Italian cafe on Furze Platt Road. It’s well known for its yummy fresh pasta and if you’re a mum like me you are bound to have met friends there for coffee.
Well, I was recently given the opportunity to do some small drawings for Palmieris new menu and I jumped at the chance.
I really enjoyed this project; it was so nice to be given a brief on what to draw rather than making it up myself! I love the way the menu turned out too, down to some amazing design work by 360 Design in Maidenhead.
Here’s some of my favourites but you can see the full menu here, or pop along to see for yourself!
(Drawings by gilhoolie, all other design by 360 Design).
Last weekend I attended a screen printing course at the London Print Studio in West London. I’ve been wanting to have a go at printing some of my drawings for a while now, just to be more ‘arty’ really; rather than ‘cheating’ and printing everything through PhotoShop.
I decided to try and print my foxgloves drawing on the course to see how it would turn out. The plan was to print lots of layers to experiment with screen printing so I did 8. In hindsight this was a little optimistic but I guess I learnt a lot because I had chosen so many, and definitely had lots of screen printing practice too.
So this is how the foxgloves drawing looked in PhotoShop:
I really like it but the colours are almost too perfect if you see what I mean, so screen printing seemed like a good option to give it a similar feel but with more texture.
We started by breaking down the image into different layers and colours for printing. We did this by tracing the sections of the image onto acetate using pens and paints to get different effects.
Layers on acetate
Then these were exposed onto the screen, all 8 of them!
Layers on the screen
Next was the ink mixing to get the right colours – a really fun (and messy) bit but harder than you think as it’s kind of difficult to visualise how it’s going to look in your head, especially when time is limited. I had to mix 3 greens and 3 purples and choose a grey for the outline.
So that was the end of day one, no printing done yet, just lots of preparation work. It was incredibly tiring nonetheless and I needed a nice glass of wine when I eventually arrived home that evening.
The next day was all about printing, yippee! You could sense everyone’s anticipation as we all started off printing our layers and looked forward to seeing the finished pieces of art work at the end of the day. Here’s where I wished I hadn’t done 8 layers; I’m really not known for my patience so it was very hard for me!
These are my prints drying on the rack, some with a graduated oval background, some with just a white background (which I preferred).
Prints drying at the end of the day
And here’s a close up of one of my prints. Not perfect but not bad and I learnt so much about layering.
Ta da!
So thank you London Print Studio, I had the best time (and never realised screen printing could be so exhausting!) I’d love to come back soon to print some more gilhoolie artwork (with fewer layers this time!) Just need to find the time to fit it in…
I’ve lived in Maidenhead for a long time but never taken any notice of the yellow signs you see around this time of year saying ‘Bucks open studios‘. This year a friend asked if I’d like to go and visit some of the homes and studios of local artists. I’m so glad I did! You just don’t know what’s on your doorstep. Firstly, lots of very talented people and beautiful art, and secondly any excuse to explore and see some amazing, very English houses, gardens and countryside. It’s also an opportunity, if you’re lucky enough, to meet the artists themselves and see where and how they work.
And so followed a lot of driving around Buckinghamshire, as far as Wendover (with a few wrong turns along the way, and lots of chatting (which probably contributed to the wrong turns!) Here are just a few of the artists whose work caught my eye.
Susan Anderson at The Orchards Studio Group in Great Missenden – I really like the simplicity of her black and white prints.
Susan Anderson print
Angela Fielder at Bledlow Ridge – truly amazing watercolour paintings, I was so inspired. I’ve always thought I didn’t like watercolour very much but just flicking through her small sketch books was such a treat. I’m going to have a go myself soon, but have to remember as she said, it takes years of practice to get as good as this!
Angela Fielder
Amanda Curbishley at the Chilterns MS Centre – I loved her painting of seaside villages in Cornwall, the effects on the water are stunning.
Amanda Curbishley
And finally, just a couple of miles from my house, Juliette Palmer RBA in Cookham. Wow, what a prolific artist! Worth the visit to see inside her house which is filled to the brim with paintings and sketches from when she worked as an art teacher in the 1950’s and then as a children’s book illustrator in the sixties and seventies. My favourite pieces though were her simple ink sketches. Unfortunately I can’t find any images of them on-line so here’s one of her paintings depicting a street in Tunisia.
Juliette Palmer
So we barely skimmed the surface really but it was well worth it and I came away wanting to draw and paint lots more. Don’t worry, you still have five days to go and explore, look out for those yellow signs, don’t ignore them!…
Last week I was asked to draw a picture of a 1971 VW Karmann Ghia car for a father’s day present. It’s a beautiful classic car and I thought it would look best if I drew it in ink first and then coloured it in PhotoShop. So this is the first drawing I have officially done this for a client – giclee printed onto 310gsm Hahnemuhle German etching paper. I think it came out really well; much more interesting than a line drawing and really fun to do.
Hopefully it’s the first of many commissions, but don’t ask me to draw your pets or family members, inanimate objects only please! Happy father’s day to all the dads out there!
