Doodling Hedgehogs!

I'm very fond of hedgehogs!

I think that may be something to do with the fact that one of my earliest memories is of being woken up, late one evening, and carried downstairs and outside, wrapped in a blanket, to see a hedgehog my parents had discovered in the back garden. 

That was so unlike my mother! She was normally pretty strict, having been born while Queen Victoria was still alive - just! She was most definitely all for children sleeping at the proper time, no matter what, so maybe that's why this lapse in my usually highly disciplined upbringing has stuck in my memory.

The 'hedgehog' doodle above is waiting to be tidied up and painted and turned into a greeting card. And I'm thinking maybe these jolly little fellows could even feature on a  repeating pattern for Nursery curtains or something like that.

As ever, I have plenty of doodles but never enough time to make something of them. The Six Nations (rugby) season doesn't help as weekend afternoons are usually my painting time. But these are now on my list of ideas to pursue so they will get done - eventually!

In the meantime, here's a hedgehog scenario that seemed to come out of nowhere - as do most of my doodles!

Snowdrops and Victorian Bathrooms!

In the end I couldn’t think of any way to avoid repainting the background to last week’s snowdrops in a stronger, darker blue.

It wasn’t quite the sunshiny effect I was hoping for and I didn’t enjoy painting carefully in between all those stems and leaves but I think the end result was a big improvement!

 I was able to make it into a variety of cards by adding different coloured borders, as well as the ‘February Birthday’ card for my daughter.

Snowdrops February Birthday Card by helikettle

What I hadn’t realised is that the snowdrop is actually one of the ‘January Birthday’ flowers, along with the carnation. So I made some cards for January birthdays too - and a few others besides! Click here to see all the snowdrop greeting cards.

Having brought myself up to date with cards for upcoming family birthdays, I couldn’t wait to get back to designing some more repeating patterns.

I wanted to do something a little less flowery next, working my way towards some patterns that would be suitable for Messenger Bags for men and boys as well as for women and girls.

Browsing through a book of authentic Victorian stencil designs, I came across a highly embellished ‘fleur de lys’ motif that I thought would make a great repeating pattern that could be viewed either way up if necessary – as in the case of the flap of the messenger bags.

I’ve always had a tendency to ‘re-invent the wheel' so I didn’t use that design in the book, even though it was copyright-free but just took it as inspiration for my own design.

This is how it worked out  - but it may be rather too pale to see, depending on your computer screen.

When my neighbour saw it, he said it looked like a Victorian bathroom – it reminded me of a very old-fashioned Public Convenience, and apparently, that’s what my neighbour really thought but was too polite to say so!

This one shows up a bit more clearly and, with the pencil lines removed, it's starting to look more like wallpaper than bathroom tiling –

Once I’d worked out the pattern and its repeats by going through all the processes that I described a fortnight ago, I painted one ‘block’ in gouache:

The next stage is to place these ‘blocks’ side by side in my photo-editing program and fill in the background colour on the computer to make sure it's even and you can't see the 'joins'.

How will it work out? Will the 'tiles' match up? I’ll let you know next week . . .


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From Dragons to Cats . . .

Anyone who saw last week’s post will notice that my dragon changed quite a bit, thanks largely to Diana’s suggestion about his muzzle!

And here she is on a t-shirt!

 

Toddler T-shirt with Cute Red Dragon

It made me notice that the dragon on the Welsh flag is not very dragon-like:

In fact it looks suspiciously like an adaptation of the lion on this Scottish flag!

But with the digital addition of the green background, I’ve made mine into:

Welsh Red Dragon Cards and Products on Zazzle

*     *     *

With one of my grandson’s turning 12 at the end of this month, a difficult age for birthday cards for boys, I find, that’s what this week’s doodling has focused on. Last year I based his and his older brother’s cards on a slightly comical cat theme:

      

And this is what’s coming up for this year so far:

Any idea what the caption might be?

Know anyone with an Aries birthday?

Click here

for

Aries Birthday Cards and Gifts

'Aries' Tote Bag by helikettle
Make your own bag at zazzle

Advice on Popular Party Games Needed!

We’re still in January and here I am already posting more than once a week! But this is just a quick one to ask for advice.

One of my grandsons will be 11 next week and I’m designing a birthday card for him. He’s definitely arrived at the age where it's difficult to find suitable birthday cards and my heart sank when my daughter replied to my enquiry about his current interests with, ‘X-box Live’!

For a start, X-box isn’t within my realm of experience any more than Playstation or Nintendo Wii are. All I know is that a lot of children and young people crave them!

Secondly, my most successful pen and wash greeting card designs seem to be ones where there’s a bit of action, or at least, movement. And from the little I have observed about these things, in television soap operas mainly, with video games, there’s very little movement going on, in fact the opposite, as the players sit crouched in one position for hours on end!

Which brings me to my third difficulty. A short time ago, I watched a television documentary about addiction to gaming. So all the time I was wondering about the design of a birthday card for my grandson, this rather worrying thought was at the back of my mind. However, the programme I saw seemed to suggest that people who get addicted to video games mostly have some underlying problem that predisposes them to addiction and that there are some real benefits to be gained from playing video games – in moderation!

So this is what I came up:

My query relates to the caption. In the UK, ‘pass the parcel’ is probably one of the most common traditional party games. But if I want to post this design for sale online -  ie globally! – I need to know whether that text will be understood worldwide. Is, for instance, ‘pass the parcel’ as popular in the US as it has been in the UK? If not, what would be the US equivalent? (And if there is anyone reading this who could translate my text into another language completely, with appropriate party game inserted, I’d be very, very grateful!)

Humour doesn’t always translate easily into other languages because of cultural differences. For instance, a range of my lighthearted Christmas cards that haven’t sold at all through Greeting Card Universe, sold very well through the UK website, yoodoo.com.

So maybe a bit of ‘international cooperation’ is called for and would be very much appreciated!

PS I must just add that Daniel, my grandson does do a lot of more active things – tennis, golf, skiing for instance – but not just at the moment! And his brother will be turning 14 in early February, so that will probably present another challenge for me!

Birthday Cards for Sportsmen of All Ages -

On my other blog today -

Birthday Cards for Sportsmen of All Ages