Designs that look forward to summer!

This is how last week's repeating pattern turned out and although it was a lot of work, I’m really quite pleased with it!

Mock Orange and Weigela Melamine Dinner Plate by helikettle

Once again, I had to spend a lot of time digitally ‘tidying up’ so that the repeats matched up perfectly. I just wish I could work out why, however meticulous I am in my measuring and in spite of taking a lot of care with the painting, I can’t seem to get the pattern repeats to line up exactly with one another first time around.

I think, though, that all the work was worth it and for the first time I succeeded in making a large enough image to cover the whole area of a Messenger Bag in one piece, in spite of warning notices about running low on memory popping up frequently at the bottom of my screen!

Mock Orange and Weigela Messenger Bag by helikettle

I seem to have turned very ‘flowery’ recently but that’s mainly because I’ve set out to design Birthday cards with at least one  for each month’s Birth Flower. 

This weekend I’ve made a start on a Water Lily design, one of the designated Birth Month Flowers for July.

The alternative for July is Larkspur, a lovely cottage-garden flower, that, sadly, refuses to grow in my garden! For years I’ve sown the seeds in the spring but they never even germinate. So this year I’ve given up – though I did think about trying them in a large tub until I realised that the less time I spend in my garden, the better, especially now that my pear tree is in bloom.

This photo was taken a couple of springs ago, before I had so much trouble with the pollen

I still have a lot of work to do on these lilies – the leaves and centres need some detail and then there's the text to add. Sometimes, choosing the font can take me as long as painting the design!

Until I searched for some reference photos, I didn’t realise how complicated and irregular their pattern of petals was!  I would have much preferred to have done one of my rather impressionistic pastel paintings of water lilies, avoiding too much detail. But unfortunately, Monet got there first and I wouldn’t want to appear to be plagiarising!

Once these water lilies are finished, I’m left with just two more Birth Month Flower designs to work on – Poinsettias for December (can’t quite get in the mood yet!) and Morning Glories for September. 

That’s one I’m very much looking forward to! I particularly like bright blue flowers and I succeeded in growing some in a pot last summer by placing the pot on my garden table out of reach of the slugs and snails, who seem to head straight for them at ground level. They didn’t bloom until well into the autumn but by then they made a very welcome, cheerful splash of colour as other flowers faded - and they remained 'glorious' all day, not just in the mornings!

I think the way that Morning Glories grow, twining themselves around anything they can reach, could make for a lovely repeating pattern. But will I be able to come up with a design that can equally well serve as a Birthday Card?

Hmmm. I’ll have to give that one some thought . . 

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Summer came early!

Bailey Park, Abergavenny, April 8th

Yes, I know we English are known for our partiality to discussing the weather, but the past few weeks really have been extraordinary!

Most of  March was sunny and warm - sitting-outside-in-shirtsleeves weather! - and the driest month for 50 years, apparently. When the month ended with a few days of wind and rain, I thought it was 'going out like a lion' and that we'd revert to our normal, less than wonderful, British weather. 

But no, we've been enjoying almost wall-to-wall sunshine and daytime temperatures that should belong at the end of May, even though it seems such a short time ago that we were comparing the depth of our snow on Twitter! It looks as if it's on the change now, though and maybe that was our summer?

Bailey Park, Abergavenny, 8th April

 
Most of the daffodils are long gone and dead-headed and these tulips in the park won't last much longer so I 'snapped' them on my way back from shopping on Friday.

So now I think I've posted images of the park that I cross to go shopping in all seasons.

Bailey Park, Abergavenny, 8th April

But here's the big shock!

I opened my back door to the garden a couple of mornings ago and, just outside, I found this!

Iceland Poppy, early April, 2011

The back of the seed packet says that it should start flowering in June, but this is one from last year that survived the record low winter temperatures - although you can see that the pot was less hardy! - so maybe that, as well as the remarkable weather, is why it is flowering so early?

Meanwhile, I've sown some Icelandic Poppy seeds, hoping that I might be lucky and get some pink ones. But the seeds are tiny and have germinated in clumps so I'm afraid a great many of them will have to be discarded. That's something I don't feel very comfortable doing - I have a book called, 'Plants are like People' and I tend to agree!  

I've also spotted buds on several of my roses and I have the feeling that I shall soon be working on photographic images for my greeting cards etc rather than drawings and paintings. Last summer was like that and the poppies were an especially fruitful source of designs. The one above featured on coffee mugs and even Keds shoes as well as greeting cards - as you can see here.

Mucking around with masking fluid and salt again!

 The weather has been so gorgeous recently that it seems a real shame to stay indoors working and I took the opportunity this morning to go out and take photos of the flowers in my garden. This one is the pear blossom, just beginning to come out -

But I'm determined to use the time while I wait for people to respond to my advertising for 'card sellers' for my partyplan scheme, to stock up my GCU and Zazzle stores. It does seem that those with the greatest number of cards in their stores make the most sales - and in any case, painting and drawing are hardly 'work' as far as I'm concerned, although I often feel surprisingly tired at the end of a painting session!

A while back I bought a masking fluid pen but I hadn't got around to trying it out until I had a little bit of time to spare yesterday. I have an idea in mind for a series of designs that will be made much easier if the pen does what it's supposed to but the instructions suggested practising before embarking on something important. So that's what I did - and thank goodness I did! It was actually quite tricky to use. The instructions said 'do not squeeze' but nothing came out at all unless I squeezed the bottle slightly all the time!

I'ts going to take some practice to get the flow really even. But in fact this 'design' didn't really necessitate a lot of accuracy - it was more of a 'doodle' really!

However, with further experiments with various types of salt as well, I liked what happened enough to use it to create some keds shoes -

Women's 'Waves' Slip-on Sneakers by helikettle
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I'm not sure where the idea for this next little collage came from but it's been pestering me to let it out of my head and into the public domain for quite a time. I think it may have something to do with the way I felt like the proverbial fish out of water when, years ago, I lived in the 'commuterland' of the South East because nobody I knew seemed to understand my need to paint and draw and generally do things creative. I was a lot more comfortable when we moved to Norwich, where even the surveyor who helped us with the plans for our loft extension painted in watercolours and the cleaning lady painted mandalas - and told me she found cleaning the brasses a 'meditative' experience! A reassuringly different world!

'Dare to be Different' Notecard by helikettle
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This one didn't take long compared to most of my other collages but even so it was long enough for me to discover, without any room for doubt, that it's the cutting of the paper that has been causing my back to object rather vociferously in the past few months. Somehow I'm going to have to find a different way to cut the paper - or give up on collage, which I obviously don't want to do!