Spring Sunshine to celebrate Norooz and the Vernal Equinox!

Spring Sunshine Repeating Pattern and some coordinates

What a change in our weather! 

The interminably long and stormy winter has given way, at last, to warm, dry sunny days with brilliant blue skies. Spring has definitely arrived here in Wales!

It’s already our ‘meteorological spring’ – that one began on March 1st. But there’s another week to go before the Spring Equinox on March 20th, which most people regard as the start of Spring. And that falls around the same time as the Persian New Year, Norooz, which you can read all about here.

Chic Turquoise Lumbar Pillow: Daffodils Polka Dots by poshandpainterly
 

The start of spring seems like a very good time to celebrate a new year, with all the new beginnings in Nature appearing! 

But it’s a very busy time for the greeting card designer! Not only do we have St David’s Day Cards, Easter Cards and Mother’s Day cards to work on, as well as, maybe, March Birthday Cards – it’s also time for our St Patrick’s Day Cards . . .  and then there’s Norooz to think about as well! 

Custom Front St David's Day Daffodils Card by poshnpainterlycymru

Daffodils Norooz Card From Our Home to Yours by poshandpainterly

Mother's Day Card, Daffodils and Check Gingham by poshandpainterly

  

Daffodils and Polka Dots, Easter Card by poshandpainterly

Mother's Day Card, Daffodils and Polka Dots by poshandpainterly

Daffodils, March Birthday Card to Personalize by poshandpainterly

St Patrick's Day Shamrocks Card to Personalize  
   

    

Just as well I designed mine while the weather was still wintry, before I was tempted out into my garden! 

Chic Jumbo Coffee Mug: White Polkas on Green Jumbo Mugs by poshandpainterly
 

   

But it was only when the rain eased off and the temperature began to rise that I thought about making a Spring Door Wreath! 

It would never have occurred to me if it weren’t for Pinterest and it was only because I found an old wreath base amongst my Christmas decorations that I began to take the idea seriously. 

When I looked more closely at the base I’d found, I decided it would be a shame to remove the dried flowers from it and, with a bit of refurbishing, it looks quite at home against the white boards on my landing.

So, having decided not to use this wreath base after all, I set about looking online to see where I could buy a new similar base – and immediately came across some excellent instructions for making my own!

How to make your own wreath base

(instructions from 'Modern Country' a blog that I'll definitely be returning to!)

I have plenty of honeysuckle and ivy in my garden to provide the materials. 

The honeysuckle opposite my kitchen window is where the sparrows congregate for a gossip and the blackbirds have even nested in it a couple of times so I would have preferred to take what I needed from the ivy!

But knowing how tough ivy is when I try to remove it from places where it shouldn’t be spreading to, I was really surprised to find that it was more inclined to snap than the honeysuckle. 

Here are a few photos of the various stages to prove I did actually make it from scratch - which still amazes me!

Sorry about the difference in colours - it is the same wreath
but I changed to using my 'proper' camera for the final pics
because I'm not yet very good at taking photos with my phone!

Wrapping the last ‘binding’ round was slightly scary – I was sure the stems would break. But I found that as long as I bent them gently, a little at the time, they cooperated perfectly. (I also talked soothingly to them and I'm sure that helped!)

When I tried to photograph the (almost) finished wreath on my front door,
the flash made the Edwardian glass panels sparkle so much it really detracted from the
wreath - so here it is, hanging from a picture hook in my bedroom!

(A florist in town, where I bought some of the silk flowers, told me that Old Man's Beard (clematis vitalba) from the hedgerows is excellent for wreaths too.)

So have I inspired you to make your own Spring Wreath - from scratch? I hope so and if you do, THIS is where you need to begin. 

I'm sure you all know by now that I'm no perfectionist and patience isn't my strong point; I lose interest in anything that can't be completed in a day or so - painting, dress-making, wreath-making . . . so if I can do it, I'm sure you can too!

And I'd love to see how they turn out if you'd like to send me your (low-res) photos to include in a future blog post! 

.........

Click

HERE

to browse more of my

Spring Sunshine

greeting cards and gifts

 

Daffodils Pillow or Cushion: Faux-patchwork by poshandpainterly
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Topsy Turvy Seasons and Christmas in April!

No, I haven’t got the seasons mixed up, though our recent weather might well have caused some confusion, with very low night temperatures and forecasts of snow in May!

My new poinsettia design for the December birthday cards did, though, get me into the Christmas spirit, even though it's April, as it was easy to adapt the birthday design to make it Christmassy! From the search engine point of view, it’s a good thing to upload Christmas cards some months in advance so it’s nice to know that I have my new collage design for Christmas 2012 ready and more than 50 cards waiting to be uploaded!

I’ve never actually been very fond of poinsettias but I think collage was a good medium to choose and I ended up more enthusiastic about these designs than I expected to be!

Festive Christmas Tote Bag, Poinsettias by helikettle

Back to April and CardGnome have announced a promotion for Mother’s Day.

In the UK, Mother’s Day, or Mothering Sunday, has a slightly different provenance from that of the US 'holiday' and it's on the 4th Sunday in Lent, so it invariably occurs some time in March. That makes it feel very odd for me to be preparing Mother’s Day greeting cards in April! But CardGnome have asked for greeting cards for their Mother's Day promotion to be uploaded by the end of this week and that has been keeping me very busy.

I sold a lot of cards as a result of CardGnome’s Easter promotion so I decided it was worth ‘burning the midnight oil’ to get the Mother's Day cards I’ve made from my recent floral designs uploaded in time.

Here they all are, together with some I made earlier!

Mother’s Day Cards in my CardGnome shop.

As a result, I haven’t got very far with this weekend’s new design!

Can you guess what sort of card this design will turn into?

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Coming up to Mother's Day in the UK!

Click here

for a selection of

Mother's Day Cards and Gifts

The tedious business of uploading, tagging, describing, categorising.....

I've been really busy putting age numbers on some of my birthday cards this week because I noticed that quite a few of my sales had been that type of card. It's boring work, especially all the uploading and writing descriptions and tags - though I seem to have got a bit quicker with the 'categorising' as time has gone on - and I've just had the first batch approved by GCU. I think the reviewers must have seen 100 new cards suddenly appearing and decided they'd better get stuck in!

With all that going on, it doesn't feel as if I've done much painting this week but in fact I've made four new designs, all 'creatures' of one sort or another, the last for a while I think as I seem to run out of steam with one 'range' of cards quite quickly - low boredom threshold perhaps? Just as well I have several 'styles' to fall back on!

First up my mouse and elephant again, in a birthday card or birthday button role this time -

'Little Mouse' 3rd Birthday button by helikettle
See other Button Buttons

 

'Jumbo' 4th Birthday Card by helikettle
Browse Birthday Cards

.
- followed by a kangaroo for Mother's Day in the same style -

Kangaroos Mother's Day Card by helikettle
Browse other Mother's day Cards

- also available on a T-shirt.

And today I've tried a collage again (and hoping for the best as far as my back is concerned!) for Father's Day - 

Starfish Father's Day Card by helikettle
View more greeting cards at zazzle

I was surprised how well it showed up on a dark T-shirt too - 

Starfish T-shirt by helikettle
See other Starfish T-Shirts

I still have about 80 of my new 'age' birthday cards to put on Zazzle but my enthusiasm has waned a bit because they seem to do so much better on GCU. They appear immediately in my 'store' though so if I do a few every day, they'll probably all be available on Zazzle at about the same time as on GCU!

Shocking Statistics

First of all a big, HUGE -

Primroses 'Thank You' Notecard by helikettle
More Notecard Cards

- to all of the artists who contributed to 'All Creatures Great and Small' and especially to those who left such kind and encouraging comments! It's good to see that 'traditional' art is still alive and kicking and to hear that people are buying it, in spite of the competition from digital art and photography.

Earlier this month I was particularly thrilled and honoured that my handpainted sweet pea design was chosen by a US customer for her wedding invitations. You may remember that I was asked to help convert my sweet bookmark into invitations over the Easter weekend and the customer ordered just a pack of ten to begin with to check how they came out. She and I have been waiting for the invitations to arrive with baited breath, especially as I had come across a thread on the Zazzle forum that suggested that the finish might leave something to be desired! But yesterday I heard that they are fine and she has now gone ahead and ordered a lot more. Phew!

So that brings me nearer to the Zazzle threshold for actually receiving some money! I seem to work much harder on promoting my Zazzle stores (and stocking up my store with 'products') and yet I seem to sell far more through Greeting Card Universe. A bit of a puzzle as the statistics are showing a steady rise in the number of visits to my Zazzle store, whereas visits to my GCU store remain static - and low! So I did a small calculation and unearthed a statistic of my own that may be of interest to others who are using both of these online stores to sell their work.

In the four months that I've been with GCU and Zazzle, the visits to my Zazzle store have been nearly five times as frequent as to my GCU card store. But when I did the arithmetic, I discovered that I've had one sale through GCU for every 17 visits, whereas through Zazzle, it's taken 413 visits to achieve each sale. And that came as quite a shock!

A couple of possible reasons for this difference have occurred to me. Firstly, the range of products for sale through Zazzle means that, to make a sale, the customer will probably be spending a lot more money. For instance the keds shoes are £60 a pair in the UK! Secondly, I think it's quite likely that a great many of the 'visits' to my Zazzle stores are by other artists. There does seem to be more of that kind of interaction on Zazzle than on GCU. And maybe the fact that GCU actively promotes our greeting cards through its sister sites is another factor, though in fact the majority of my sales have come through Google searches.

I'd be interested to know whether anyone else is experiencing the same sort of discrepancy between store visits and sales and to hear any ideas about why this may be. I think it's important to know, as far as one can, what actually needs to be done to encourage sales. At the moment it doesn't look as if 'store visits' alone are a reliable indicator of sales opportunities, though of course, on the other hand, nothing will get sold if nobody comes to our stores!

In the past week I've made another discovery! At last I've solved the mystery of why I wasn't being offered all the options for creating products on Zazzle - I was starting from the wrong page! So much to learn! The one that was particularly bugging me was that I had no choice of style of keds shoes, just the ladies lace-up sneakers.  I was looking at the slip-ons and other styles that artists were creating with great envy - so this week I've been busy making pretty floral slip-ons -

Primroses Women's Mini-Slip-On by helikettle
Design your own personalized shoes with zazzle.co.uk

I made the design as a repeating pattern - something I haven't done since my screenprinting days  - and it took me a while to get the hang of it again. But I persisted because I was also determined to make a design that would 'tile' properly on the men's ties.

I don't think I know a man who would wear such a flowery tie as this one - 

Floral Tie by helikettle
Browse Tie Ties
 

- but you never know! 

And at least the pattern joins up nicely so I feel encouraged to try again with something a little more masculine!

I've also used these primroses from the shelf in my front porch to make birthday and Mother's Day cards for my GCU store, but they will take a few days to be approved - hopefully they will be appearing shortly.

More for Mother's Day!

Yesterday I decided to experiment. Whereas usually I design for greeting cards and then sometimes use a part of the design for other things, yesterday I made my first ever design specifically for a T-shirt-

"Best Mum" T-shirt by helikettle
Design a Custom Tshirt at zazzle.co.uk

and the more discreet version -

'SuperMum' T-shirt by helikettle
Browse more Mother's day T-Shirts

But then - and this is the experiment - I made greeting cards from the T-shirt design that I think are nearly off the scale of ghastliness and uploaded them to Greeting Card Universe and Zazzle.

This bizarre idea was prompted by a look at the 'What's New' pages on Greeting Card Universe to see if my latest designs were on there. They weren't (and they never seem to be) even though I waded through pages and pages of what, to me, were a great many cards that I wouldn't give houseroom to! I'm not going to publicise my 'experiments' here, though I can't stop them appearing in my Zazzle flash panel. But it'll be interesting to see whether anyone likes them. One thing I've learnt in the past year or so is that there's no accounting for taste! And maybe I'm just getting old.....

I didn't waste a lot of time on my experiment - the collage was already made and I used Photoshop to make the coloured backgrounds so each one only took a few minutes.

This one, on the other hand, took me so long that I was reluctant to give up on it when the lettering didn't show up and I've spent a bit more time rescuing it, painting the light flowers that were distracting from the lettering, in crimson gouache and lightening the darker blue forget-me-nots.

'May Garden' Mother's Day Card by helikettle
Browse more Mother's day Cards
 

It was 'interesting' painting with gouache on top of acrylics, but the slightly 'veined' effect that resulted was just like real wallflower petals -  so a 'happy accident'! On both of my computers, at least, the message is now clearly visible; and, printed, it's the sort of card I'd love to receive! But, as I said, there's no accounting for taste!

All Creatures Great and Small

If you are one of those talented artists who paint wonderful pictures of animals, this is definitely the moment for you to look away!

I've never been very good at, or in fact particularly interested in, drawing or painting animals. As a little girl, I habitually drew ballet dancers (I wanted to be one for a while!!) or sailing boats - obviously the result of living by the sea. In later years, I went on to paint landscapes, people, flowers, interiors, still lifes - and, apart from once making my big brother a birthday card with an elephant wearing a mortar board, standing by a blackboard, when he had just started teaching, I seem to have largely avoided attempting to draw our four-footed friends!

Today my teaching was postponed till tomorrow so I got around to making cards from some sketches I'd been working on in the evenings whilst watching my regular ration of whodunnits - and these cards involved animals!

I'd been putting them off for a while because I couldn't decided which medium to use. I wonder whether anyone else ever comes up against the problem that whatever I plan to do, someone famous has already done something similar and I worry that I'll feel as if I'm plagiarising! Sometimes I wish I hadn't looked at so much art and illustration and could start from a completely clean slate. For instance, I wondered whether to use pen and wash for my 'animals' cards but then Quentin Blake has made a pretty good job of a pen and wash elephant on a thank you card! But if I went down the collage route for this 'range', one of Leo Lionni's first and perhaps most famous children's book illustrations involved a wonderfully simple but effective collage mouse! So thank goodness for my newly discovered 'watercolour pencil and watercolour' technique!

I like to have two of these on the go at once so that I can work on one while the other is drying. In the past, I've had a few disasters when I've tried to tidy up the outlining before the 'wash' is completely dry!

So from a couple of decidely large animals to some of the smallest -

I haven't used this method very much yet but there's something I've learned about it which I'd like to pass on to anyone who may be thinking of trying it after reading my step-by-step instructions for painting a leprechaun for St Patrick's Day. If you use a mixture of different brands of watercolour pencils, BE VERY CAREFUL about how much pressure you use. Some are softer and/or more crumbly than others and this can result in flakes - or even chunks! - of the 'lead' breaking off and staining the paper. And it's practically impossible to then remove the unwanted marks. I've found that it's OK if I stick to using those softer ones because I get used to the amount of pressure needed, but once I start to go from one type to the other, I'm on dangerous ground!

That apart, I'm beginning to really like this way of painting and think I learnt some useful lessons from my Hot Cross Bunnies - and rather importantly, I'm hoping I won't wake up tomorrow with a painfully stiff shoulder, like I did this morning, as a result of  yesterday's fiddly collage!

'Mice' Kids' Apron by helikettle
Design kitchen aprons on zazzle