Greeting Cards with Boats

You'll find a collection of 'boat' Greeting Cards from my Greeting Card Universe Store on my other blog today:

 http://mugsmousepadsandmore.blogspot.com/

Boats Paintings 1954 - 1960

It's surprising what you can find when you're looking for something else!

I was hunting in my big 'Art' cupboard to see if I'd kept the original grubby little sketch of Knowle Park (above, dated April 1971), the one that I was working on when the deer all but ate my paints, when I came across a whole folder full of paintings that I did at school! I didn't even know that I'd kept them, and, if it weren't for the fact that I clearly remember many of the details in the paintings, and my name is neatly printed on the top, I wouldn't even have been sure that they were mine at all!

I was pleased to find that there was a preponderance of boats and coastal scenes as it bears out what I thought I remembered about having been fairly obsessed with sketching boats as a child. Most of the paintings are rather crumpled at the edges but I've managed to photograph them so that at least most of the picture is visible. What amazes me is that these were all painted at boarding school, on 'the mainland' between the ages of 11 and 16 and yet I filled them with so much accurate detail of the places that were so dear to me at home on the Isle of Wight!

My figure drawing at this stage was, frankly, awful enough to be quite funny - look at the length of the woman's arms as she stretches out with the shrimping net! And as for the flat little figure in the foreground, sunbathing on a towel - she could be Flat Stanley's sister! But even that far back - probably at least 55 years ago - I seemed to have begun to notice and somehow retain images of people and their little idiosyncrasies, such as the man paddling at the water's edge with his rolled up trousers!

The coast in the background is obviously Portsmouth but I was very fond of Sandown beach with its white cliffs so there's obviously some 'artistic licence' going on here!

I loved living by the sea in winter, when the 'visitors' had all disappeared whence they came and we would all go down to 'the Front' after a storm to inspect the damage to the sea wall - though this one looks more like the end of Ryde Pier -

Does anyone remember my description, a while ago, of the Scouts' boathouse that my parents and their friends helped build during one of those long, hot summers of childhood, while I had such fun, messing about in boats and pretending to discover a Treasure Island just round the corner in the next bay?

Well here it is, in pastels!

It looks rather spooky and it's hard to believe that I wanted to spend the night there - alone! - at the age of ten!

I can't identify this place (below) but there are plenty of details, such as the wooden groins and the seaweed clinging to the wall at the tideline, that I obviously drew from my experience of living by the sea -

This one is clearly Cowes - a scene that I witnessed at Cowes Week and stored up in my memory to take back to school with me. By now I must have been coming up to 'O' level age (just 16) as my figure drawing had vastly improved. And I do remember the fashion for huge baggy sweaters over tight-fitting, three-quarter length jeans. It was the uniform of the 'The Great Unwashed', the 'Beatniks', who apparently overran the Art Colleges, and, as I understood it, the reason I was not allowed to mingle with them! .

At this point I gave up art, having been thoroughly discouraged by getting my second lowest 'O' level mark in the subject; all those balls of string and Vim tins to draw were enough to put anyone off, not to mention the wilting philadelphus on a hot summer's afternoon!

But I did continue to sketch a bit. I also found some pen and wash sketches that I must have done on my first visit to Germany a few months after 'O' Levels. Most of them are people, but I remember spotting this barge on the Thames, possibly on the way to catching the Student Train to Germany -

Which goes to show that I was always fascinated by the shapes of all boats, not just the graceful sailing boats, something that remains true today.

 

Gloucester Docks Print or Poster by helikettle
View other Print Posters

I think boats are often quite difficult to draw accurately. I've struggled with some more recently. But I wonder whether I've improved at all? I've gathered together prints of some of my recent pastel paintings of boats in this post on my other blog.

 What's your verdict?

'Shed Bleu'

This week didn't start off too well!

After the excitement of selling my dragons to the newsagent last week, there was almost bound to be a feeling of anticlimax but as well as that, all the rushing to get the cards printed for the coffee shop had not had a good effect on my slightly dodgy back and it was threatening to go into spasm all weekend. Added to that was my failed attempt to make a collage birthday card for a friend on Saturday. The card was fine and I was sure she would like it but the scanner had turned the little bits of gold paper I'd used to a nasty shade of khaki and photographing it instead hadn't produced anything better.

And then two of my former neighbours in other parts of the country, who have been pestering me for months to send them some of my cards so that they could sell them, suddenly seem, just as I am almost ready to do that, to have been plunged into rather all-consuming situations of their own; so, understandably, selling my cards is the last thing they want to think about. By yesterday lunchtime I was feeling quite sorry for myself and the thought of spending the afternoon making a Christmas catalogue for the newsagent was hardly enthralling!

So I decided to 'play truant' from my laptop and make a start on my ever-growing list of ideas for card designs. After all, that's what's at the heart of all this - if there were no designs, there'd be no catalogue to make, no printing and no online promotion to do!

Immersing myself in my painted papers and glue (almost literally!) did me the world of good and this is the result -

Although I called it 'Spring Garden' when I uploaded it to GCU and Zazzle, it will always be my 'Shed Bleu'! Maybe it's someting to do with the famous 'Gilet Rouge' - I don't know! But I realise with horror that, even after more than 7 years studying French at school and two terms at University, I don't know the French word for a 'shed'! I could look it up, I suppose, but 'Shed Bleu' seems to have embedded itself in my mind!

Late in the afternoon the usual bombardment of emails from GCU arrived. I normally leave looking at them till the end of the day as they are invariably notifications from the forums. (How I wish we could be more selective about which notifications to receive. But it seems to be an 'all or nothing' approach so I opt for receiving them all, just in case there's something important or useful in one of them!) To my utter amazement, amongst them was a sale notification! Someone in Virginia had googled '60th Birthday' and had come up with my 'Life in your Years', Adlai Stevenson quotation!

That seems to be a popular design and I've sold another one this morning to a lady in the walking group.

In the middle of the evening, the Zazzle 'New Product Alerts' arrived - or so I thought. But no, amongst them was another sale notification! This time a mousepad with my collage sailing boats on it. I could hardly believe it! It's been so quiet on the PODstore front for the past three or four weeks and then two sales in one day!

So you can imagine my amazement when, just as I was going to bed, GCU emailed me to tell me that someone had googled '1st birthday' and ended up buying this one -


Three sales in one day - it's altogether rather like the buses; you wait and wait and then three come along at once! I actually don't much like the Rainbow Fairies and I only decided to give them a whirl because one of the little girls I was teaching when I made it last summer, drooled over them. It's not the first of that series that I've sold so the lesson there is that you never know what other people may like!

I absolutely love Margaret Tarrant's fairies and there are quite a number of other artists of her time who painted similarly magical fairies. But my own attempts at fairies came out looking like Barbie Dolls so I decided that if I was going to paint fairies - and they're obviously popular with little girls of all ages! - they would have to be so tiny that there was no possiblity of mistaking them for Barbie dolls. These designs were quite a fiddle to make as I used both transparent watercolours and gouache and each fairy was underpainted in white gouache - and I don't like 'fiddly'! (Which makes my penchant for collage a bit of a mystery!)

I fully expected that third sale to be the end of my good fortune for now - things go in threes, don't they? But no, another surprise was waiting for me at the coffee shop this morning, when the manageress handed me a little plastic bag full of money, which aroused enough interest for another member of the walking group to have a look at my basket of cards and purchase - again! - my dancing man! She suggested that I should do something similar with a woman on it - which I will, when I find the time!!!