Poppies for an August Birthday -

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Mugs, Mousepads and More

Sweet Peas in April?

Some of the ‘official’ Birth Month flowers have really surprised me!

They don’t seem to be in quite the right months - at least not for part of the UK, where I live. But the one that has really made me wonder who decided each month's flowers, and where they live, is the Sweet Pea – one of the April Birth Month flowers.

Customizable April Birthday Card, Sweet Peas by helikettle
   

I love Sweet Peas! 

They are one of my favourite flowers. They represent everything I love about flowers: the fragrance, the colours and the diaphanous, almost ethereal look of their petals!

To me they seem as if they were designed especially for painting in watercolours and my Sweet Pea greeting cards and gifts have been very popular.

Sweet Pea Bookplate Round Stickers by helikettle

But April is far too early in the year for Sweet Peas in my garden. According to the seed packets, April is the month for sowing them outdoors. 

In the past I have sown them outdoors in the Autumn, just like the Broad Beans, and that has produced slightly earlier blooms. But the past couple of years I’ve been so busy in the run-up to Christmas that sowing the Sweet Peas was the last thing on my mind!

This year, I experimented with sowing them indoors (in March) in biodegradable egg boxes and toilet roll tubes to make planting out easier and less of a shock to their systems. 

And it seems to be working well. They look as if they’ll be ready to plant outside by the end of the month, ready to flower in July.

While I think that watercolour is generally the best medium for painting Sweet Peas, back in the 1980s I screenprinted a Sweet Pea pattern in a slightly Art Nouveau style and made a roller blind for my kitchen door to the garden.

Later I painted the design in gouache and used it for a bookmark in my Zazzle store. 

Sweet Pea Bookmark Business Card Templates by helikettle
 

An American bride-to-be with a particular liking for blue Sweet Peas came across it when she searched online for blue Sweet Peas for her Wedding Invitations. Apparently mine was the only design with a Blue Sweet Pea! Together, by email, we worked out the layout for her invitations, which I felt was a tremendous honour and a reminder of how thankful I am for the wonders of modern technology!

An alternative Birth Month Flower for April is the humble Daisy. 

And when I gave my lawn its first haircut of the year, back in March, there were already daisies amongst the grass  - and other weeds. So watch out for my new pattern for April – Daisies! 

In the meantime, you might like to take a look at some more of my many 'Sweet Pea' greeting cards and gifts: here's the link -

Sweet Pea Greeting Cards and Gifts

'Sweet Peas' Budget Tote Bag by helikettle
 

Iris, the Greek Goddess of the Rainbow

Van Gogh's 'Irises'

An alternative February Birth Month Flower is the Iris.

Whoever decided on these Birth Month Flowers must live in a part of the world where spring comes much earlier than here in the UK. The irises in my garden are usually in flower in late May!

I’ve never been very much attracted to irises. I do like the plain blue-purple ones but, like violets, irises often has that smudge of yellow that, to me, makes them look ‘dirty’. As well as that, I tend to prefer flowers that grow on curved branches or at least on stems that will sway and bend. Typically, irises stand a little too straight for my liking, though a clump of the light blue ones at the back of a border can look lovely.

And strangely, I think the iris is a flower that seems to grow more appealing when portrayed in watercolour, rather than as a photo. I became much more enthusiastic about this flower in the course of collecting paintings of them for my Iris Pinterest board. 

Hereford artist, Ruth S Harris's Irises,
print available from Society6

The paintbrush seems to lend them a softness that doesn’t come across so well in a photograph. Van Gogh’s irises are certainly not standing up to attention and Monet's are decidedly floppy and curvaceous!

Monet's Yellow Irises

A few things you may like to know about Irises:

• Irises grow all over the world and they come in too many varieties and colours to list them all here.
• The Iris is the state flower of Tennessee as well as the National Flower of Croatia. 
• And in Japan, where they grow easily in the wild, people have traditionally used Iris designs on their kimonos, to protect themselves from evil energies.
• Traditionally, the iris represents faith, hope, wisdom and courage and they are represented in very early art, such as Ancient Egyptian and in Greek mythology.
• Iris is the name of the Greek Goddess of the Rainbow, who was also the messenger of the Gods. Purple irises were planted  on the graves of women to summon the goddess to guide the dead on their journey over the rainbow bridge. (I don’t know who guided the men!)

.......

When I started to think about this blog post, I began to wonder whether there was any connection between the Iris flower and the part of the eye that controls the amount of light that reaches the retina - the ‘iris’. It seemed quite unlikely.

But wikipaedia, as usual, enlightened me - 

It is in the iris that we see the different eye-colours, blue, grey, hazel, brown and green – a ‘rainbow’ of colours! (Not quite a rainbow as we generally think of it but certainly quite a wide variety of colours.)

I’ve only ever seen blue, purple, yellow and white Irises but I like the pink and tangerine ones I’ve seen in paintings. 

It seems that William Morris did too:

William Morris's Iris pattern for wallpaper and home textiles

It’s too late for this February but maybe, next year, I should put my prejudices aside, like I did with the violets, and really get to know some irises through drawing and painting them?

Dreaming Spires Roses . . .

As I write, the beautiful Dreaming Spires climbing roses in my garden are coming to an end.

I've been quite thorough in my deadheading of them to encourage them to flower again in the autumn. But I accidentally removed this very much 'alive' head. And, on my kitchen table, it has provided me with a cheerful reminder of summer on days when the weather has been anything but summery!

In other years, when I've had more time, I've painted this rose in watercolour . . . read more

Twenty Minute Challenge

At the weekend, I had a lot to catch up with after all the printing and posting I'd done during the week; things like my Tax Return, people I needed to get in touch with, the ever-present ironing, the lawn needing mowing and the batteries in my doorbell urgently needing changing - the usual list of tedious tasks that seems to get longer rather than shorter. But I was determined to fit in some painting as well so I decided to see what I could achieve in a very short time in the way that artists on the 'Twenty Minute Challenge' website do.

My wallflowers are coming to an end so I, naturally, wanted to paint them before it's too late and I picked a bunch of assorted colours for my subject, set my timer and got stuck in! By the end of 20 mins I had easily finished the painting part of the exercise and my wet paper was decidely less wet. Unfortunately, I didn't think what I'd produced was worth photographing and it was still too wet to scan; so I can't post the result of the first stage. But after I'd had a quick lunch and done a few more 'odd jobs', I went back to look at what I'd done and decided that, now it was completely dry, there might be something worth salvaging if I defined the shapes of the flowers with a brown fineliner pen.

Not that it would ever be likely to become a greeting card design, but it might have some future on a white mug or even some more shoes! (These are obviously becoming my favourites when it comes to 'creating' products for my Zazzle store!)

Wallflowers Ringer Mug by helikettle
View more Wallflowers Mugs

I'm not sure that I learnt anything from limiting myself to 20 minutes as it is normal for me to work very fast and I never spend much time thinking about what I'm doing. In fact I'd probably have stopped painting sooner if I hadn't set the timer. But I did feel frustrated by the fact that I wasn't able to produce a really transparent but vibrant yellow. I tried several but they all seemed to turn murky and more like yellow ochre when they came up against the reds and merged with them.

My Keds shoes with a photographic image of wallflowers won a Today's Best Award but I actually prefer the slightly riotous look of my watercolour wallflowers -

Wallflowers Keds Shoes by helikettle
Make your own shoes online with zazzle

On the election front, I was beginning to feel a bit better about it when I read that Charles Kennedy had stood by his principles and felt unable to back the LibCon Coalition. But then I was disheartened again last night when it became clear that the women members of the BBC Newsnight's focus group had voted according to the 'fanciability' - they actually used the word! - of TweedleCam and TweedleClegg! And the men had almost all voted for them because they were more 'young and modern'! If this is what the election came down to, obviously Gordon didn't stand a chance!

Fortunately a spell of catching up with The Artistic Curmudgeon's blog, that I had neglected lately, went some way to restore my sense of proportion, as did happening upon these -

The Original Coalition Mug 2010 by Coalition_Mug
View other Coalition mug Mugs

And the jug of wallflowers, even though they are starting to droop, are still giving off a delicious fragrance - pity I have developed some sort of allergic reaction over the years that causes me to lose my voice around my favourite flowers!

Cards for the Boys

Somewhere at the back of my dark and cavernous roofspace is a voluminous old suitcase full of things I don't want to throw away but don't know what to do with - other than pack them away in an old suitcase....! And somewhere in this suitcase are my school reports, aged three, with marks for 'literature' and 'poetry'. One of these now fragile documents contains the information that I 'showed promise in Art' but was 'not much interested in sport'. So nothing has changed really - apart from my late-onset enthusiasm for watching Wales play rugby.

But today I've begun to bring the two together, using my 'promise in Art' to make a series of birthday cards for young people who are 'interested in sport' -

 I had originally intended that these should be more collages, but as I seem to have sold mostly pen and wash designs through Greeting Card Universe, I decided to go back to that style. I even planned to venture into unknown territory, using a dip pen and went out and bought some Indian Ink. My practice pieces with the dip pen went well and I was pleasantly surprised at how much ink the pen could hold in its little reservoir (I was using a calligraphy pen), but when it came to the point, I chickened out and stuck with the 'safer' watercolour pencil and watercolours routine. After all, I haven't used ink for a while and one wrong stroke of the pen and all my work would be ruined!

You'll notice that, so far, these are all birthday cards suitable for young men! But I couldn't resist adding one for the girls -

I am trying to focus on cards for men and boys but 'three out of four ain't bad!'

The Greeting Card Universe reviewers seem to have speeded up just recently and cards are being approved in 5, rather than 7, days. So these, and all their related 'age specific' cards I've made, should be available quite soon.

Salt/snow effects with watercolours

This is the Penguin Christmas Card I mentioned below, in my reply to Michelle's comment on 'Keep Your Chin Up'.

(Sorry to be so out of season!)

Canadian Artist, Carole Barkett, writes about some very challenging Bluebirds!

When asked by Judy to do a guest artist article for this blog, I was thrilled, then I wondered what to write about. For a while, I tried to find new images that would inspire me to paint but that's hard when you're working and running a household and family, as many artists do, and of course the more you want to paint something, the harder it is to settle down and actually do it.

My last painting was the Magpie family but it all came together so quickly, there was nothing to talk about, then....I decided to paint Bluebirds.

I quickly realised that my past paintings were based on my knowledge of a particular animal or bird. Although we have Bluebirds here, and I've seen their nestboxes on almost every fencepost, I've had no luck seeing one and because I haven't, a few problems developed in the painting process.

I searched my stockpile of reference pictures until I found ones that looked great. After hours of sketching and rearranging, I finally had what I was looking for and was satisfied. I painted the picture and scanned it. The painting still looked pretty good at this point; then I uploaded it to Zazzle and.....my bluebird had a moustache. He doesn't in my picture but he does in my uploaded one, as you can see below:

 

I don't know where this moustache comes from except that I lose a lot of the lighter colours in the process of uploading, so that area looks white when it isn't.

Back to the drawing board I went, but it can be impossible to fix watercolour. The more you work on it, the muddier the colours get and soon it's ruined. Well, that's exactly what happened to this one. I tried playing around with photo editing but that only made it worse as you can see.

I think most of my problems come from never having seen a Bluebird so I was never sure if what I was painting was quite right and I kept having to check my reference pictures which rules out any creative thought.

I guess I'll go out birding this summer and wait for a real one to study, unless....I can find one on Youtube.

If I'm successful, you'll see it on www.zazzle.com/countrymousestudio and if you want more background stories on my other paintings, you can check out my blog.