The Humble Daisy and Exotic Mock Orange Blossom!

The daisy is, apparently, the Birth Month Flower for April. 

According to one website I found, so is the Sweet Pea. But April seems a bit early in the year for either of those flowers here; though when I mowed my little lawn a few days ago, hoping that my wrap-around sunglasses would protect me from the pollen, I noticed a couple of little daisies in the grass. And they inspired this April Birthday Card design.

I painted it with gouache on blue sugar paper so that I wouldn’t need to paint the blue background. Sugar paper absorbs the water rather quickly so I used the paint much thicker than usual. It almost felt like using pastels and it freed me up from the rather ‘tight’ approach I’ve had to use recently when making repeating patterns. I was almost able to revert to my ’fast and furious’ ways that I feel so at home with when I use both oil pastels and soft pastels.

But I really do enjoy making repeating patterns, in spite of all the extra stages they take, and the accuracy they demand, even though that doesn't come naturally to me. And I was really delighted that a customer ordered a phone case with my primrose repeating pattern earlier this week.

Pretty Spring Primroses Case-mate iPhone 4/4S by helikettle

It just happened that on the same day, I was tidying up – something I have to do occasionally when I run out of flat surfaces! – and came across a whole sheaf of papers with drawings of flowering plants that I made in my Norwich garden, in the days before the pollen began to affect me.

It seems miraculous to me now that I could have taken the time to make a careful study of probably my all-time favourite flower, Philadelphus, or Mock Orange Blossom without any pollen problems. In the days before its wonderful fragrance began to have this adverse affect on me, I used to have jugs and vases of it all around my house when it was in season, but sadly, now I mostly just admire it through the window!

So this series of plant drawing was a terrific ‘find’ and it included the daffodil drawing I mentioned a few posts back. I couldn't wait to make a start on a repeating pattern with Mock Orange and Weigelia and here is the tracing:

'Can you see what it is yet?' - as Rolf Harris would say!

I seem to have a horribly busy week ahead, dentist check-up, appointment with the bank, and the newsagent wanting some of my Easter Cards, featuring our local  St Mary’s Church, with the greeting in Welsh.

All these things are extra to my normally very full schedule of uploading cards and, currently, organising my Weddings category on Zazzle – a rather huge and tedious task!

But I really hope to have the Mock Orange Blossom design ready to post next week - if only because there are so many more flowering plant drawings just begging me to make them into designs!

All Things Bright but not necessarily Beautiful!

I didn’t quite get addicted to making abstract digital designs but it came pretty close!

I was having such fun making my paintings and photos into blobs and swirls . . .

Orange, Blue Green Abstract Business Card

Elegant Pink, Green, Cream, Black Business Card 

. . . and blocks of colour

Burnt Orange, Slate, Black Abstract Business Card

Blue, Green Abstract Business Card

 

 . . . that, day after day, finishing the lily-of-the-valley design kept getting put off!

I’ve had a nasty bout of conjunctivitis this week. It seems to have been brought on by the pollen from the white hyacinths in my garden – my favourites, but they affect me so badly that I no longer grow them in pots for indoors. A lot of the time I've just wanted to close my eyes rather than stare at a screen; so the fact that I continued with the digital designs, in spite of the discomfort, demonstrates how much I was enjoying myself.

I haven’t made many business cards on Zazzle. Somehow I didn’t feel very interested but I heard that they sell well so I thought I’d have a go, using my digital designs. I intended to stop when I’d made 50 but somehow that number crept up to 65 – which you can see here.

I have no idea whether such bright and bold designs will be popular as business cards - they certainly would help a person to 'stand out in a crowd', I should think! But I have to admit that I'm not too bothered about whether they sell; it was just enormous fun creating them!

I finally, reluctantly, called a halt to my 'playing with colours and shapes' at the end of Friday because of ‘Super Saturday’.

'Super Saturday' is the final Saturday of the Six Nations Rugby, when all six teams play on the same day. And this year, Wales stood poised to win, not just the tournament, or the Triple Crown, which they had already bagged by beating Ireland, Scotland and England, but the Grand Slam! Only France, with a population more than 20 times that of Wales, stood in the way of a third Grand Slam for Wales in eight years - and France are - or were! - probably the most feared team in the tournament.

Wales was buzzing with Grand Slam fever by Saturday and I was so nervous that I couldn’t bear to actually watch the game but just listened from the next room and ran in to see what was happening when the crowd started to roar! And what kept my blood pressure down was working on the Lilies!

I’ve made a few changes since last week, cut out  the ‘frame’ that I’d tried to make in the Art Nouveau style and experimented with different colours for the background. I’m torn between the beige, which is more authentic for the period and the pale yellow which looks a great deal more cheerful, I think!

 

There’s no reason why I can use both background colours but I feel that would be terribly indecisive! So which do you prefer?


I have such a backlog of designs to upload and make into cards and other things, that I haven’t done any painting this weekend but now that the Six Nations is over, it should be business as usual next time . . . and meanwhile you might enjoy these creative BBC Wales television adverts for the rugby:

Wales v Scotland  

Wales v England

Wales v Italy  

Wales v France

Old-Fashioned Florals and Digital Designs

 I've been happily switching from one to the other - and back again! - this week!

The primroses design from last week turned out to be very versatile and I used it to create about 60 products, which you can see here – and more to come later.

Here are just a couple to show how different the design looks when expanded to different sizes. I really enjoy the 'playing around' aspect to creating patterns and using them on different products!

Spring Primroses Customizable Gardening Notebook

Spring Flowers Pitcher or Jug, Primroses

But in between times, I’ve been doing something entirely different, abandoning my paintbrushes and paper for the ‘effects’ button in my photo-editing program! I've been having great fun playing with some of my previously handpainted or screenprinted designs to make new abstract patterns.
 
It felt a bit like ‘cheating’ but in fact it wasn’t particularly quick or easy; some designs worked better than others and they all took a fair amount of 'trial and error'.

The addictive nature of playing with images and not having to worry about making mistakes, or wasting expensive paper, meant that I actually spent much longer than I intended.  But it wasn't time wasted - I won a Today’s Best Award on Zazzle for this iPhone case:

 

Flame, Midnight, Green, Abstract iPhone 4/4S

I haven’t abandoned my traditional tools of the trade, though, and I made a start on a Lilies-of-the-Valley May Birthday Card, part of my series of Birth Month Flower  Birthday Cards. But it wasn't all plain sailing!

One of my favourite decorating styles is Art Nouveau and I also love painting flowers. And since the Art Nouveau style has its roots in plant and flower forms, you would think that I could easily paint my lilies in that style, inspired by my lovely book of Verneuil’s Art Nouveau Floral Designs. But strangely, I found it quite challenging. I found the very formal, heavily stylised approach to flowers decidedly stiff and unnatural to me. (And, if I'm honest, probably the need to draw and paint neatly went against the grain!) But I pressed on and this is where I've got to so far –

I still need to tidy up the leaves, add the caption and choose a background colour, for which I will use the paint bucket in my photo-editing program to ensure that it’s completely even, in case I can use this design as a repeating pattern as well as a greeting card. On my laptop, this background looks like beige, quite an authentic colour for Edwardian decorations. But I emailed it to a friend and she thought it was ‘mustard’ – one of the difficulties of viewing images online!

I hope to have made some progress by my next post . . . if I haven’t completely succumbed to the addiction of generating designs digitally!

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Nurses, Nests and more Spring Flowers

This is the collage greeting card I made for the hospital staff at Ysbyty Ystrad Fawr, where everyone seemed to go out of their way to make me feel comfortable in what could hardly be called the most comfortable of situations!

And - spot the difference! -  I made a customizable version to upload so that customers can write the appropriate text on the ‘clipboard’ at the foot of the bed.

Customizable Thank You Card for Hospital Staff by helikettle

Once the card was winging its way to The Valleys – the brand new hospital is a replacement for the old Miners’ Hospital – I made a start on a new repeating pattern to use for creating products on Zazzle.

I had really intended to make a start on some less flowery, more masculine designs. But with blue skies, very warm sunshine and temperatures in the upper teens, it seemed as if -

'The Spring is sprung

The grass is riz

I wonder where the boidies is . . .'

Well, I know where one of the ‘boidies’ is! It’s nesting on top of the little plastic greenhouse just outside the French doors of my dining room where I work!

I’ve noticed birds, sparrows and blackbirds mostly, getting in under the honeysuckle, finding some sort of food in amongst the leaves that drop onto the roof and stay there, making it sag a little, unless I get around to clearing it out.

But one morning, as I was working as usual, I heard a tremendous flapping of wings against the plastic. I went out to investigate, thinking that a bird must be trapped and unable to take off from the slippery, plastic surface.

And there was Mother Blackbird, peeping out at me and not looking particularly 'stuck'. But I thought maybe her apparently composed demeanour was a cover for sheer terror; so I went off in search of something to lift the roof gently from inside, to help her on her way. But as I did so, out she flew, no problem at all!

But then I've been hearing more flapping, at intervals throughout the days – as my bedroom is directly above the dining room, the beating of wings against the plastic woke me up a couple of mornings. Sometimes it sounds like a helicopter! And I took this photo through my kitchen window. Other birds fly away as soon as I get anywhere near a window with my camera but the blackbirds here seem to be remarkably tame - as well as singing more beautifully than in England, Wales being known as The Land of Song, of course!

When she had flown away, I was able to see the beginnings of a nest! I have no idea what all the flapping is about. It appears to be part of the nest-building process. Maybe somebody who knows about birds can tell me?

Last time I was able to take a peek, the nest had grown considerably and seemed to be dripping with mud – not very inviting, I should think!

So this long diversion has been by way of explaining why I just had to embark upon yet another floral design! 

This time it is Spring Flowers, primroses, prompted by another scruffy scrap of tracing paper I found in the treasure trove that is my Screenprinting Designs Folder from more than 20 years ago and the signs of spring that are 'bursting out all over' in my garden!

Here are four 'blocks' of the handpainted design, put together on my computer and then 'tidied up' so that the 'join' isn't too apparent -

Watch out for these primroses as they gradually appear on everything from cushions (pillows) and tea pots to phonecases and iPad sleeves, during the course of this week!

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Patchwork and Daffodils

The patchwork design I began last week has found its way onto a few products on Zazzle and I intend to create more from it this week.

Denim Patchwork Messenger Bag, Pinks, Blues by helikettle

As planned, I put the ‘blocks’ together on the Zazzle site but it was very slow-going! 

Making all the pieces exactly the same size on Zazzle was time-consuming so I had another try at fitting them together on my computer before uploading the whole piece, keeping my fingers crossed that I wouldn’t run out of memory. At one point I did get a message saying that Windows was increasing my memory and warning that some requests might be denied in the meantime, so I left it alone for a while and went off and did a few jobs around the house.

When I came back I was able to continue and this cushion has the larger pattern on one side and the smaller one on the reverse –

Denim Patchwork Pillow, Pinks, Blues by helikettle

This Ipad case is a good example of what I mentioned last week – I hadn’t anticipated that the pattern, when repeated, would turn out to have such a prominent 'slanted' effect!

Denim Patchwork iPad Case, Pinks, Blues by helikettle

Meanwhile, spring seems to have begun to arrive in my garden. And seeing buds on the daffodils, I felt a strong urge to paint some! The daffodil is the Birth Month Flower for March; it is also the traditional Welsh flower featured on St David’s Day cards, as well as Persian New Year cards.

So I decided that treating myself to a bunch of daffodils when I went shopping would be money well spent. But I was disappointed to find that the only ones left in the shops were the short, straight-stemmed kind with no leaves – really boring and not at all what I was looking for!

One of the things that I love about daffodils is the way they move, ‘tossing their heads in sprightly dance’, as Wordsworth wrote.  Somewhere I have a sketch from long ago of just a couple of long-stemmed daffodils, with their leaves and I remember that it was their ‘gesture’ that appealed to me and compelled me to draw them.

But the nearest I could find in town was a little pot of tiny daffodils – apparently I had left it too late for a bunch! -  so I bought it and began to draw them. I often draw flowers over and over from different angles before I paint them. It’s almost like 'getting to know' them so that when I come to paint, their shapes are really familiar to me.

The trouble with this particular pot of daffodils, the only one left in town, was that all the flowers were facing inwards! So I took a bit of ‘artistic licence’ and  moved the left-hand clump over to the right when I drew them, to make a much better composition.

I had hoped to try out my new water soluble crayons at last and I started out with some lovely blue sugar paper to give a bright sunshiny background. But the colours, dry, weren’t strong enough to show up on the blue background and the paper didn’t respond at all well to being made wet.

So I moved on to some watercolour paper. That worked better, but I felt that the effect of the crayons was too heavy for my ‘tossing their heads’ daffodils and I ended up painting them in ordinary, transparent watercolour, after drawing them with watercolour pencils.

I hadn’t wasted my time with these various experiments, though, as with each attempt, I became more familiar with the 'personalities' of my daffodils. My scanner didn’t do a particularly good job – the yellows came out too pale and the orange was a strident red. But I made some minor corrections digitally and I'm quite pleased with the multi-purpose end result –

 

 

One painting has formed the basis of several ranges of cards. But in case you're thinking that I've saved time by using one design for several occasions, these, with all their variations and their search engine-optimised titles, descriptions and keywords are going to take hours to upload! It will probably take me all week - at least!

But I also have an idea sketched out for a ‘Thank You’ card for the lovely staff at the Endoscopy Unit at Ysbyty Ystrad Fawr, who were so kind and went out of their way to make me feel as comfortable as it's possible to be with such an uncomfortable procedure, a couple of weeks ago. 

I can't wait to get started on it . . .

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Easter Bunnies, Norooz Goldfish and Denim Patches

This week I’ve got myself into a bit of a muddle, to put it mildly, and I was doubtful whether I’d get the ‘new, improved’ (and larger) bunnies finished in time for this week’s post. 

But here they are -

It wasn’t just my hospital visit eating into three days that made sticking to usual my plan very difficult; nor was it finding that Greeting Card Universe are asking us to create more Persian New Year (Norooz - 20th March) cards as a matter of urgency. I actually enjoy doodling and painting fishes and, with different wording, this one will double as a Pisces birthday card for a friend's upcoming birthday -

These interruptions didn’t help. But what really threw me off course was that I allowed myself to be distracted into trying out an idea for a repeating pattern, a patchwork of denim pieces, that I’ve been wondering about for a while.

I didn’t think it would take long because I decided to colour it with my new, rather scrumptious Derwent Coloursoft pencils, with the idea that if I used them on a rough-surfaced watercolour paper, they might give the effect of a grainy fabric.

Or, on the other hand, it might come out looking like a small child’s scribbles! Which is EXACTLY how it looked when scanned.

Apart from that, I didn’t much like the configuration of the  shapes.

You have to be careful when making a repeating pattern as the overall finished effect can be quite different from what you intended. Sometimes a colour will seem to be too dominant; or a shape will stick out like the proverbial ‘sore thumb’.

In this case, it was the two shapes by the arrow that, put side by side, reminded me of a modern tower block – quite the wrong connotations for a design that was intended to be soft and folksy and erring on the side of ‘country’! It’s difficult to anticipate these things unless, I suppose, you are very experienced in creating repeating patterns, which I’m not!

I’m still not entirely decided whether to make repeating patterns the old fashioned way or whether to use the computer throughout. Both have their pros and cons. 

• The computer has the potential for greater accuracy but I often run short of memory when I’m placing the blocks side by side, in spite of my son buying me a whole lot more memory for Christmas last year! Even if I manage to get all the blocks positioned, if I use the paint bucket to colour the pattern, after a bit I get the dreaded ‘this programme is not responding’ message!

• Making the complete repeating pattern with tracing paper on real paper has its limitations too as I only have an A4 scanner nowadays and these patterns usually need to be bigger than that.

So here’s my way round it – I hope - my 'cunning plan', as Baldrick would say!

While I was waiting for the Norooz goldfish to dry, I painted a very simple pattern based on the pieces of  a patchwork bag I made years ago and using the colour scheme of my first attempt, which I rather liked.

It’s just the one unit, so it fitted into my scanner, and I’ll upload it to Zazzle and hope that I can ‘add image’ repeatedly and then slot all the pieces together on the item I’m creating, like doing a jigsaw puzzle.  That way I should avoid the memory problem.

I very much hope to have something to show for all this in my next post – please keep your fingers crossed that this new ‘Cunning Plan’ of mine will work!

Repeating Patterns and Hot Cross Bunnies

Last week I had reached the stage of painting one block of the ‘fleur de lys’ repeating pattern I had designed and intended to place the blocks side by side to make up the complete pattern.

But I found that my painting was too inaccurate to match up properly, not surprising really since accuracy is not my strongest point! I think that tracing the pattern several times for the repeats, and finally tracing it on to the watercolour paper on my lightbox, meant that any tiny discrepancies had been magnified each time, even though it looked fine to the naked eye.  Tracing film can be tricky to work with in any case because of its tendency to stretch if it becomes at all damp – even the moisture from one’s skin can distort it!

All was not lost though – I went back to the ‘Victorian Bathroom’ that I posted last week and coloured it digitally, matching the colours with my painting and then filling in the background in various colours. It took a very long time but I ended up quite pleased with it.

When I used to screenprint, one of the things I loved about it is that you can use one stencil to print a design in as many different colour-ways as you can think of! And it’s somewhat the same with using the computer to colour a design; I’ve made a few different colour combinations so far but the possibilities are endless!


So here are a few of the products I’ve created so far –

iPhone4 Case, Maroon, Gold, Blue, Fleur de Lys

Stylish Pillow White, Gold, Fleur de Lys Pattern 

Stylish Placemat Fleur-de-Lys, Maroon, Blue, Green 

And there are plenty more here!

I could go on creating different colour schemes with this one design for months to come! But I’d probably get bored after a bit so I’ll put that on the back burner and come back to it later.

I’m going to be a bit short of time this week because of a hospital appointment so, rather than start a completely new design, I’ll be ‘refurbishing’ an old one, my 'Easter Bunnies'.

I’m not sure what to make of this card design. It’s been popular among my friends and the Portsmouth Cathedral shop ordered some, but it hasn’t sold well online. I’ve always been unhappy with the shape of the Easter Egg and also the fact that the original was too small to enlarge well so the watercolour pencil outlines look a bit fuzzy.

Also, I've discovered that anyone who isn't familiar with UK Easter fare probably won't understand the pun!

So I hope I can make some improvements to show you next week -