After a Long Gap . . .

I have been most remiss and haven't put anything on my blog for, ooh, well over a year.
A lot has happened, had a gallery, closed a gallery!
Still papercutting but have discovered pen and ink so have started drawing again.
And have created "ghost bunny", more on that later.

My papercutting has developed to the point where I know use full colour which means lots and lots of layers of paper, and much quicker filling up of my jam jar of dead scalpel blades!
My pictures are filled with much more wildlife now, after years of saying "no" to such subjects! Well, I can do them in paper . . . weirdly!

And I've jumped into the world of greetings cards having been taken on by Natural Partners, a North East based publishing company.

Only in the last few weeks have I started drawing again.
I have discovered the joys of watercolour pens! A blessing as my forays into proper watercolours always ended in puddles of mud a hippo would love to roll in!

This is probably where I can bring up "ghost bunny".
He started life as a papercut character, a little creature that just popped out of my head onto my cutting mat one day, where from . . . nobody knows!
He has his own little online page and a few fans, though I'd love him to have more . . .
When my first pens arrived he became my model, of course.

There is more freedom, I find, with the pens I can step back from the precision needed when working with a scalpel, a bit more scribbley, so my eyes are sighing with relief, not that eyes sigh but you know what I mean.

Time for some pictures now . . . if I can figure out how to put them on after all this time away, lurking in the dark depths . . .

Birds, Still-life and Stuff . . .

Thought I'd put a few more bits and pieces on today, after all, this is supposed to be about my work even though I keep getting side-tracked! Butterfly-brained I know.

Birds, birds, birds . . .

   I have started getting a little obssessed with our feathered friends! thus far they've tended to be of the generic variety as that allows me a bit more artistic license, which translated means I get let off mistakes!! I won't have bird enthusiasts pulling me up for getting plumage wrong, or missing a claw off. But, as I have a head full of new ideas based on extinction and evolution, to include dodo's, pteradactyls, etc, I'm going to have to break the habit of a life-time and at least attempt to get things right, or do I??? They're extinct, who can tell me off?
   And here are a couple of still-lifes, just to prove that my bird obssession isn't totally taking me over, yet! After struggling to do these things when I was at school I swore blind that pots with greenery in them would never darken my desk again, so what when wrong? Well we all need a challenge from time to time, and to tell the truth, I enjoyed doing them. The pots are by Charlotte Morrisson, a local maker and their stripey-ness inspired me, so a stint parking my car up hedgebacks in search of interesting frondly things to arrange in afore-mentioned pottery eventually brought forth these two pieces, there may be more but my studio is a tad messy and they could be anywhere!
   Thankfully school art classes didn't make me still-life phobic forever, after that initial quivering fear and dread I took the plunge, alright, hundreds of years later! but I think these turned out ok.