This week’s drawing of the week is a Orange tip butterfly.
After all that Christmas stuff I’m now working on illustrations for next year and I’m going to make an illustrated guide to butterflies. This is the first of many butterfly drawings.
The latin name for these creatures is Anthocharis cardamines and you can find them in damp pastures and meadows, damp woodland edges and glades, riverbanks, ditches, dykes, fens, railway cuttings and country lanes.
My final Christmas gifting idea can also double up as decorations! I just decorated these mdf Christmas trees with posca pens I had left over from my autumn shows.
I’m very fond of sticking to a simple set of colours, so as well as using black and white designs I’ve also done some black, silver and gold trees. It’s about as bling as I get. Both of these would go with black wrap or metallic gold and silver papers.
As you can see I’ve used my laurel stem design (how to here), and simple star, snowflake, heart and tinsel motifs.
Another of my go-to motifs is my simple flower design. Like my other Scandi-style shapes it’s really easy to recreate as you’ll see by my how-to below. 
Simple flower how to step 1: Make a three curved marks one at the top and two at the bottom. 
Simple flower how to step 2: Add two lines between the triangular shape so the shape resembles a dancing man.
Simple flower how to step 3: Draw curves around the lines to make petals and add a dot in the middle. 
Simple flower how to step 4: Colour in the petals and make little dots around the shape.
I’ve deliberately kept it simple for part three of my Christmas wrap ideas with these easy black and white designs.
I’ve opted for a lovely iridescent white paper and teamed it with simple black tags and co-ordinating ribbon. The gestural stem designs are based on my laurel stem illustration, see the step by step here. The Christmas tree and garland are really simple; I used a white Posca pen to create tiered jagged shapes for the tree, waited for the paint to dry and overlaid it with gold dots. For the garland I drew some simple thin lines with a silver Posca pen then added white and gold dots.
Last week Pantone announced its colour of the year for 2017. It’s ‘Greenery’ and it makes me happy.
A few design experts have been a bit disparaging about this colour with the name ‘Kermit’ referenced, well as a person who admires the work of Jim Henson I don’t think that’s so bad.
But seriously I love a bit of greenery, and I was even singing its praises earlier this year. Bringing the colours of nature into your home is a marvellous thing and the vivid shade of this Pantone works incredibly well with both subtle pastels and equally vibrant hues.
The colour is described by Pantone as a “fresh, yellowish hue” that “symbolises the reawakening of nature in spring and is a symbol for a new beginning”. Great – just what we need after 2016.
I’ve embraced shades of greenery already in my own new print designs (before the announcement I may add) so I’m incredibly happy that it’s not just me looking to find hope in natural colours and forms.
Over the next four days I got some top easy gift wrap ideas for giving your Christmas pressies that extra pizzazz.
Idea number one is inspired by the totes trad red and white festive theme as outlined in this Christmas trends post. As I might of mentioned, this red, white and green colour scheme is one very much favoured by Dr B. So I always do something every year that’s a little concession to his yuletide preferences (although in fairness he’d have penguins and robins and Santas everywhere if it were up to him).
This is my concession to tradition. I have loads of gift tags and Posca pens left over from the craft shows I did this autumn so I thought I’d get busy with some quick and easy wrap revamps. I used two different nib sizes (5M and 1MR) to create different sized dots on the wrapping paper and some of the tags. I then finished it off with a trad twine bow. I also completed some of the gifts with a bespoke wreath tag. It’s dead easy to do, so much so I’ve got a little step by step for you below for you to try.
You don’t have to be a fantastic drawer to create this wreath, I’ve shown loads of people how to do it; if you can make a mark you can make this wreath. You’ll need a circular tag and Posca pens in dark and light green, gold (or silver), red and blue.
Step 1: Make a dark green circle using a rough layered zig-zags.
Step 2: Overlay the dark green with a lighter shade.
Step 3: Once your wreath is dry (the pens are paint based so you can use them as such) use the gold pen to draw lines around the ring as above, like it is wrapped around the wreath. Once you have covered the wreath with gold lines draw circles along the lines to make a string of beads.
Step 4: Add coloured baubles in-between the gold bead garland.
Step 5: Write a little festive phrase in the middle.
This time for my drawing of the week I’ve done a very earnest little Zebra. Even in the middle of doing loads of Christmassy type stuff I still made time to work on my zoo animals series.
Although I love black and white drawings I can never resist subverting a traditional black and white subject with a bit of colour, so as well as using my black pens on this illustration I’ve adding some purple and yellow watercolour notes.
My posts have been sporadic of late because I have been having the busiest time sending out Christmas orders and selling my ways in various Christmas markets. It’s been fun but boy has it been full-on.
Anyway, my festive mood, and indeed this Monday Moodboard, is in total full flow now working on a set of Scandi-style designs and illustrations for Christmas demos for Posca pens and for my Christmas wrapping. I’ll reveal more of this later in the week but in the mean time enjoy some of the patterns and imagery that has been inspiring me.
My drawing of the week this week is of a pelican.
As a prolific drawer of birds, I’ve always wanted to draw a pelican. I like the long beak/bill (with that funky pouch) and squat body; they appear to me as both elegant and bulky at the same time.
This illustration was created with blue and orange shades of watercolour and black uni-ball pin pens. He looks quite stern here but I’m sure this guy is quite friendly when you get to know him.
This week’s drawing of the week is of an elephant.
There are no trends, no ‘work’ here (even though I have been talking about drawing zoo animals). I made this picture for my husband.
It was our 14 ‘ivory’ wedding anniversary. We’re not buying each other ivory because that’s wrong, so we needed an alternative. We (completely independently) used our imaginations with this watercolour and ink illustration and Dr B wrote me a poem entitled ‘Elephant’. We think they are our best pressies to each other in all our marriage.
After a busy fortnight with holidays, workshops and Christmas prep, I’m back with some insights from the outside world – a Monday Moodboard dedicated to henna designs and patterns.
I get trend reports and press previews all the time but every now and then a trend comes along that I don’t know about that really excites me. While I obviously know about these beautiful, ancient designs, and have even had these exquisite patterns painted on myself in the past, I didn’t know they were capturing peoples’ imaginations right now.
How wrong was I?
Every teenage girl that came to my Posca pen workshops in Manchester and Birmingham wanted to recreate mandala and henna designs. They were really very adept at creating these patterns and told me that they wanted to place these designs on their clothes and homewares. It’s good to get out there and talk to people – you can always learn something.
