A gratitude ecard

This design is one of four I have recently created for Gratitude Habitat.

It is a free ecard that can be printed out for you to send as you wish!

The idea is to encourage you to show your gratitude, by thanking those around you you really make a difference in your life. You can even just print it off as a reminder for yourself!

Each card has a gratitude relevant quote on it, and an image to support the quote.

I think just one image is available online right now, but I will post all four images here over the next few posts, and they will all be available on the Gratitude Habitat website soon!

Lola

Now that Christmas has passed and the new year is upon us, I can finally show the painting I did of Lola the dog! She was a commissioned Christmas gift, which is why the finished result had to stay secret until now.

The painting is acrylic on handmade-paper covered canvas, and the paper has real leaves made into it, so it has a real texture to it. I also started the painting with modeling paste, so parts of the dog are even more textural again. There is a bee in the painting, to symbolize hard work, and as a reminder of pain, and the dogs collar is made of a daisy chain - symbolizing innocence and purity.

The dandelion speaks of happiness, and is the oracle of love. The dandelion clock references time and it's relation to love. The butterfly represent metamorphosis and change in life, and two mean love again.

I love to weave in symbolic reference or secret things when possible, in my work. I love the challenge of sliding imagery in - sometimes unnoticed, that has relevance and meaning to those it is created for! Mostly it's something I've done in my glass work, but since I am currently painting more - put it here instead!

Lola: 30" x 18" Acrylic on canvas

Happy new year!

Happy Holidays!

Blog silence recently, due to surgery on my left knee to reconstruct my ACL ligament with some donor bone, donor ligament, empty toilet roll holders and glue! So, after 2 weeks of severe pain and a whole lot of drugs, I have returned to myself again.

Funny how you can be absent from yourself and your life, even if you are actually there.

So it is time to wish you all a very Happy Christmas, and post a picture of some custom star ornaments, made from poly clay and painted.

I do have a picture from the inside of my knee, but I thought the stars were more appropriate for the time of year!

My Ad in Gentry magazine!!

My digital artwork is in November's Gentry magazine (p66-67) in the form of an advert for Corrective BodyworX - who I design for. Hooray!

Here is a copy, if you don't plan on visiting the magazine yourself. It's always fun to see one's artwork in print.

Alice and Andre

Here are the last of the Grammar Town characters. Now it's on to something else!

Polly Pronoun and Cahn the Conjunction

More from the project that never came to pass! Polly and Cahn join the other characters of Grammar Town. Polly has a 'can do' attitude, and Cahn is somewhat of a magician.

A painting of Penny Peach

Things in Blog Land are a little mixed up for me at the moment, which is why I'm posting a painting of my dog Penny, before I even mention that I have a new dog called Penny.

But there it is! I will catch up with things at some point.

I was too excited not to post this though: Kim Santini, the incredibly talented, daily painter (Who's blog I follow) over at paintingadogaday , has painted My Penny, as part of the gratitude series paintings. This is a series of paintings of rescue animals, where part of the proceeds go to the rescue organisation they came from. I suggest you go to her blog to read more about this, and other projects, and you can see the link to the actual painting of Penny here.

I am a great fan of her style, and the painting is a very good likeness of Penny. I will post the picture she painted from, here, so you can see how good she is!

In other news - I have a knee that doesn't work, so needs surgery. And I have been painting, but it's a secret Christmas commission, so may not get to post it until much after, but may sneak in a detail or two in the meantime!

Will be working on more paintings soon, and plan to make some Christmas ornaments when I have my knee surgery (early december) so I have lots of 'sitting down' jobs to do - stop me from going out of my mind.