Secret postcards

Caught stealing an egg

Art Deco lady

My younger son's school is fundraising at present and has used the Royal College of Art's idea of having a secret postcard sale.  Ideally, they'd like known artists or celebrities to contribute cards, but were asking anyone who could pick up a pencil to have a go.  These were my contributions.  They lady should/could have been more delicate, but the markers bled slightly more than I was expecting on the postcard paper.  By the time I drew the fox, I was anticipating this, so I used a Chinese brush pen and rather than trying to include more detail, I just tried to make fewer lines work harder by varying the thicknesses.  My inspiration was Art Deco postcard work, as those artists gave such expression in few lines and fewer colours.

Ingredients for Caught stealing an egg

Pentel Chinese calligraphy brush pen

Letraset Tria marker in orange O567
Pentel white gel pen for highlights in eyes; other white areas are just the white of the card

Ingredients for Art Deco lady

Steadtler triplus fineliner in brown

Letraset Tria markers: red R766, blue V245, orange O567 and skin tone O729

Craft spaces and inspirations

 My craft space, at the back of our sitting room

 Close up of my craft space

Mouse under a cushion

I am always fascinated by other people's craft spaces, so this is mine.  It is newly set up, although we moved into this flat a year ago.  The desk and most of the stash arrived from where it was being stored about six months ago and I finally unpacked the last of the Pickford boxes on 2 January 2012.  Yay!  

I had forgotten how lovely it is to be surround by crafting things.  What you cannot see is that behind the sofa I have three big bags of...well stuff.  At least it is hidden from view when guests visit.  I close the shutters outside at night, but during the day, they open up to a cityscape of the City of London, where I can see 30 St Marys Axe, aka 'the Gerkin' building, the Shard of Glass (Europe's highest skyscraper) and just the golden cross of St Paul's Cathedral (sadly the rest is hidden by a neighbouring building).  It is a beautiful vista in its own way.

My favourite type of art is represented here by the iconic image of Le Chat Noir, an 1896 poster by Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen.  'Fin de Siècle' refers to the end of the 19th Century (typically 1890s), an era of cynicism and debauchery but also of hope for the new century.  Arthur Rackam, Aubrey Beardsley and Edvard Munch are all of this period.  I love the painfully cold, but beautifully detailed pen and ink (black and white) drawings of Beardsley and the downright creepy illustrations of Rackam to which I was introduced as a child through a book of Aesop's Fables given to my younger brother.  I also love the art, architecture, furniture and jewellery design of the Art Nouveau and Art Deco periods that followed and the future echos of artists and poets like William Blake who preceded Fin de Siècle with his Songs of Innocence and Experience.  To my mind, these artists managed to break away from recieved wisdom about what art should look like and yet still convey such emotion and conviction in their works.  What talent, what courage!  What I take from this is that when all around you looks bleak and empty, create, create and keep on creating, because even if your inspiration is something negative, you can still use it to create something positive.