I've just added some beautiful new personalised mugs to my Etsy store - they make great gift ideas and stocking-fillers for friends and family...

It's been back to school for me this autumn - I'm currently just over halfway through Victoria Johnson's wonderful Create Collections class - and I'm enjoying taking a new look at colour and creating my artworks and designs with a collection in mind...

Here's some of what I've been up to so far, with more to come!
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Learn how to easily measure drawing angles and proportions to help develop your drawing skills...

My best drawing techniques for beginner drawing and drawing from life - step-by-step guidance - follow along with me as we learn to draw together...

In this earlier blog post, we looked for simple shapes in our drawing to get us started. This is a fantastic drawing technique that you can use when you’re drawing absolutely anything…

But not everything we want to draw is as simple as a single leaf and sometimes we need to use additional techniques to help us draw more complex things.

We’ll start looking at these here…

Have you ever seen artists holding a pen or pencil up at arm’s length when they’re drawing something?

Celtic greyhound knotwork art plus gifts for greyhound lovers, greyhound-design fabrics and loads more…

I, myself, used to own a rescue greyhound and I still consider myself a greyhound lover, so I was keen to create a Celtic artwork and have a go at intertwining knotwork around those lovely long legs and tail. The greyhound is such an elegant dog that perfectly suits the Celtic knotwork style...

Why keep an art sketchbook?

Whether you’re feeling inspired to draw, draw, draw… or have been told to start a sketchbook habit, here we take a look at some reasons why you might keep a sketchbook and think about what format that sketchbook might take…

Your sketchbook is there to serve you so use it in the way that’s most useful for you personally!

How do you feel about the idea of keeping a sketchbook?

Is it something you’re keen to get started doing? Or do you feel you ‘should’ keep an art sketchbook?

Perhaps you searched online for sketchbook ideas and now feel intimidated by the perfectly-coiffured sketchbook pages gracing Instagram and Pinterest?

Yep! Me too!

Exploring self-expression in art and creating meaningful drawings…

​​The objective of this particular drawing lesson is to understand that art is expressive and personal…

…and NOT an exercise in technical drawing.

So that you will feel confident that, actually, you ARE an artist.

Celtic knotwork art - Humanity & Kindness...

I created this colourful Celtic knotwork design on the theme of humanity and kindness and based on a traditional Celtic knotwork design -

I actually created it in the first weeks of lockdown (late-March 2020) for a book on kindness, 'Be Kind' by Tecassia Publishing - thinking about how we're all interconnected across the whole world and how we need to cultivate our kindness and patience towards each other so that we can all live together effectively, especially in those most difficult moments when we sometimes feel anything but patient and kind...
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Basic colour wheel colour theory explained – keeping it simple – put the ideas into practice straight away.

Do people keep referring to the colour wheel or colour theory without explaining what it is, why it’s helpful, or what it’s got to do with you? …confusing, right?

Only until it’s explained properly! When you understand basic colour wheel ideas, it’s like you’ve been let into a special artists’ club and get to find out all the colour secrets!

I didn’t properly understand about the artist’s colour wheel until I started training in interior design… it was a big ‘a-ha’ moment and suddenly everything ‘clicked’…

That’s what I want to share with you – how basic colour wheel colour theory can improve your art!

We’ll look together at the basic colour wheel – we’ll understand what it’s for and understand some simple colour terms before going on to see how basic colour wheel colour theory can help us choose colours for our drawings and artworks.

In this blog post, we’ll cover:

• Understanding the colour wheel
• Understanding ‘warm’ and ‘cool’ colours and why they’re important
• Using the colour wheel
• How colour mixing works
• Mixing colours for drawing

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Exploring drawing and painting on fabric - inspired by the beautiful blendings of colours that watercolour artists create, I decided to explore the effects of ink on wet fabric....
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A small handful have become artworks in their own right, whereas others become part of a pattern, or composite artwork, combined with my drawings, and many are just a very faint background, you would hardly notice.

​This is actually a technique I use in very many of my digital artworks to create an interesting, colourful and textured background for my artwork...

Learn how to draw anything by seeking out shapes - basic drawing skills to help beginners get started drawing quickly and easily...

I want to get you started drawing by sketching nature. The objective of the drawing lesson in this blog post is to understand how to sketch out the basic shapes of your drawing so that your drawing is recognisable and accurate.

This is important because although art doesn’t have to look ‘realistic’ you do want your drawing to look recognisable (unless you choose to play with the shapes and proportions for style and effect)…

It’s important not to give your viewer the sensation that “there’s just something wrong about it” which can often be the case when we get things even subtly wrong.