Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Since Christmas is now officially past here's a last viewing of this years Christmas card. The version that made it to the post has glitter in all the snow flakes. All the cows are actual cows from my family's farm, including Maia who is my very own Hereford cow. I hope everyone had a lovely festive period and here's hoping 2012 is a great year.

Woodside Craft Fair

This Saturday I will have a stall at Woodside Garden Centre near Ancrum. Their Traditional Woodside Christmas Celebration features carol singing, wreath making and a wishing tree as well as the craft fair and many other things. I have a selection of cards and prints for sale and with me are Robyn and Linda Kinsman-Blake with lots of lovely ceramics and jewelry as shown on their website here

I have returned!

Hello again. It's been a while since I've posted anything new. I've been busy with my other career in the agricultural world of grain testing. By a rough calculation I've probably counted out 30,000 individual grains of malting barley this harvest. After that it's quite nice to get back to some illustration work.



If anyone is around the Borders region I have some prints for sale in the lovely Coldstream Gallery. There's a selection of cards, some of my fish prints and my latest editions are the snipe and partridge above. There is lots of other artists' work in the gallery, in a huge mix of styles and mediums so it's definately worth a visit.


Just to prove that I did manage to do some work over the harvest period, this rather fat pheasant was on a pretty elaborate I.O.U. poster for a prize of 1 tonne of wheat donated to an charity auction in Northumberland.

I did say I was going to paint a cow...

Technically it's a calf not a cow. This is without a doubt the most unusual thing I've ever had to paint. The calf is for the Border Union Show this Saturday coming. He's going on tour around the Border towns with Radio Borders first. So if anyone is in the area this week, look out for him.
The two buildings on each side are Kelso Abbey and Kelso Old Bridge.

I haven't used acrylics for about 4 years. I had forgotten how much I dislike them. Back to watercolours from now on I think.

Summer Days

It's approaching harvest time which means that I'll soon be disappearing into the oblivion that is my summer job testing grain. In the mean time I've got few things to get finished before then. This is poster that I made of everyone's favourite ice-cream flavours. I'm not sure whether it works or not. I might put it on my Etsy store - it depends on whether people like it.

In other news I'm going to be painting a cow in the next few weeks. No, I'm not making that up. Details to follow...

Something from a wee while ago.

It's always a good idea when posting Birthday card designs to wait until after the recipient's Birthday is passed. So this is a card design I did last month. I was told that the man it was for liked growing tomatoes, played the cello and was always worrying about the fox getting his hens. Since I like writing rhymes I came up with this. I hoped he liked it.

One down, three to go.

So, my introduction of new breeds of cow into our herd progresses. There are still too many boring plain black ones but I have managed to coerce my Dad into getting a few Herefords. Never one to miss an opportunity this is the Birthday card that I've made for him. While Shorthorns and Luings are a long shot I think it would have been more realistic to put "Status - Denied" for the Highland. Pity.

Happy Easter

Did anyone else eat an excessive amount of chocolate yesterday? Having said that, any excuse to go overboard decorating Easter cakes is always worth it!