What a lovely weekend

My trip down to Colemans Craft Warehouse in Rushden on Saturday was really enjoyable and was among several things this weekend that gave me a much needed boost. There were several demonstrations besides mine, including beading, Fimo sculpture and needle felting, though I really didn't get a chance to have a proper look as I was kept busy all day - just how I like it!

Thank you to everyone that spent time at my table and for all your lovely comments. Most artists and designers have moments of self doubt, the negative thoughts that creep up unawares from time to time, so a day spent with people who give such positive and appreciative feedback is just the right tonic.

For some silly reason I forgot to pack my camera, so I don't have any photos from the day, but I doubt I'd have had time to take any really so not to worry! I hope that we will be able to arrange another date for me to return to Colemans, so I will keep you posted.

We were all well looked after on Saturday too, with a constant supply of hot drinks and lunch laid on upstairs - just as well too, as my long journey home didn't contain any opportunities to buy anything to eat on the train. I had a few grapes with me so I made do with those and getting back at well past 10pm was far too late to be thinking about a meal! 

Sunday morning saw me on Sidesperson duties at church...welcoming people at the door with service leaflets, taking the collection and helping people up and down the steps during Communion...not just by myself, there are four people on duty at the Sunday service. I was trying to stop my tummy from rumbling, though it seemed to be timing itself to the quietest parts of the service!

After church I met up with Heather in Blackpool as there was a vintage and craft fair on at the historic Winter Gardens that we wanted to go to. We didn't buy anything, but we enjoyed having a wander and browsing through all the bric a brac, various crafts and collectables. We both found the vintage dolls exceedingly creepy! 

I was, by this time, feeling quite faint, having eaten nothing except grapes and a tiny breakfast cereal bar since midday on Saturday, so we made our way to a noodle bar and had a rather late lunch there. It's almost worth going without food for so long just to relish the feeling when you actually get to eat something again!

My treat last night was to watch Michael Bublé whose voice makes me turn to jelly inside! He can be a very naughty boy, with a really mischievous glint in his eyes but he somehow gets away with his sauciness. He sang "Sway"  - Dean Martin's song of course...a man with an equally sexy voice! I enjoyed the whole programme, though when he sang "Home" at the end I admit that it was back to the tears again as it's all about being away from the one you love and I used to sing it to myself when I was missing David while away on my trips. 

All in all I had a happy weekend though and today has been thoroughly wasted on doing just about nothing! I was so busy last week that I just wanted one day where I didn't feel guilty if I slouched about. So, apart from dead heading some pansies, Violas and Nasturtiums I've really done very little. I was able to watch the tennis at last - hooray! And Thomas and Tara have loved having their mum around all day.

The sunshine has been beaming here, and still is as I type, so I took a few pictures of the garden this morning. David's rose is blooming again now which really gave me cause to smile and I know that he'd have loved seeing all the vibrant colours that are really coming into their own now. The garden is somewhat haphazard, scruffy in places and the lawn certainly needs mowing (or scything!) but it is colourful.

 To think these were all tiny seeds a few months ago.......

 ....and Princess Tippy Toes checking out the pots.Unfortunately my Nasturtiums are being chomped by caterpillars but I haven't got the heart to "deal" with them and I reckon that even the Large White butterflies need a hand these days!

Love these Anemones. I've also had plenty more fresh veg, with more courgettes plumping up nicely and, so far, fingers crossed, very little sign of the nasty, slimy slugs that plagued the garden last Summer!

I've added some more items to my Etsy shop today too, including the little shadow box that I posted pictures of last week. You can see thumbnail pictures of the new items in my left sidebar, or click on them for a closer look. Here's a peek of the gold fish semi abstract painting though....

....this has gold highlights and I wanted to create a stained glass sort of effect.

Well, I've just got time to prepare something simple for dinner before one of my favourite programmes strats - Only Connect on BBC 4....it's a very tough quiz based on connections between things. A real brain trainer!

So, I'll say cheerio for now and head for the kitchen.

Painting progress

Thanks everyone, for the lovely emails that I received over the last couple of days. They were filled with warm wishes and I just want to assure you that I'm doing okay in general, getting on with everything and becoming involved with new things. The love that David and I shared runs through me like the words in a stick of rock, so, that will never change or wane. It's as much a part of me as the blood in my veins.

Yesterday was my time for contemplation and today was a fresh page of course. No gardening - it was cold and rainy here, although now the sun is blazing down again! I've been doing some more work on the painting that I showed you the start of a few posts ago....

....still a long way to go on this, but she is beginning to take shape now. I know exactly where this image is going, so it's just a case of getting the pictures in my head onto the canvas. One tricky aspect of working on a boxy canvas is working on the areas near the edges, so I find it helps to put something of a similar thickness on my table to rest my hand on. I've never liked working with an easel, even with large paintings. I prefer to work at a table, hunched over and close up!

Once this canvas is completed it will be going onto my Etsy site and I hope to have a few more items listed on there over the next few days.

Tomorrow I'll be spending the day with Heather and Graham and will pass on everyone's good wishes to them.

Keeping my mind occupied with a new venture

Hello folks, I know it's been another week gone (flown) by, so it's definitely time for a catch up.

Last Saturday I was at Card-io in Pemberton where a great deal of fun was had by all I think! I was wearing my new Doo Lally sweatshirt of course...

 ...which seemed to go down well with everyone! It's always good to be at Card-io as I get to see lots of friendly faces and this timwas no exception, catching up with some old friends that I haven't seen in a while. Jacqui kindly brought me a beautiful scarf and a handmade notebook from her trip to India - how spoiled am I? I do love a blank book, so am still deciding what to fill those inviting pages with. 

I'll be seeing quite a few of Saturday's ladies again next weekend as I'll be at the Happy Stampers show in Port Sunlight on 11th May. I do know that tickets have sold out for this show, so hope all of you that wanted to go have managed to get your hands on them. It's going to be a busy day there!

Yesterday my friend Paul came over to visit me which was a treat. We spent the day wandering, nattering and catching up. Sadly, the beautiful weather of the previous day didn't materialise, so my plans for us to sit out in the garden to eat our sandwiches had to be shelved - I was looking forward to some company to share my bench with too!

Today has been a rare Saturday at home but I've been busying myself with a few things. Apart from getting on with putting together my workshop samples (which I can't share yet of course!) I've finally got my act together and opened an Etsy shop. I will happily admit that Paul helped me over the last hurdles yesterday as he is a bit of a whizz with all this technical stuff (!), though it turned out not to be anywhere near as tricky as I'd thought. Anyway, you can take a look at my efforts if you click on the Etsy shop link in my left hand sidebar. 

I've only put a few things up so far, but I will be adding more things on a regular basis, so do let me know what you think! I'm aiming for an "eclectic mix" and you never know, I may even put some Doo Lally Tee shirts on there!

Some of you may know that I was a wildlife artist in a "previous life" so there are a few of my paintings in my shop too....which has the very original name of "Lindsay Mason Designs"! 

It's a pretty tough time at the moment, with the anniversary of so many sad and frightening moments to go through. Today's been particularly hard and I've had a knot in my stomach since I woke up - hence me keeping myself occupied with the Etsy shop. David was really keen for me to get it started so it felt right to make the effort and finally do it.

Well, after all this time in front of the lap top I think I had better get myself some sustenance. I haven't eaten a thing all day, so I really need to make the effort and raid the fridge. The kettle and coffee jar will be the first ports of call though!

20,000 mark Blog Candy

Hello everyone and, as promised, as soon as my visitor counter hit 20,000 I added some Blog Candy, details of which will stay up on the left until 1st August when I'll write everyone's name onto pieces of paper and David will randomly pick the winner. Just leave a comment before 1st August to be in with a chance, and, if you are able to, please add a link on your own blog. There are two of my clear stamp sets: Zoo Animals and Count My Blessings, two of my unmounted rubber stamp sets: Christmas Season and Christmas Days and one of my wooden stamps: Special Delivery. Also some Magic Mesh in pink, a fabulous Just Glitter pen in gold, a Versafine ink cube in Deep Lagoon, a Ranger Antiquities Frosted Crystal embossing powder, a pack of Wacky Tac repositionable adhesive dots, twenty assorted 12" x 12" papers and (no idea where this came from!) a decoupage kit of a Pansy Basket.
This morning I woke up, always a good start (!) and, bizarrely, an image of a painting that I love came into my head. I was going to share it with you on here, but I cannot find it anywhere on the web. It is simply called "Off!" and it's a Victorian painting depicting a young woman on a park bench looking down at her discarded ring as her young man walks away. It's a small picture which hangs in Manchester City art gallery, but I can't recall the artist's name - which is shocking! I love the fact that there is so much detail and you can look into it and imagine the story behind the painting. If anyone finds an image of it, please email it to me!

It made me think that it would be quite interesting to recall some paintings and drawings that have made an impact on me down the years. The picture on the left is by Alphonse Mucha and posters and cards of his work adorned my teenage bedroom! I've always adored the sinuous lines of Art Nouveau in it's various forms, whether in advertising posters, vases, frames or whatever.

The next painting is called "Shadow of Death" by Holman Hunt, and is also in Manchester Gallery which houses a wonderful collection of Pre Raphaelite work, another of my favourite genres with the incredible colours and detail. This painting always fascinated me. It's a huge painting which has a heart stopping impact when seen in "real life". It shows Mary's horror at seeing Jesus's shadow against the carpentery workshop wall. A wonderful painting.

This beautiful picture is by one of my all time favourite artists named John Atkinson Grimshaw. His atmospheric street scenes, landscapes and townscapes are bursting with mystery and untold stories and just fire the imagination. Gorgeous!

The drawing on the right is one of the many brilliant works by M.C. Escher who totally fascinated me when I was a little girl! He specialised in impossible perspective and optical tricks within his works, which really appeal to my love of cryptic puzzles.

My last choice is a painting called "Flight of Fancy" by a modern Polish artist called Bohuslav Barlow, whose work I first saw at a Manchester Academy exhibition. Here is a modern artist whose work I would collect if I had the money and the space!! He uses lots of strange imagery of puppets, dogs, figures, scarecrows etc, all painted with great skill and imagination. The dreamlike quality of his paintings is what appeals to me. By the way, I should say that the word across the picture is not part of the painting, but it has a copyright over it! Well, I hope that you enjoyed looking at a small selection of my favourite paintings - I'd be interested to know which have made an impression on you down the years.

Meanwhile, don't forget to "be in it to win it" by leaving a comment! Lindsay

My art and I

Oooogh...sorry, another terrible pun for my title! Good name for a song though! (If you're not a Richard Tauber fan you may not get the joke!) Anyway, I've been asked by quite few people about my art background, so I thought I'd put some photos of my paintings on here and a bit about what I used to do before I began designing stamps and papers. Apologies in advance for the poor photos, but these were taken before I had a digital camera or computer, so they are "snaps" really! I don't have many photographs now as a lot were lost a few years ago unfortunately. Those below are photos of photos!

I trained in Manchester and my speciality was detailed work, mainly fauna and flora (mostly British) with some landscapes as well. I particularly enjoyed painting busy foregrounds filled with grasses, fungi, ferns, snails etc. The one below is a case in point, with an array of toadstools around a tree stump. I used watercolours a lot but in a rather different way to the norm in that I used white, which is quite unusual. Each painting began with a very light, but detailed, pencil sketch. The background came next, be it a lightly washed summery sky, or more moody, atmospheric autumnal one. Next I would start to work on the largest sketched areas, such as the tree stump in this picture. The next stage being to paint white watercolour over the sketched details. This gave me a very smooth surface to paint on, in a similar way to painting over gesso, which allowed for very detailed brushwork. I would then keep working on the fine details with a 00000 brush, and my preference was always synthetic brushes, especially the golden nylon type, as I like the fact that they feel stiffer than a natural brush, more like using a pencil in a way. Each painting could take anywhere between a week and a month, depending on the size and subject, though I'd often work on more than one painting so that I could take a break from, say, a detailed woodland, and work on the soft fur of an animal instead.

The painting of red squirrels below was a commission from a gentleman, for his wife who was very fond of them. Unfortunately it's not a great photograph! I had success with my work in many galleries and open exhibitions such as The Laing and The Mall Galleries in London's Pall Mall. Here's a picture of me with my dad after I had won an open exhibition with the central painting of "Sea Mist at Rackwick Bay". This painting depicted a foggy seascape with all the main detail being focussed on hundreds of pebbles, large and small, along the beach. Those pebbles took forever to paint! Think this picture was taken in "widescreen" as we both look a bit st-r-etch-ed! A couple of years after this, I was one of 400 wildlife artists, worldwide, to be invited to paint two pictures for a prestigious auction in Nairobi in support of the East African Wildlife Society which were raising funds for the Elephant foundation that year. It was a very exciting project and David and I transported my work, as well as other artists, down to Oxford where they were then being taken to the airport to be flown by BA (who donated the flight) out to Africa for the auction which was opened by Prince Bernhardt of the Netherlands. Exhibiting my work alongside artists like David Shepherd, Gary Hodges and Willem deBeer was a real highlight of my career, and the auction raised a huge amount of money for the foundation.

As well as wildlife themes I occasionally liked to paint landscapes and these would sometimes be in oils, such as the wintery scene below. Working in oils is so diffrent, and the smells of Linseed Oil, Turps and oil paints are so evocative that they give inspiration in themselves!
The painting below was the result of stopping by the roadside for a coffee on the way home from Scotland. I loved the scene and made some sketches, took a few photographs and painted the picture after we got home. I loved the contrast between busy foreground and peaceful panorama behind. Russell Grant, the astrologer, bought one of my landscapes featuring a country lane, as he said he could just imagine walking down there and seeing what was round the corner!

The next picture is of Blue Tits, and it's appropriate as I've been watching very similar scenes this week from my window! The adults are flitting to and from our feeders and their fledglings, who are keeping them really busy. The chattering they are doing is really loud as well for such tiny birds!
The last picture is one that now hangs in my parents' home. My mum really liked this painting which I told the lady who bought it. When she died she left the painting to my mum, so she finally did get to hang it on their wall. The subject is of an Owl being mobbed by other birds (which is what they do if they discover an owl anywhere near a nest). I kept the background very uncluttered and simple as I wanted to focus just on the birds. Whenever I hear the Magpies clacking away and the Blackbirds shouting an alarm call I wonder if they are after a poor, unsuspecting and sleepy owl!
Well, I hope that you enjoyed the insight into my background. I sold many paintings over the years and David and I ran our own Gallery for a few years too. Unfortunately, as art in the UK veered into the strange world of installations and more abstract forms, I found that I needed to change the focus of my work. My interest in crafts had been there since I was a young child and I have always enjoyed creating a wide variety of things. It is a very long story, but I began to design stamps for Personal Impressions about seven years ago and it's something that I really enjoy. Seeing what people create with the stamps is as much a thrill as it was when I first began. Now I'm working on other things such as papers as well, so there is always something new to excite me. Sadly, because my work keeps me so busy, I really don't get the opportunity to paint "pictures" anymore, but I love being able to show people who think that they aren't artistic that they, too, can create something unique and to be proud of.