Conkers

Horsechestnut Flowers 

I have been working hard daily on a portrait commission for a few weeks now. But in the evenings I have been doing miniatures on the theme of the horsechestnut tree. 

You will rarely see me without a pen or a pencil near to hand. 

I am sad that there is a disease in British horsechestnut trees and dead ones won't be replanted because they are not native to Britain but to a small area in the Balkans. 

However conkers are so much part of the culture of British children that I and a like-minded friend think that it would be so sad that we are growing our own. And I decided to honour the horsechestnut tree by recording it through the seasons. 

I found a frame that holds eight miniatures and I am filling it with horsechestnut miniatures to give to my friend. I will give it to her after the Craft Fair but not before as I am going to put it on display and sell home made bookmarks of my horsechestnut drawings. The Craft Fair will be at St Laurence's Church and it is in aid of the restoration fund. Should I ask a price for the bookmarks or should I take a money box and ask for donations?

Above is one of my drawings. It is the flowers of the horsechestnut tree. I did it in Caran d'Ache Luminance coloured pencils. 

It will be a while before I add these drawings to my website. I didn't back up my website file and my computer died so I lost it. I will have to start again from scratch. I have not got time to do it until after the Craft Fair because I am busy working on that. I think I will make new buttons and title bar too. I expect you will recognise it. My self portrait will still be on the first page. 

New plans

I have been building a new website for myself. I haven't uploaded it yet because I still need to do all the keywords and things. 

After not very careful consideration, I decided to use Blogger for my Artblog. It will make it easy to update. Perhaps I will upload new posts more often than in the past if I use such an easy platform. 

I am not going to delete the posts from my old website yet because I hope to be able to link to them. 

The software I am using to build my new website is Macaw. I like it very much. It produces very clean code and I have achieved exactly the simple look that I want. It makes responsive websites too. 

I hope that as the app evolves I will be able to produce my blog as part of my website. I could do it now but it would be complex to keep it in order as Macaw doesn't have folders yet. I am sure they will eventually. Hint hint!

I have other plans for the future. One is to put together a portfolio of equestrian art. I have been keen on that idea for a long time. Once I have a few more portraits of horses, I will make an equestrian art gallery on my website. For now horses are included in animals. 

My other plan is a very new one!

A new art gallery/coffee shop has opened locally. My friend twisted my arm to speak to the gallery owner. I wasn't expecting anything. It is difficult to exhibit portraits especially as once they are finished they are no longer in my possession.  But I took my iPad in to show my work. He liked the miniatures I have done of wild cats. I do them in pen and ink and then colour parts of the image. 

The trouble is that they are the size of playing cards and I think that is too small for a gallery. And I make them to give as presents to my daughters in law who both love cats. I just have one left which is the one above. 

So I spent the last two days going through my reference photos of tigers, lions,cougars and lynxes. I don't want to do them big. It would be too tedious to do a large pen and ink. So I will do some at 6 x 4 inches and see if the gallery will take them.