Beginning of Summer

Some pictures of sunny greenery from Instagram to celebrate the beginning of summer, a tradition on the 1st of May for thousands of years. Have a good May Day and a lovely summer!

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El Condor Pasa

Textile paint experiments - first flowering cherry - winter sun and a new blanket - el condor pasa.. a few pictures from over at Instagram. I hope you have a great week!

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Wild Cub

This album has been helping me feel sunnier on these grey and rainy days; especially this song:

And I've been dreaming of being back on this holiday in Portugal:

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hand drawn nature on fabric, accessories & homeware

  

Plane Trees

We're really enjoying the sunny weather; it's scorching and very welcome after the cold spring!

Me! The first photo of me on the internet (I hope :))

Beautiful Plane trees on my favourite walk.

Hope you had a lovely weekend and good weather wherever you are!

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Forest & Sea ▪ www.etsy.com/shop/ForestAndSea

hand drawn nature on fabric, accessories & homeware

  

Antidote for wintery symptoms.

Icy drizzle, low clouds and grey skies - all the symptoms of an oncoming winter! Here's an antidote I've been working on this week for this contest:

Lagoon details: threadfin butterflyfish, flame angelfish and sergeant major fish.

Lagoon details: anthias, clownfish and flame angelfish.

See other t-shirt designs and vote here or read about how I made the water texture here!

Lagoon on a Riviera Tee

Lagoon on a Riviera Tee - the pattern is from One-Yard Wonders.

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Forest & Sea ▪ www.etsy.com/shop/ForestAndSea

hand drawn nature on fabric, accessories & homeware

  

Lagoon

Lagoon



Lagoon details - click to view larger.

I love the versatility of vector graphics. For anyone who's looking to upgrade their software, I'm currently using Xara Pro 7 (update Nov 12: I've upgraded this to Xara Pro X which you can read about here!) which is a fraction of the price of the Adobe stuff and has a really usable interface. Apart from the layering and flexible editing of shapes that vectors offer, using the texture fills is addictive and they can be absolutely anything. The water in my design above for example, is made up of layers using a photo I took of sunlight reflecting off a bowl and I'm really pleased with how that's turned out!

You can see all the other 'fluid' illustrations here! 15% of proceeds from Lagoon go to the Coral Triangle Initiative!

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Forest & Sea ▪ www.etsy.com/shop/ForestAndSea

hand drawn nature on fabric, accessories & homeware

  

Illustration Friday: Duet

Monkeys fly on parrots' backs - it's true! OK, I wouldn't believe me either, so have a read about this lazy squirrel monkey and his parrot compadre. I think they make a most excellent duet for Illustration Friday this week!


Lazy Monkey

Click on details for larger image.

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Forest & Sea ▪ www.etsy.com/shop/ForestAndSea

hand drawn nature on fabric, accessories & homeware

Autumn Sunshine

Some of the blogs I read are written by fantastic, committed people who, although hard to believe now, claim they used to be unorganised procrastinators. Being a bit of an unorganised procrastinator myself, who'd like to actually do some of the things I've been dreaming about for a while, this may be just what I need: a place to show my work, ask advice and all the other brilliant things you can do with a blog. So, to dip my toe in the water and get the ball rolling, a picture I painted a while back of the amazing array of colours you get at this frosty time of year:

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Forest & Sea ▪ www.etsy.com/shop/ForestAndSea

hand drawn nature on fabric, accessories & homeware