Earlier this year I visited the Crypt Gallery here in Seaford and was delighted to see an exciting exhibition of sketchbooks by local people. This was the result of the 2024 SCIP (Sussex Contemporary Illustrators and Printmakers) Sketchbook Challenge. I decided that I’d like to take part in this year’s challenge.
To take part I need to raise at least £25 to have my sketchbook included in the show next March and need to do my best to fill the A5 sketchbook I was given. I feel ambitious and have decided to try and fill two sketchbooks, aiming to raise £50.
SCIP is a local charity based in the Crypt Gallery. They offer free art workshops and events for communities around Susasex – adults and children – often those who would not otherwise be able to access the arts. I’ve seen some amazing exhibitions – for example a rainforest room decorated with wondrous papercut animals and plants organised by SCIP for local school children as part of The Garden Show,.
If you’d like to sponsor me I’ve created a Local Giving Page. All money raised will go to providing free access to creativity and culture to children, young people and adults across Sussex.
I thought it would be a good idea to write about some of the new products I have listed in my website and Etsy shops. I don’t always like just promoting my stuff on here, but I’ve moved away from writing a blog for a while, as I wonder who reads blogs these days. I miss writing it though, so I’m going to make more of an effort, even if it’s just for myself.
But anyway, the new products: I have a brand new badger tote bag available.
Badger Tote Bag
I also have a little badger tin. Inside the tin is a tiny concertina strip featuring badgers on one side and moon phases on the other:
Mini Badger Tin
Badger Tin with Badger Strip
I’ve made a few little box frames with original pen and ink scenes. There’s a deer one and a fox one. The badger one has recently sold, but I’ll show it anyway:
Fox at Dawn
Badger Beneath the Moon
Under a Crescent Moon
I do enjoy making these little layered scenes. These days I use off-white card, which is gentler on the eye, and I’m experimenting with covering the frames either with paper, such as print-outs of old maps, or with paint. I’m used to using acrylic paint on wood, but not used to combining it with pen and ink in the same artwork. I’m still working at this.
Also in my shops are little pen and ink originals:
The Owl and the Snake
Young Badger in the Brambles
The Owl and the Snake was inspired by a recent holiday on Crete where we heard a lot of Scops owls and hoped to see a snake (as it is the Year of the Snake!)
Since visiting the ancient sunken forest off the coast at Pett Levels in 2019, I’ve been fascinated by how it must have been 6000 years ago in the Mesolithic when it was a live, flourishing forest and we were still hunter-gathers. Over a period of time I’ve been working gently on a Pett Levels Project inspired by this section of coastline.
Anyone reading my blog will probably know how much I like trees, woods and forests and that includes ‘ghost forests’. For this project I’m exploring this ancient, prehistoric forest through words, artist books, movement and other art forms. Below is a selection of art pieces I’ve created so far:
inspired by the 900,000 year old footprints revealed off the coast at Happisburgh in Norfolk in 2013, I decided to create a footprint using local clay and found natural materials – curlew feathers, moss, beetle wing cases, bones, snail shells etc. Inside the footprint on handmade paper I’ve placed the words of a simple poem. I’ve titled the artwork Ancestor Gwen as Gwen is the oldest word from Europe for woman that I could find, a Proto-Indo-European word. I could also call it ‘Ancestor Sylvia’ as ‘Sylvia’ is from the Latin word, ‘silva’, for forest.
My small sketchbook is a mish mash of ideas – photos, handmade papers, pen and ink drawings, words, builders’scrim and stitching.
I had to include an altered book – of course! This one was created after a visit last year to the Bialowieza Forest in Poland. I’ve included it in the project because the forest is ancient and the last remnant of a much larger forest that extended across Europe and may have linked to the Pett Levels forest before the sea rose after the last ice age about 11,000 years ago. (This altered book is currently on display in Gallery North, Hailsham, as part of their Into the Wild exhibition.)
Here is a little clip of a movement video I’m making. Two worlds, the world of trees and world of shore overlap. The tree video I filmed in the wild garden of our previous house. The video is as much about the loss of trees from my home life as it is about the loss of forest at Pett Levels. I now live – temporarily I hope – in a town with few trees.
More Than Hunter Now page spreadMore Than Hunter Now page spread
Sketchbook drawings
I’m working on a booklet/zine about a hunter hunting a deer in this ghost forest during the Mesolithic. I’m calling it More Than Hunter Now. The top two images above are all I’ve drawn so far. Below are a couple of pen and ink doodle ideas in a slightly different style that I might develop.
I’ll be continuing with this project and hope to display some or all of it this coming October at the Discovery Centre at Rye Harbour Nature Reserve.
Last year I was approached by a book publisher to design a cover for a new book set in the world of Alice in Wonderland. They wanted me to create an altered book that could be developed into a cover. Sadly, for me, the cover was rejected and they used another – very good – altered book artist, Isobelle Ouzman (if you don’t know her work, do check her out).
Anyway, I thought I’d share my Alice (or rather ‘Alyce’) altered book.
I can understand why it was rejected – too busy for a cover design. I was following a brief, but with limited guidance. Nevermind.
Now I’ve decided to sell it.
There are three illustrated pages including the top page. Below these there is a deepening, blue-inked hole that has been cut into the book (the actual book I’ve used is a secondhand Alice in Wonderland edition). I may decide to continue the illustration over the left hand page.
The hole represents a pond and it goes quite deep into the book. The final pages of the pond are unillustrated.
Below is my ‘cover’ minus the title and author’s name. Perhaps I’ll make a card out of it?
The altered book is available to buy in my website shop and on Etsy, or contact me if you’re interested.
I’ve been quiet on here for a while, occupied with projects that I can’t talk about just yet. But here is one I can – another altered book I’ve titled Returning to the Garden.
With this book I wanted to stray away slightly from my purely wildlife themed books and feature a woman from a previous century wandering the grounds of an old house. The older I get the more interested I become in the past – from prehistory to my own past – and that includes the time of Jane Austen, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
And my interest in the dress has returned – there’s a woman in a long dress among the pen and ink trees. I came across the work of the artist Victoria Brookland, who exhibits at the Masham Gallery. From the gallery I bought some postcards of her artworks and then a little book titled Wearer Unknown.
Victoria Brookland postcards and book
I love her imaginative and somewhat dark imagery and her bodiless dresses, from which all manner of strange and wonderful beings and things spring. She was interested in the Brontes, while I find myself curious about Jane Austen, especially after seeing Stephanie Smart’s paper dresses at Firle House. that I wrote about here.
The current BBC One drama, Miss Austen, based on the book by Gill Hornby, helps fuel my interest. The series is about letters and I’m intrigued by letters and diaries. I visited Jane Austen’s house in Chawton a few years ago and saw her writing table and notebooks.
Back to my book. It’s called Returning to the Garden as it features a woman wandering the garden of an old house with darkened windows, smoke rising from the chimney. There’s a bonfire lit and a fox creeping the edges. We do not know why the woman is out at night, but I am reminded of how Cassandra Austen, Jane Austen’s sister, was found wandering the garden after reading her dead sister’s letters in the Miss Austen drama series.
I have a new, sepia wildlife calendar for 2025! Hot off the press :)
Featuring a barn owl out at dusk.
it’s A4, opening to A3, in size and has 13 sepia illustrations and month grids including one for January 2026. There are owls, a badger, stoat, hare, buzzard in nests, trees and heathland.
I had a lovely surprise in the post recently, a CD of the album Wild Wood by the folk singer Nessy Williamson.
Nessy had contacted me asking if I could create some artwork for a CD cover. I said I was happy to, but she could also use one ofthe illustrations I have already drawn. She chose the above picture of a woman beneath a large spreading tree from my little zine/booklet If You Are Lost You May Be Taken. I think the CD looks great.
And so are her songs, they’re so lovely!
Nessy has a beautiful voice, accompanied by her guitar playing and other instruments like the shruti box. Her songs are about the natural world, the seasons and change. Wildlife is profuse; we hear of blackbirds, kestrels, hares, unfurling leaves, berries… There’s a wistfulness about the songs – a longing for what’s leaving or has been lost – that they share with the English Folk Tradition, but there’s also a celebration and joy.
Nessy lives in the North Yorkshire Moors. As a child she sang in a choir, which began her life in singing and music. In her teens she found a second-hand guitar, accompanied by a basic chord book, in a junk shop for a fiver and learnt how to play. In the 1980s she listened to bands such as Chumbawamba and musicians like Bob Dylan, Donovan, Simon and Garfunkel and Joan Baez, and taught herself to play along with them. Introduced to the folk band Planxty one day, Nessy knew she had discovered her genre and set about learning all she could about their music. Folk music is timeless, Nessy says, as it’s about the same human struggles that repeat throughout generations. She loves to hear the protest songs of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Billy Bragg and, of course, Chumbawamba and is always listening out for new music that touches her soul.
You can buy the album, as a CD or digital download, from Bandcamp. Highly recommended.
I’ve created a screen printed tea towel, using my Nightjar illustration as it’s one of my favourites. I’m pleased with how it’s turned out. It’s 100% natural, unbleached cotton and makes a lovely addition to the kitchen.
Tea towels like this are quite ink heavy on the printed side, making that side less absorbant than the unprinted side.
Researching tea towels I discovered that they were originally used to keep tea pots warm in the 18th century, hence the name ‘tea’ towel. Tea towels are made of either linen or cotton, whereas dish cloths are traditionally made of terry cloth, which is a woven cloth with protruding loops that can absorb a lot of water.
Later on, by the 19th century, tea towels became more decorative, especially with embroidery, and were often given as gifts by ladies to ladies. In the early 20th century some people called tea towels glass towels, using them to dry and polish glass.
Tea towels can be used in all sorts of ways – for drying dishes, as a decorative wall hanging, a tray cover, bread cover, cheese wrap, place mat or napkin – whatever you like.
Nightjar Tea Towel is available in my website shop here. Other products with this nightjar image include a greetings card and notebook.
I have a new altered sketchbook that I’ve called The Badger Wood. I’m back into woods and all the wonderful, intricate textures and details I love about them.
I wanted to work in a sketchbook this time as I didn’t want to have to stick extra paper into the book as I do with a hardbacked, secondhand book. I can see the appeal of using old books and the surprise of finding the magic of original papercut illustrations inside, but with this one it’s all a bit tidier.
The Badger Wood Altered Sketchbook
As usual there are six illustrated pages each side of the central spread and as the title suggests, there are trees, badgers, a deer, lots of brambles etc as you go deeper into the book and into the wood.
The Badger Wood is available in my Etsy shop where you can also see a video and some inside pages of the book. It’s also now added to my website shop.
I’ve also created some new A5 notebooks using illustrations from my Goddesses of River, Sea and Moon book – Water Goddess Yemanja and Moon Goddess Hina – and another more recent illustration, Waiting for Rain.
Moon Goddess Hina A5 Notebook. Hina is a goddess of the Pacific islands like Tahiti. She is depicted here beating tapa tree bark into cloth.Water Goddess Yemanja A5 Notebook. Yemanja is a goddess of rivers and the ocean. She originated in West Africa. Here she is depicted wearing a dress of seven skirts.Waiting for Rain A5 Notebook.
Each notebook has different coloured inside pages. Water Goddess Yemanja notebook has 80 light blue pages, Moon Goddess Hina notebook has 80 lilac pages and Waiting for Rain notebook has 80 cream inside pages. They’re also available in my Etsy shop.
I’m pleased to say that my Waiting for Rain illustration has been included in the lovely 2024 Earth Pathways Diary along with my Forest Angel picture:
I’ve had enquiries about possible art prints of these two images. Contact me if you’re interested in A4 prints or prints of anything else on the website.
