Brighton Saturday 11 November 2023   - Beau Events Artisan Market
Unitarian Church in the centre of Brighton's North Laine, near the Pavilion/Theatre etc. Next to Pinocchio's Restaurant.
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Lewes Sunday 26 November 2023 -Lewes Creatives Christmas Emporium
All Saints Centre, Friars Walk, Lewes
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London Saturday 9 December 2023 Illustrators Winter Fair, Kings Cross London
The Crossing- a beautiful covered space part of St. Martin's art college. 
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Brighton Sunday 10 December 2023 Press + Play print tabletop fair Phoenix Gallery Brighton 10-14 Waterloo Place, Brighton BN2 9NB
Save the Dates!

I have just joined Pedddle, the online directory of independent markets. Their strapline is:
'Find independent creative markets near you, and discover their stallholders across the UK'
It is a lovely website and I would recommend you having a look. They have a great newsletter too.
As a customer, you can find markets that are happening near you, if you are a seller like me you can find your next venue.
You can search by date or area, there are loads of markets all over the country.
Pedddle* members have listings on there, so you can track down makers that you wish you had bought from....
*that third 'd ' is important...
​Click on the yellow spot to go to my page.

I will be taking part in Artwave this year, at Venue 170 which is in the All Saints Centre, Friars Walk, Lewes BN7 2LE. 9th and 10th of September 2023.
I am so happy to be invited to participate in the Lewes Creatives Show, they are a talented group of creatives who always have such wonderful events. I will be taking a selection of my paintings, prints, cards and textiles, and will be there for the whole weekend. The lovely Seven Sisters Cafe will be on hand for sustenance (looking forward to that!)
The venue is an old church, and is a five minute walk from the train station, and from the main shopping street. Keep an eye on my instagram page for updates.

My next in person event is This Is Brighton Maker and Design Fair, a Paper Daisy event. 23 July 2023 at Wagner Hall Brighton, 2 Regency Road, Brighton BN1 2RU.  There will tons of other artists and makers in a varied show in the centre of Brighton. Please note this is a 2 day event, 22-23 though I will only be there on the second day, SUNDAY.

I will be selling my own Happy Tomato range of prints, including my latest screen prints, textiles, cards and badges at various venues this year, beginning with 8 July Illustrators Fair, 11-5pm.
This is at the crossing,Granary Square, Kings Cross London N1C.
Expect lots of tomatoes! Come and see me!

I have a new range of products in my shop - tea towels.
So, maybe you don’t know this about me, but I trained as a textile designer, and I specialised in print. I learned how to do patterns in repeat, the old fashioned way, with tracing paper and cutting up designs. Yes folks, it was pre computer days….. Now you can do it fairly easily with photoshop, which is great for block repeats. (where the pattern repeats directly below and beside itself in a regular pattern)

BUT the thing is, I never did like patterns in repeat. I always wanted them to look as if they weren’t in repeat. so i would either do a huge design so that it wasn’t obvious where the repeat was, or make it a brick or half drop repeat so it wasn’t quite as obvious.

So I sold textile designs for a while, and then became an illustrator. Now I am also making products for my shop, and I recently made these tea towels. When you are printing tea towels you can do a Panel Print. Just a unit to fit the shape, with allowances for hems. It doesn’t have to repeat, as long as you have enough artwork to fill the space. Yippee!

Pictured above are the first of my tea towel designs, currently available in my Folksy shop, for £12, link to shop here, but I have a very small amount of each as I am a small batch producer.

I have made a set of 5 designs, I say set but they don’t relate to each other only in that they are things I like. 
The 5 designs are:

Happy Pandas.
I used one repeat that I had made from my popular panda cards. Actually it was a painting that looked like a textile, made into a card, now an actual textile.
This one is a repeat. Thanks Photoshop, no tracing required. Please forgive the repeat-ness of it, but i thought it was pretty.

Happy Tomato. this one has individual tomatoes scattered or splattered over the design. Each one is different with its own personality. You can see the scratchy brush marks. And yes that is how I wanted to arrange them. Not neatly. Also there is one green tomato, for the Whistlestop cafe.

 Blue Pigeons is the same ish as my popular blue pigeons print, quirky blue birds with lots of character - but Big. This is what I mean by Panel print, there is no suggestion of it repeating, it is like a picture. Note the side-eye.

Love Cats! This design is a little different.
This design comes from a gouache and watercolour painting I made of lots of cats and I wanted to keep it as much like the original as possible, it is landscape in format.
You can see the original on my desk. I like that the quality of the digital printing is so good you can see the different brushstrokes and little bits of pattern that I added in to the background.

Happy Hens 
Based on my Happy Hens digital print, this is lots of different hens or the same hens looking a different way. You decide. You can look at it for a long time, while you’re doing the drying up.
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Tea towels are digitally printed on 309gsm half Panama Cotton,- half panama is the weave pattern, very densely woven and sturdy.
Size 68cm x 45cm. approx with hanging tag and washing instructions label. Designed and printed in the UK.
​
I hope you like them, I'm looking forward to designing the next range.

I am delighted to be part of Small Indie and Mighty Gift Guide, an online directory of 165 independent makers and designers created by Sarah of @pipandliloriginal . There are different categories that you can browse to discover small business, and a link to their instagram, and their shop. I think it is a great platform for supporting independent creatives, and hope to do a lot of my Christmas shopping via this site. (I've already started!) ​https://www.smallindieandmighty.com/theguide
Let me know in the comments about any online guides and markets you know of.

Painting with Gouache- my method.

Gouache is a thick opaque watercolour paint used by artists and designers. (there is also acrylic gouache, but I will talk about that in a different post, it is great, but it acts differently and you don't want to mix them together)
Gouache dries to a flat opaque matte finish (if you want it to) and you can overpaint it.
If you are careful the new colour won't lift off/mix with the underneath one- great for someone like me who makes mistakes/ changes their mind…
You can paint light colours over dark colours too, which is very useful.
Gouache comes in tubes, or sometimes jars, and you just squeeze a small amount out on to a palette or plate, or my favourite, a shiny postcard- I'll tell you why later.

I really enjoying working on novelty books for small children, there are lots of different types: Touch and Feel, with different fabrics and textures, Lift-the-Flap, with hidden images,  Pull-and-Slide, with parts that move, etc. 
Lots of care and attention goes into the design and engineering of these books. The illustrator has to provide artwork for the flaps and moving parts and the backs of the extra pieces too, so sometimes there can be twice as much artwork as in a regular book.
Here's an example of one I illustrated for Scholastic: Alfie's Amazing Farm, The flaps had die cut holes, which 'revealed' something underneath - but when you opened the flap, it was something else entirely.
The little boy Alfie walks around the farm expecting to see ponies, chickens etc, but sees much more unusual animals - lots of fun for me to illustrate! The original artwork was painted in Winsor and Newton gouache on smooth white card, and there is another book in the series  Millie's Amazing Garden which features a little girl in her garden, who encounters some hidden exotic animals as she goes about her day.