Happy New Year!

First anniversary giveaways and my word for the year.

Firstly, thank you to everyone who has followed me, commented on and given me encouragement during the first year of my blog. You have all been so wonderful and friendly and I truly appreciate the time you have spent with me.  So as this is the first anniversary and to thank you all, I am doing a giveaway (well 3 actually) which I hope you will like.

This year is going to be very different for me as I will be reaching that magical certain age, so will be retiring from paid employment during the summer and starting a new phase in my life.  At the same time, hoping to sell up and move down to the South Coast.  I have been so  looking forward to this next stage in my life, where I will be able to relax and spend more time on my art, or doing whatever I fancy. So as there will be big and challenging changes for me during this year my word (linked to Geri's What's your word for 2012 blog) will be:  EMBRACE.

Now on to the goody part. There are three giveaways, each lucky person will recieve an owl ACEO and also one of my coffee flower ACEO's.  All 3.5x2.5 inches in size.  The owls are painted on recycled card and envelope paper in acrylics and the flowers are coffee painted backgrounds on watercolor paper with pen.

You can have your name added to the draw up to three times:

• If you are already a follower of my blog and leave a comment I will put your name down twice. (this is as a thank you for all those who have been following me through the year)
• New to my blog then follow and leave a comment saying you are now following and I will enter your name once.
• Follow my on my facebook page (link on the right hand side) and you will also have your name entered.

I will close this giveaway on Thursday 12 January 2012 and then announce the winners a day or so later. You will then need to email me your address. Am happy to post anywhere in the world.

Good luck everyone!

This giveaway has now closed.

Coffee flowers and Zazzle cards

This is my update for the week for Artists in Blogland.  Well, I finished my Creative Tuesday's challenge of Kitchen.  My witches kitchen can be viewed here or in the blog entry below this one.  The next fortnightly challenge is Morning and I already have ideas for this one.

I have also been playing around with coffee, yep using coffee as a basis for a picture.  Not only is it wonderful to work on but smells heavenly as well.

Also I ordered some cards from zazzle of some of my designs to see what they would look like, which have now arrived and I am soo pleased with them. So I have now decided to open a Zazzle store, I will keep you all posted on that.

After reading my update for the week, check out what everyone else has been doing at the Artists in Blogland page. Thank you so much for dropping by and have a great weekend.

Creative Tuesdays - Moon

Creative Tuesday's next challenge is the moon.  Well, I am afraid that my imaginative muse flew out the window on this one.  As all I could think of was an owl and the moon, I had to come up with something that was not in my normal style or using acrylics, so I tried a lino print.  In the UK speedycarve is not readily available so I had to resort to cutting it out of printers lino, which I found quite hard to cut. 

Anyway this is the result, which I am not that happy about, and also a picture of the cut lino, which I put a little orange on it to make it stand out better for the photo. But that is what this co-op is all about is to push yourself.

As I was drinking a cup of black coffee as the time, I sploshed some of my coffee onto some watercolour paper added a few granules of coffee, let it dry and then drew the same owl and moon.  Dried coffee actually give a lovely surface to draw on and it smells heavenly whilst you are working. Sorry I had to resort to some of my usual line work, but I did not use acrylics!

Mr T, feel free to use whichever picture, as I am not sure if the lino print qualifies.  Come next Tuesday go and see how others have been more inspirational than me with the moon.