A word from Alice - studio stories from Alice Draws the Line

This extract hopefully shows some of the brush marks I was working with. The sky was amazing - blue but with streaks of white wispy clouds. Hard to achieve with watercolour without white or masking fluid, and so I added just the blue for the sky and left out spaces for the white clouds. 

I was also working with a partially dry brush to try and create the white horses at the shoreline - I started to want to really play with this and develop it - but prolifically filling pages and stopping them blow away in the middle of a birthday picnic didn’t feel the right thing to do!

I had the pleasure of creating a really enjoyable piece of brush lettering recently. A customer approached me with some words that they wanted written out to sit alongside two other artworks on a wall in their home. 

They bought the other artworks to the studio so we could look at the pieces and the colours used and to work out how this piece - a poem, could sit with them. 

We decided to pick out a blue and the grey that had been used in the other pieces and I mixed the colours throughout all the lettering.

The piece related to the seaside and so these colours worked really well. Here are some extracts from it. 

Do you remember I had a lovely weekend away at Logfire Holidays last year? and that while there I drew and drew and drew their chickens?!

Well, they have made an appearance in the greeting card range! Here they are!

Perfect for Easter or for any time! You can buy them here.

At the start of the year I met up with my friend Kath (The Walking Sketchbook) to sketch outdoors. We had the brilliant idea to put another date in the diary to make sure we made it a regular thing. 

This week we met up again. I was lucky enough to meet Kath’s Robin - a beautiful feathered friend that regularly comes to find her when she is out locally. The Robin likes to sit near Kath when she creates and this time the Robin came to see what I was up to too!

It's not really a surprise that I have, once again been excited by the snowdrops this year. 

I've drawn them before - yes. Many, many times. But that doesn't take anything away from them. I still like drawing them. I like looking at them, working out their structure and shapes and colours (yes green and white but the colours and shades within those colours too!).

Happy New Year!

I started this on New Year’s eve - by flicking back through my Instagram account and scribbling down some things that stood out from 2022. 

I realise I’ve actually blogged about many of them so I won’t go into lots of detail, so this is more of a list of nice things that 2022 entailed. I have done this partly as a reminder of the things I loved so that I make sure I plan them in to 2023.