Cornwall holiday favourite photos part 1

Last week I returned from a 3 week road trip around lovely Cornwall! Here is a selection of my most favourite images (there were a lot!) I hope you like them I think I will do this in 2 parts...

Lost Gardens of Heligan

Collection of Pumpkins, Squashes and Gourds

Southern Hawker Dragonfly laying eggs Aeshna cyanea

Collection of colourful dried flowers

Scottish Longhorn Mother and Calf

Burma Rope Bridge 

St Ives
The below 3 images are from an installation by Mark Dion in Porthmeor Studios St Ives. This artwork was commissioned to reflect the remarkable arts and fishing heritage of the area.

The Maritime Artist installation by Mark Dion

Bright colourful Fishing floats

More Bright colourful Fishing floats

Hillside Graveyard

Levant Mine and Beam Engine

Levant Mine

The Contemporary Craft Festival 2016 - Favourites Part 2

Here is part 2 of my favourite artists and designers that I discovered at the Contemporary Craft Festival, in Bovey Tracey. In my last post I covered Ceramics and printmaking, today I have Homeware, Fashion, Art and Jewellery. You can find out more about the festival and all the artists here. 
I also visited last year and you can find that post here.
  

Jewellery 

Coyosa Design

Sayoko Kobayashi hand crafts her lovely jewellery using ethically-sourced materials, and features natural ordinary things like poppy seeds, wood and washi paper, her work's focus is on "the expression of wabi sabi, the understanding that the nature of things is transient, imperfect, and incomplete." I particularly liked her items that had seeds suspended in resin.

 

Libby Ward Contemporary Jewellery

Libby also uses a lot of natural materials within her jewellery work, combining unexpected materials to make thought provoking pieces. She uses loads of different processes like etching, coating, layering, stretching, heating and breaking. The unusual colours and textures attracted me to her work, it's very different to most of the jewellery I saw.

 

Art 

Little Burrow Designs

Claire Read uses unloved or unused objects to make her unusual mixed media artistic creations. I loved the techniques she's used to make these objects into something attractive and that you'd want to keep and display, instead of them ending up in the bin! I admire her imagination and ability to sew and assemble these tiny objects.

 

Anya Keeley

Anya's cute characters are made from wire and paper and various other vintage bits and bobs. They're so sweet and carefully made and so obviously unique they really caught my eye! It must be a lot of fun making these little beauties.

Hen's Teeth Art

Hen's Teeth Art is Viv Sliwka. Viv's work is somewhat similar to Little Burrow Designs', in that she uses lots of recycled materials and stitching to create tiny works of art and tell stories, though her pieces do look very different. I love the tiny story boxes like the one below, they are so delicate and beautiful.

 Homewares

Twool
Twool are a company that make lovely woollen bags and twine. "Twool® products are made in Devon from the ‘lustre’ long wool of the rare breed Whiteface Dartmoor sheep." Apparently these sheep are quite rare but their wool is really strong and soft which means it's great for making bags! I bought a brown one and I'm really enjoying using it. The straps are made from off-cuts of leather from a westcountry handbag company, and they smell lovely.

Tess Wakeling
Tess makes beautiful handmade lampshades from layers of paper, into which she cuts geometric patterns to create beautiful effects , both when the lights are on and when they're not. Each lampshade is hand cut and so no two will ever be the same.  

 

 Thanks for reading, definately worth a visit to the show if you're in Devon next June!

The Contemporary Craft Festival 2016 - Favourites Part 1

A couple of weekends ago I visited the Contemporary Craft Festival, in Bovey Tracey which I visited last year, and posted about here. Here are a collection of my favourite artists and designers and their work. You can find out more about the festival and all the artists here.

Ceramics

Kate Evans Ceramics 
Kate creates beautiful porcelain vases inspired by nature and plants, having a background in gardening.  I enjoyed the simplicity of her designs.

 

Elaine Bolt Ceramics
Elaine creates hand-thrown ceramic objects and vessels in porcelain, terracotta and mixed media. Her use of everyday and found objects in her work gives it a unique quality, as though it is telling a story.

Katherine Lees Ceramics

Katherine makes porcelain vessels and jewellery, and then she screen prints directly onto the clay surface. Katherine says: "The decoration adorning the surface of the vessels is inspired by the cabinets of curiosities popular in the Victorian Era. I am fascinated by the forms they contained and the way they were labelled and categorised." Her work really reminds me of old ceramic medicine bottle that you sometimes find at flea markets, but much more refined and beautiful. 

Printmaking

Robin Mackenzie

Robin is an illustrator and printmaker whose work I greatly admire! I love woodcut printing and how the medium gives a pleasant old-fashioned feel, mostly because the techniques and materials are the same ones that have been used for centuries. Robin's colourful reduction linoprints depict everything from scenic countryside to industrial cityscapes.

 

Jess Davies

Jess is a talented printmaker and member of the Devon Guild of Craftsmen who uses a variety of printmaking techniques such as Lino printing and Etching. You can see the landscape of the Devon countryside has much influence on Jess' work.

Lucy Gell

Another artist who uses a variety of printmaking techniques is Lucy Gell, who creates humourous and fun animal prints. Some of Lucy's techniques include Collograph printing, Acid plate etching and Monoprinting. I really like the humourous style of Jess's work, it really made it stand out for me.

Richard Shimell

Richard uses lino or soft flooring material to create his prints. I really admire the detail and texture within his work, I think it is quite difficult to get such detail with lino prints! I always end up chopping through bits that I wanted haha. Richard lives on the edge of Dartmoor and the influence of the surroundings is clearly evident within his work.

 

 

Recent trip to Eden Project and new camera pics

I visited the Eden Project to take part in a Botanical Painting 3 day course (will post about that soon) whilst there I took some photos with my newly acquired camera, Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark II. It was an ideal place to test it out with a wealth of beautiful flowers and plants.

Beautiful Ranunculus Flower

Echeveria Succulent Plant, I love its geometry.

Climbing Sorrel (Begonia Glabra)

Just love the contrast of this lime and purple foliage

Mysore Clock Vine Flower

Another lovely Orange Ranunculus

Pink Ranunculus Flower with white Ranunculus

Close up macro Pink Ranunculus

Roul Roul birds enjoying a puddle bath

Another lovely contrast between Purple tulip and mint coloured leaves

Some fancy Tulips!

Some more lino prints

You may have seen my previous post where I shared my lino prints, well I decided to try them out again on some different paper stocks, and with two different green colours (although I'm not too sure that you can see the difference here on my scans). It was fun to use the big albion printing press instead of just rolling over the paper with a roller as I had previously done, and also this time I used oil-based inks which can give a deeper and richer colour.