Foxgloves, ‘naughtie humours’, and xanthopsia

At last, my foxgloves have come into flower! I have been waiting since the middle of last summer, when I first thought up the idea of painting the Poison Flower Fairies. Digitalis Purpurea, to give them their scientific name (regardless of the fact that many of them are not in fact purple), are famously poisonous, famously useful in medicine, and were gone and over for the year, before I thought of this little painting series. So were the opium poppies. So I have had to wait a full cycle for the next year’s flowers. Meanwhile I have had plenty of…

How to grow greetings cards from seed: part 2

I promised I would post a photo of my greetings-card runner-bean ‘pots’ when the beans grew, so here they are: The start of this curious use of unwanted greetings cards was documented in a previous post: https://nancyfarmer.wordpress.com/2012/05/07/how-to-grow-greetings-cards-from-seed/… And I have to admit that these may very well be the borlotti beans and not the runner beans after all. Most of the runner beans were actually grown in toilet rolls, which do not make such a pretty picture, but there is something quintessentially English about a row of runner beans in the back garden, so runner beans is what I wanted…

Demons or Aliens?

There’s a blog which claims: “In 1985, engineer and inventor George R. Simpson was visited by extraterrestrial presence. He was told that there was a hidden language embedded in the English Language, and it was his job to discover the decoding structure (rules) and tell it to the world.” And that, more or less, is what the site is about. It’s a bit odd: http://ufoetblog.com/. I had an email from George, he said the same thing, and very politely and enthusiastically asked permission to use one of my drawings at the top of his blog. Permission which I granted. Now,…

What’s the point of Life Drawing?

This is not a rhetorical question. I don’t mean it in the sense that one might ask ‘What’s the point of Simon Cowell?’ because there is undoubtedly a lot of point in life drawing; in fact there are a number of different very good points to life drawing, and that is exactly my problem. I don’t draw from life when I compose my paintings. I may occasionally grimace in the mirror or hold up a hand or an elbow to see the outline of it at a certain angle, but on the whole I am drawing (no pun intended) upon…

‘Registered Animals’… and other exhibitions

So… the last few days have been short on artwork, but rather long on cutting out pieces of cardboard, mounting up drawings, wrapping up prints, and quite boring things like that. The dining room currently looks like this: …though now I think about it, it’s not usually much better than this. I shall get back to the real artwork soon I hope, but for the moment a lot of this activity is because I will have work in a few exhibitions – including the ‘registered animals’ which I shall tell you about in a moment. So, in case, by some…

Sketch for a new masquerade painting: Vis-à-vis

I have been working on a new masquerade piece – albeit a masquerade with a difference. Working out the actual composition always takes me the longest of time – I can spend days poking at the piece of paper in a desultory way, periodically wandering into the garden to pull out weeds, getting distracted, changing my mind about the subject, even occasionally getting on with paperwork, until at some point the sketch all starts to pull together. And then, I can actually get on with it! Clicking on the images will allow you to see them bigger… So, here is…

I can make you look like a fairy!

Here’s the painting I recently completed. This is Sherrie-jane – she sells lingerie in Somerset, including specialist bra-fitting, her business is called ‘Orchid’ – http://www.orchidlangport.co.uk/ – and she likes champagne. Quite a lot to get into 4 x 8 inches… but her daughter wanted a special present for her, for the re-launch of her new business, so in went the bras and the orchids and it all came together with quite a nice oriental feel, which was something of a happy accident. People do occasionally ask me ‘do you do commissions?’, and I say yes… occasionally… but I don’t usually…

How to grow Greetings Cards from Seed…

Ok, so I lied a little bit in the title, the seeds are in fact runner bean seeds, but there are seeds in there and they are indeed planted inside greetings cards: And here is how I come to be planting runner beans inside my greetings cards: It can be hard to sell original artwork because the cost of the final item can be prohibitive to some who’d like to be customers. I find this especially so because my pictures are very detailed and I am so very slow and fussy… And it is so very easy to get artwork…

Do flower fairies eat flowers?

According to the site stats, somebody found this blog today by googling “do flower fairies eat flowers?”. I am sorry to say they would not have received an answer from this blog, for it is indeed an excellent question, so much so that I feel it ought to be addressed! If they do eat flowers, of course, this leads me to wonder do they eat the flowers of their chosen plants? Because this might be a very serious problem for my poison flower fairies. A scan through more of the obscure search terms people have used to find this blog…

Finished painting: Ricinus Communis, the Fairy of the Castor Bean Plant

The Fairy’s name is Ricina, of course, being a girl fairy… but for the sake of botanical accuracy and Google the title remains as the masculine form of the name. She holds an umbrella in memory of the time she got caught poisoning someone, and, weaponized umbrellas being something more suited to the Avengers than to real life, I have given her John Steed’s bowler hat. She is deadly, but, more sinned-against than sinning, she is rarely the actual culprit, though frequently the suspect… either that, or she has got a lot cleverer and isn’t going to get caught again!…