One of my favourite things I love using my artistic skills for is to create cards for the ones I love - and none more so than my beautiful daughter. She recently turned 12, and I made her a card in a style which could loosely be described as 'preppy'. For those of you who are not parents to a pre teen girl, 'preppy' describes a very neat, tidy classic look, with ribbons and bows forming part of the aesthetic. I decided to spell out the word 'Twelve' in ribbons, with two little birds in charge forming the letters. I outlined the letters for the word Twelve using a dip pin, then coloured them in with a wash of ink. Even though I am an artist, I am actually terrible at hand-writing. You can see how wobbly and off my lettering is in the picture above - it is not my forte!.
Although we have lots of lovely birds here in Scotland, blue tits are pretty high up on the scale of cuteness. I am on safer ground sketching birds, and I drew out two blue tits from different angles. Using my beloved Faber Castell oil pencils, I coloured them in lightly, then did a light wash of ink over them. I wanted the sharper texture of the lettering to contrast with the feathery fluffiness of the birds.
You can see the final card above. It is very sweet, and in line with what I wanted to achieve. There are some improvements I'd have made if I'd had more time - but as I'd had to get up at 530am to make sure it was finished by the time my daughter got up, these improvements did not happen! But sometimes I think I can overthink and overwork ideas and images, and a fixed, quick deadline means it is not possible to do this. I'm happy with the image, and my daughter was too, and that is all that matters.