High Tea

Recently our friend Andy gave my husband (I still hate saying that word) a book for his birthday - Nicey and Wifey's 'A Cup of Tea and a Nice Sit Down'. I was intrigued by this particularly the biscuits section in the later half, being a fan of biscuits...well lets face it who isn't? Its an amusing read,  and it kind of inspired a new tea based illustration.
I wanted to do a series of new greetings cards/ prints for my online shop but also with a view to submitting designs to Phoenix Trading and some other card companies. I'm aiming to have six in total to replace the current designs I have online.
So 'Tea with Moon' is one i've just finished & i also intend to have it for sale as a print very soon.

I'm half way through the next planned design & here it is in it's pencil drawing phase:

I'm hoping to finish the painting today, but i'm taking 1/2 a day off to go on a weekend trip to the Lake District to celebrate mine & the other half's 10th (YES 10th!) year since meeting.
Yes as all those lucky folks wake up at Glastonbury Festival, i remember 10 years ago waking up in a semi-muddy field to find someone had hijacking half of my tent pegs by pitching their ten right next to mine. Little did i know that would be my future husband (ahh i hate that word).

Byeee!

Spot the difference

I'm really excited as today my shiny new website produced by the lovely folks at http://sitely.co.uk/ is live on the cyber waves. I'm now a .co.uk rather than a .com and you can take a look around at all the swish new features here.

I created the old version along quite some time ago and with some help here and there improvements have been made but it had some major issue like a) not being compatible with those new fangled devices - tablets, phones & such like, and b) it being virtually invisible to Google due to a lack of SEO thingy-me-jig stuff....yep you can tell i'm really hot on all this interweb malarky.

Now though the site can be viewed on phones and other people's computers as well as just my own lowly Mac - wow! So what are you waiting for hop over and have a gander -
http://www.lucyshappyplace.co.uk/

Veg Update

Now we're well into summer I thought it was time to bring you some vegetable growing news. Remember my post back in April about the Greening Wingrove Vertical Veg project we're taking part in? Well following on the plants are now in production mode and the first signs of edible greenery are now sprouting, so heres some highlights in pictures.

Back yard salad -

Indoor beans -

Front yard gooseberries, beans and squash (possible a little over zealous with the front yard planter) -

Its a veritable green feast!

Finished product and character sketches

It all went a bit quiet on here last week as I had several things on the go that needed completing. One of the two major things was the illustration spoken about in the previous post done to accompany a picture book text which an overseas publisher has shown interest in.
I managed to complete the piece yesterday along with some character sketches which i've now sent off to the publisher and here they are:

Who knows if this will lead to anything but I couldn't miss the opportunity and I had fun doing it, although painting all those little fish in the shoal was a total pain in the behind!
Anyway we'll see what happens, and perhaps you may see more fish action on here in future.