The hartstongue fern is a favourite plant of mine. Here in Dorset it turns up in woods and on roadsides, even close to the sea in shady places. When I took up artwork again after a very long gap, it was one of the first plants I drew. Its shape is both elegant and intriguing.
This drawing was based on a photograph I took on a shady bank in the grounds of Sherborne Castle. I take a lot of photographs of plants – choice garden varieties, wildlings or weeds – they’re all equally interesting to me. I have taken thousands of pictures – so when I want to make a drawing, I usually have something to work from. I don’t mind admitting that my style is influenced by William Morris and other artists of the Arts and Crafts or Art Nouveau movements: flowing shapes and a touch of the medieval woodcut. Not all plants lend themselves to this type of treatment, but the hartstongue fern certainly does, and it remains one of my favourite drawings.
These days it not only appears in my magical story The Herbarium, for which it was designed, but also appears on the covers of handbound notebooks, greetings cards and mini easels. This just goes to show that the right drawing can go a long way.
My daughter Nina and I have made these items to sell at a local Christmas art and craft fair later this year. It’s all very small-scale, but we really enjoy it, and it generates some very joyful mother-and-daughter time, too. It’s surprising how much good stuff can come from sharing a simple bit of artwork with a family member.
As the Christmas 2022 Art and Craft Fair approached (in the larger hall of the same building as last year), I looked through my stock of books and found I had sold off many of my out-of-print novels. In the meantime I had a new book out with Veneficia Publications, my helpful local publisher, to help fill the gap. Again we had a lot of fun on the day and took some money, but my cheaper, clearance books were nearly gone so we needed to have a re-think. There were two more of my books in the pipeline for publication – but would this be enough to fully stock the stand for the following year?
Could we offer something else – something more in the craft line? Could I make rather more of all the nature illustrations I had produced in recent years? My daughter Nina reminded me that I knew basic bookbinding. Teach me how to do it, she said, and we’ll make some hand-bound notebooks for next year’s fair. So, in March 2023, she came down for a few days of intensive teaching. It was a lot of fun and she was quick on the uptake. I checked with the publisher that it was acceptable to use some of the plant and bird images from my published books for the covers. Yes, was the answer, provided you mention Veneficia Publications somewhere on the product. So that’s what we did and little handbound notebooks with my illustrations on the front began to appear, with much enthusiasm from Nina. Now, handbinding is very labour-intensive, and Nina soon felt that we could diversify into simpler items that were quicker to make.
We started with greetings cards. Now, most people who produce artwork have cards made – and I had experimented with commercially-printed cards without much success. So we took a more handmade approach, using card blanks with prints on art paper for the fronts. I have a decent-quality desktop printer, so I was able to do all the printing myself, without any restrictions on how many different designs we did or on the type of paper we used. Nina and I both liked the hand-finished look of these, so I began work on a set of oval flower drawings that would suit the card shapes and sizes. These would also be ready to feature in my next illustrated book – a magical tale of an abandoned garden. From that moment on, I made all my artwork dual-purpose in this way. Soon we had a little cottage industry going, despite my being in Dorset and Nina being in Wales. Thank goodness for the internet.
Then one day I was talking to my sister Janet (also an artist) on our weekly chat call, and she showed me some artwork on little canvases and easels. Those are great, I said, and bought some. Soon I was printing little images for them. The oval flower drawings worked perfectly, along with some bird drawings I had done for books and blog posts. Again, doing my own printing meant there was no restriction on how many designs we had or the paper they were printed on. Neither was there a wait to see if it would work. Mini-art – love it!
But Nina was still coming up with more ideas – why don’t we make gift-tags? So off I went, trailing through my existing drawings. The trick is to find something with the right sort of proportions. I soon found that the plant illustrations from my book The Chesil Apothecary lent themselves to the gift-tag treatment and I chose a set of three and set to work on the layout. There’s a good division of labour here – Nina cut out the tags from light brown card, which gives them a nice natural look, punched holes in them and decorated them with a hessian-style ribbon. She’s a whizz at tying bows. I printed the images, and created a loop to tie them onto the gift with a heavyweight bookbinding thread. We both felt it was good to use bookbinding materials where we could. It gave the whole ‘collection’ a similar look.
Then (need I say it) Nina had another idea. Could you just do a Christmas card design and matching tag, Mum? This is for a Christmas fair, after all. I did as I was told – designed a Christmas rose and mistletoe illustration (also to be used in the future book), and two tag designs to go with it. The result is seasonal without being too overtly Christmassy. It was a little odd doing this in July, but hey-ho.
Nina still hadn’t finished: I suppose you couldn’t do a few bookmarks, could you, Mum? I found that some of the illustrations for another book, The Yaffingale’s Tale, currently with Veneficia but not yet published, were just the right size and shape. I used five of them – trees and fungi – to create a woodland-themed set of bookmarks. Simple but effective. The materials were the same as for the gift tags, but approximately twice the size.
Seen all together, the ‘collection’ was starting to look very impressive and attractive, with lots of designs to choose from. Everything apart from the handbound books were quick and simple to make. But the decorative illustrations make them unique. This year’s stand is going to look startling! Will we sell these things? Who knows – but no-one can say we haven’t tried to make an interesting collection.
Now, all of this is not really about setting up a proper business – or not at present, anyway – it’s more about the enjoyable and interesting things you can do if you’re a writer, artist or crafter. Even done like this on a very small scale, it might do no more than just about pay for itself, but it’s fun. A paying hobby? If you like – but it could perhaps be more if we wanted it to be.
I’ll tell you more about the process, and the outcomes, as we go along. If you’re into arts and crafts yourself, we’d love to hear what you do, too.
In the autumn of 2021, when we were all still reeling from the effects of the pandemic, an opportunity arrived in my inbox. Now, I’m a great one for opportunities – maybe not the kind that need a big investment of time or money – but the smaller, fortuitous ones that sometimes crop up. This was an opportunity to take part in a small local art and craft fair.
I had been looking for ways to sell some of the artwork I had produced during the pandemic – and this seemed like an ideal opportunity. Yes, please, I said, if you’ll have me. Chrissie, the organiser, was an old acquaintance from my days singing with a local choir. Of course, she said, and will you be bringing your books, too? To be honest, I hadn’t even thought of that – but the artwork related to the illustrated books I’d had published during the pandemic, so yes, I’d be bringing the books. And as an afterthought I brought the out-of-print stock of my four novels, too with the intention of selling them off cheap and clearing a space at home.
The fair was to be held outside in a walled garden by the sea. In December. Not the perfect place for paper-based goods. But so what? Why not? It soon became clear that other local artists and crafters were looking for an outlet too, after all the lockdowns, and enthusiasm for the project ran high. We all desperately wanted it to work, and after so many sad and gloomy goings-on, the cheerfulness and colour of a Christmas art and craft event was just what everyone needed. Tents and gazebos were begged and borrowed, and fairy lights were strung around the garden.
The great day dawned. It was blowing a gale – a real top-of-the-range gale – and it was very cold. Would everything get blown away? Would any sensible customer come out in such conditions? Messages flew round the internet as Chrissie struggled to hold things together. And then we were told that the whole thing had been transferred at the very last minute to a nearby hall. We breathed a sigh of relief. Indoors! But would the customers find us? Would we sell anything at all? Would it work?
My daughter, Nina, intrigued by the event, had come down for the weekend to help – and here she was, staggering across a wind and seaspray-swept carpark with boxes of books precariously balanced in her arms. What on earth had I done? Inside, poor Chrissie looked exhausted. She got a grateful hug from everyone, including me.
Well, we said, let’s get on with it, and we set up shop squeezed into the smaller of the two halls in the building. It’s amazing what a group of people can do if they want to, and the hall was transformed into a bright and colourful, welcoming art and craft fair. All we needed was the public. We need not have worried. When the doors opened, people came in. They had found us despite the last-minute change of venue and seemed as delighted to see us as we all were to see them. We chatted, roared with laughter, had hot coffee and mince pies and generally had a wonderful day, weather or no weather. We even made a little money – I sold out of one of my out-of-print novels. In short, it was huge fun and a great success. Would we be interested in doing it again in 2022, Chrissie asked? You bet!
Next week’s post will tell you what we did next and bring you up to date.
I have had quite a few books published in the last decade, some with my own illustrations. For all that, I have no degree in English or creative writing, nor in art, and sometimes this worries me. Am I qualified to do what I do?
When this feeling comes over me, I think of a little girl called Bella. At the age of five, Bella decided she wanted to write and illustrate a book. And she wanted a proper, published book, too. Was she qualified to do this? Did she have a degree in English or art? Of course not – she was five. Did she let it stop her? No. She got on with it and wrote and illustrated her story. Ah, you might say, how sweet! You might think again when I tell you that not only was her book published, but she holds the Guinness world record as the youngest author of a published book. To achieve that, she needed not only a bona fide publisher who was prepared to invest in a print run, but also needed to sell at least 1,000 copies of the book. She did both, and wrote a second book, too. Quite an achievement for someone with no qualifications at all.
How do I know all this? Well, Bella and I are colleagues – we share a publisher. Ginger Fyre Press, who publish Bella’s books are in the same ownership as Veneficia Publications who publish mine. They didn’t ask to see my qualifications – and I’m pretty sure they didn’t ask Bella for hers.
There’s nothing wrong with qualifications, of course, and no doubt Bella will acquire some when she’s older. The point is that neither of us let our lack of qualifications stop us from being creative. So the message from me, and I’m sure Bella would agree, is just do it. Neither of us would have become published authors unless we’d created a book in the first place. I can’t say it too often. Just do it – you never know where it might lead you.
I have been taking a little course on Putting Your Work Out There – something many people find difficult – and I’m no exception. One of the ideas I picked up was that of sharing the process of what you do. As an author and artist I have a lot of ‘process’ to share, and I thought I’d give it a try. Keep it short and helpful they said, so here goes.
I was talking to my friends at the Off The Cuff writing group yesterday about book titles. They can be difficult to get right, we agreed, especially for fiction pieces. Judi told us that her book Little Mouse was taken for a children’s story (it isn’t), and she had to change it to Little Mouse: A Novella to clarify. On the other hand we agreed that Peter’s novel-in-progress Killing Uncle Felix was perfectly titled, describing the broad content of the story without giving too much away.
My own work-in-progress has been labouring under the working title The Overgrown Garden. This sounds like a gardening book, which it’s not. My latest thought on this, I told them, is to change it to The Abandoned Garden. This has a different feel, and the word ‘abandoned’ has two meanings, (1) deserted, and (2) in a wild and reckless manner. Both of these fit perfectly with the story – though I’m not sure if readers will get it. I’ll change to that title anyway, and we’ll see. I might have a better idea later. So there you are – a little share of the writing process in action.