Valentine’s cuppa

The Valentine’s rubber stamp image  © Peter Gander 2013

Using a proper cuppa as inspiration (ink drawing in corner)

For our Have a Gander business, I drew this design for a line of hand-printed Valentine’s cards for lovers and tea-lovers. The original drawing was done in Indian ink and scratch (dip) pen, visible in the corner. I used a dainty tea cup as reference, colour was added in Photoshop for the mock-up above. The real thing will be turned into a rubber stamp and individually hand-inked and printed onto card.

The fish padlock © Peter Gander

I started this painting of my beloved fish padlock a couple of months ago. The padlock is a weighty lump of hand-incised brass and is accompanied by a more golden-coloured key. I bought this beautiful piece of handmade Indian art on Ebay a few years ago from India and though I wish I could say I had an exclusive ‘fishing tackle shed’, it does appropriately guard my fishing gear in my garden shed. Painting-wise, my original, half-baked creative attempt was painted in gouache and not working at all on the strongly-coloured pastel paper, so I abandoned it. The whole thing was wishy-washy, so undeserving of something so chunky and strong and I didn’t know what to do with it. Revisiting it today, I covered the whole coloured image in black Indian ink, creating a black silhouette and started again. This time with soft pastels working in darkest colours first over the black, finishing with the highlight. I then painted the scales, keyhole and fin lines in ink and finally, acheived a good result. Indian ink and soft pastel on Daler Rowney Murano (warm colours) Pastel Paper (160gsm).