London

Good morning!  It's a rainy morning here in London...again!  Still, March is almost here so I am confident that will mean things are on the up.  I can spy a lovely array of spring flowers from my window out in the garden, and that's always a highlight for me at this time of year.  When it stops raining I will pop out to pay them a visit.
I wanted to share a recent personal piece I completed of some London 'things'.  It comes as no surprise that I do love drawing iconic London buildings and bits and pieces.  There is such a wealth to draw from, and many places I've drawn a lot, Tower Bridge is a prime example ;).  I feel I know it very well now!  When you live in such an impressive city with so much history it is tempting to take it for granted, but I still get awestruck when walking around, crossing the Thames and so on.  I still will make many more drawings of London, there are always ideas pulsing away in my head, but for now here's the latest.

I made a lot of preparatory sketches which I then copied and scaled up and down until I was happy with the composition.  In the end I removed the purple and used brown as the additional colour, I wanted mainly to use red, blue, black and white.  

I hope you can tell this is a corgi!  I'm sure that in their spare time the Queens doggos love to have a good run-around in their own crowns :).

Ok, it's Friday which means a drawing day for me.  I've been working on some commissions which I can't share but today I should be able to work on something new that I've been doodling with for a few days.  Have a lovely Friday and weekend!

London

Hello,

This week I want to share some London themed work I've been doing recently (I love drawing London things!)  The first is an illustration of an area of Carnaby Street and around.  It's an area I feel I know quite well.  I wanted to stick to a particular colour range and include places and items that have stuck out to me as I've walked around.  I do enjoy drawing the Liberty building, it's so iconic and beautiful, and I really enjoyed selecting what else to draw for my kind of map.

The second illustration I created after reading a book I received for Christmas called 'Underground Tales for London'.  It contains twelve stories from twelve different authors all inspired by, yep, the Underground.  I created an image for each story and then centred them around an image of a tube train.  I had fun creating this little project for myself and it also encouraged me to draw more figures which is something I haven't done that much of recently.

I hope you're having a good week.  It's pouring with rain where I am at the moment but I'm happy that now it's staying lighter longer at night, I'm always excited to see that change.  Right, back to the desk with a cuppa for some more drawing :).

Have a great weekend.

Out for a walk

Hello,

It's a lovely sunny Saturday :).  I'm sharing another illustration completed after a little break in the countryside.  I went walking through Sheringham Park where luckily some of the Rhododendrons were out at that time, lots of glorious colour.  I made this inspired by the walk which led to the coast in the end, and also to fish and chips and later an ice cream, yum.
Have a lovely weekend whatever you do, I'm about to start sketching for some new nature themed work :).

A little break - part two

Hello,

If you saw my post from last week you will know I'd been on a few days break out of London.  As soon as I came back I knew I wanted to make some work inspired by what I visited there when I can. One of the places I visited was Sutton Hoo in Suffolk.  It's a place I'd been wanting to visit for years and it was great to go during the week, on a beautiful day, where I could have a good walk around in the sunshine :).  It's fascinating to think a lot of the objects found here lay dormant for so long (minus the rabbit disturbance!) and it must have been so exciting when the finds were revealed.  There was so much detailed patterning on a lot of the items, it's incredible to think how they were made at that time.
For me, making work in this way means I can choose exactly what elements really stood out to me on my visit, and I wanted to make sure I incorporated the earthy feel of the dig all those years ago.  This also meant I was able to use all the gorgeous brown inks I have keeping the feel of the earth very loose in contrast to the lined work of the rabbits.  I was lucky that at this time of year bluebells were out, and after days of visiting places where the bluebell displays weren't quite as anticipated I walked into an area of woodland here and they were everywhere.  It was a real treat!

It really was lovely to have a break, get out into the countryside and just walk.  I think I really needed it.
So, back to work.  I have a lot I want to get done today.  It's a gorgeous day so a great way to spend a day of drawing looking out at some lovely sunny weather :).  See you soon!

A little break

Hello,

I've had a lovely week.  I finally took a proper few days off and incredibly picked the week with the best weather so far :D!  I went to visit my family back in Norfolk and spent time in the countryside, and by the coast, in what was permanent sunshine, I really could not believe my luck.  As the weather was so good it was also the perfect excuse to try several varieties of delicious ice cream, yum.  Below are some pictures of my time there.

I really enjoyed getting away, I've come back full of new ideas, and got to work on some new illustrations inspired by my travels.  I love creating work in this way.
In honour of the sun (which is not with me today :(, it has been a day of rain) here's a recent sunny Illustration I created all about bees.  I wanted a really limited sunny warm toned palette for this one.

I hope you've had a great week and enjoyed the sunshine if it was around where you were :). 

Springy things

Hello there,

So it's the easter weekend and although it doesn't feel very spring-like I wanted to share some spring influenced illustrations.  I've been drawing lots of daffodils this week.  Just having a bit of an experiment with some techniques and colours and having a good old play around.
I did loads of colour sketches here's three below

I decided in the end to go with the yellow/blue tones.  I enjoy experimenting like this so much and it really helps sort my ideas out in my head.

The image above is my final finished version.  I'm really happy with the colours because for me they really remind me of spring.  Unfortunately I was working on this whilst it was a very grey and rainy day outside, (I was pretending there was sunshine!) but we have got lighter evenings here now so things are looking up! 

I hope you have a lovely break if you're having one over this weekend, so far I have only eaten one hot cross bun :).

The Cold

Hello,

So, you may have heard that it has been very cold here, (compared to normal for us at least) in the uk. By day two of the snow I was feeling pretty impressed that I'd got the hang of the layering business and was feeling pretty toasty as I trudged out in the snow, but by that point I'd also caught a cold.  I don't tend to pay much attention to these things and assume if I don't pay too much attention it will just go away, but this one has decided to stay for a bit.  Today that has meant a lot of admin tasks have been completed as I haven't really had the concentration for much else.  There is a lot of nose blowing, sore skin and pathetic coughing going on.  I had managed to avoid all colds over winter until this point, whilst people spluttered around me, so I was pretty happy that I had somehow managed to escape all that, but eventually one came.  On a positive note it has meant a lot of sofa sitting with my feet up and plenty of hot drinks :).  Tomorrow I'm hoping I can be in for a day of painting as I think a good nights rest is in order with a good supply of olbas oil to hand!
On another note a couple of weekends ago the weather was still cold but gloriously sunny and I spent a Saturday out in London.  I had guests visiting and one of the places we visited was the Foundling Museum where we saw The Lost Words which was full of glorious illustrations of uk wildlife.

We also popped into the British Museum always worth a visit, (we spent a while looking for Lindow man!) 

I love the colours and shapes in this Grayson Perry vase.

Finally, just incase we forgot in amongst all this snow it is now officially spring in this part of the world! hooray! So here's a few springy flowers from the garden which will be back shortly!  It's always immensely exciting to see these pop up :).

I hope you have a lovely warm (or snowjoyable) weekend, wherever you are :).

A weekend away

Hello!

I've spent the last few weeks working away on some lovely editorial commissions hence why I haven't posted here for a bit.  They're not published yet so I can't share them with you but I will as soon I can.
Besides that I also spent a weekend away visiting family and during that trip we went to Ickworth House.  I love visiting properties like this, getting a glimpse of the past and strolling around gardens.  The gardens here included a stumpery, I'd never heard of it before, but it's like a secret little garden made up of upturned tree stumps that have then been left dotted around so other plants can grow up around them.  Sometimes the stumps are shaped into animals and so on as was the case with some here.  It was beautiful day when we visited which was very lucky indeed.  There may well be some work inspired by this trip!

I also loved this inventive scarecrow.

There were also some rather beautiful Dahlias in the garden, look at the perfection!

I hope you've had a lovely weekend.  The days are getting shorter but I do love this time of year, it's still not too cold and the trees look so beautiful with all the leaves changing colour.  

I'll be back soon :).

Sunshine and Website update

Hello there,

It's a beautiful sunny day here in London today hooray!  There's definitely been a lack of those just recently so it's fantastic to have such beautiful weather :).
I've been busy over the last week or so with amongst other things completely re-designing and relocating my website.  This is something I'd been wanting to do for a long time.  I was never entirely happy with how my previous site looked, but was quite nervous about undertaking a big re-design because I was worried just how long it would take, and whether I would be able to create what I was after.  In the end I had about a week of downtime and I'm so happy that I decided to do it.  I'm now with Squarespace following a recommendation, thank you! and I've been so happy both with the level of support they give and all the guidance they have available.  For someone with very little knowledge of website creation they have fantastic templates and how to guides.  I'm pretty much done for now so if you'd like to check it out take a look here sharonfarrow.com and let me know what you think!

Besides that I thought I'd share some recent work especially as it seems a fitting day for strawberries! These are strawberry shortcakes (my Mums are delicious :)).  I really enjoyed doing all the plate decoration and detail.

Yesterday I also popped into the Roundhouse to see the immersive installation +/- Human.  I loved it. I found both the orbs and the music totally mesmerising and hypnotic.  I'd just been to the gym so I settled down on the floor all relaxed and just watched them whirring all around me.  It finishes tomorrow so if you're in the area I'd really recommend popping in.  

Ok that's it for now.  I hope you're having a lovely weekend.  It's bank holiday here in the UK so that combined with such gorgeous weather is a real treat!

A day at the beach

Hello,

A few weeks back I took a little trip back to Norfolk and visited what is possibly my favourite beach there.  As a child I used to go regularly to Wells-next-the-sea so I have a lot of happy memories from that time.  It's great to go when the it's a lovely hot day and you can paddle.  The tide goes out a long way but leaves little pools behind so you have warmish water to swim and paddle in, I love it!  The beach is huge so even if it's busy you can walk and walk and get away from it all.  There's a pine forest behind the beach huts which you can also wander through.  I've been when it's hot, when it's cold and windy too, it's just a lovely place to go to whatever the weather.
So after that little visit I made a piece of work based on it.  I spent ages working on the colours for the huts.  In reality they're all a variety of colours but I wanted them all to relate to each other and share the colouring.
Here's the finished piece

Here's some of the work in progress colour sketches.  I tend to make a lot so I can really sort colours and have all sorts of scraps with marks and textures which I then keep as they are so helpful for future work.  Then I piece it all together before working on the final.

Here's some photos of the beach, ahh it's a lovely hot day today and it would be great to be there!

I hope you're having a lovely weekend, I'm gazing out at a lovely blue sky and looking forward to another sunny day tomorrow :)