Everything I Created for my Wedding!

 Hello everyone, I hope you're doing well!

I wanted to create a blog showing you everything I created for my wedding back in August, as I spent a lot of time painting and designing things for it. Hopefully it will provide you with some tips and inspiration if you are looking to do the same for your own special occasion.

To start off with, our colour scheme was teal, blues, peach & white. As we were getting married in the summer, I wanted something light and fresh to fit the season. Our favourite colour is blue so we definitely had to incorporate it! 

My bridesmaids and myself made the bouquets with fake flowers, I got them from The Range and Shein - surprisingly good quality and cheap! We trimmed the stems with wire cutters, played around with arranging the flowers and then taped the stems in place before wrapping them in ribbon. I had teal ribbon and my bridesmaids had peach to contrast with their teal dresses. We made such a fun evening out of making them ourselves in my lounge, I would recommend it!

                  

I designed our save the dates and invites with these colours as well. I found it so much easier to decide on a colour scheme first, it made decision making a lot easier down the line. I started by doing watercolour paintings, scanning them into my laptop and editing them on Photoshop, saving the images and then piecing them together with text in a document to print. Designing these was probably my favourite part of the whole process! I used Vista Print to print everything, save the dates, ceremony & reception invites as well as the details cards. I found the site really handy as you could add on envelopes and rsvp cards etc. if you wish and they would match the size of the products you were making.

I then bought a wax seal kit with a teal coloured wax from amazon, some tracing paper from B&M and made my own wraps to hold the invite & details cards together. Saved me a lot of money making them myself and it gave them all a personal touch. It's a great feeling knowing I made them myself when everyone said how lovely they were.

The wax seal kit came with an anchor stamp to match the invites, we wanted an anchor as a nod to my husband being in the navy!

The confetti was made from biodegradable tissue paper and my bridesmaids kindly helped me create loads with a heart shaped holepunch! It was time consuming but another excuse to get together and chat all things wedding!

For my table center pieces I collected loads of empty wine & gin bottles and painted flowers on them. I just used acrylic paint and it stuck nicely to the glass. They looked pretty enough without being painted with the flowers in them but I wanted to add a personal touch and include my art in little bits of the wedding. I got some cheap twine and wrapped it round the neck of the bottles to add a rustic feel.

I thought it would be good to have some sort of sign for the order of the day so set out to make a rustic style pallet sign. This was just one left over from my dad's work that he kindly bought home and painted white. I then got some cheap pastel paint pens from The Range which had light blue & peach pens which were perfect to match our colour scheme! I lightly wrote everything on the pallet in a calligraphy style with pencil before going over it in the paint markers. I did two layers to make the letters thicker and the colours really stand out.

My next favourite thing to make was our welcome sign. Luckily my friend's husband managed to get mw two pieces of wood from his work free of charge, one for this sign and the other I made into a seating plan. I tried to mimic the design of our invites so it all linked and there was a theme. I used acrylic paint and the white paint marker that came with my pastel set from The Range for the text. It was such a lovely afternoon spent sat in my garden painting this in the sunshine! 

             

For the seating plan, I created print outs for who was sat at each table, using the same design as my invites. For these as they were printed slightly bigger, I just printed them at home on my own printer. They were A5 size so I can fit two on an A4 sheet of paper. I bought slightly thicker cartridge paper to print them on and attached them to the wood with glue dots. I then used the wax seal again as I had loads left over to seal the tops straight onto the wood. This just gave it a bit more detail and bought the theme together. I used the white paint pen again for the calligraphy at the top and attached a premade flower arrangement to the top with a glue gun. The flower arrangement was from The Range as well.

                                 

This photo frame believe it or not used to be a table! I'm very lucky to have a dad who is good at DIY and has lots of tools in his shed! The round frame was a tabletop which he cute the middle out of, and he had a metal frame lying around in the garage, so we painted both bits white and drilled them together. I added some fake ivy vines to the legs just to make it look a bit prettier and fit in with our floral theme. Using the same blue paint marker, I wrote around the edge of the frame so when people look back on their photos with the frame they will have a little reminder of our wedding date.

Lastly, for some guest entertainment throughout the day, I made a canvas that everyone could paint. We thought this would be something different and interactive that everyone would enjoy. And great for the kids! I got a blank canvas, a variety of acrylic paints, brushes and a pallet from The Range and created a little box to place next to the canvas. We also used this as our guest book, leaving a blank notebook and a nice pen in the box as well so once people had painted, they could let us know by signing the book. I created some instructions on Canva.com and printed it on A4 paper at home. Luckily my friend is a teacher and could laminate it for me! And we popped that in the back of the box for people to read. It went down really well and we now have a keepsake from the wedding to look back on.

So there you are! These are the main things I created for our wedding. I hope it gives you some ideas and if you have any questions, I'd be more than happy to chat :) 

I'll sign off with a few photos from the day ...

Buddiepet

 Hello everyone!

I wanted to share some exciting news with my fellow pet owners. I have teamed up with the fantastic Charlotte and Paige at www.buddiepet.com 

The amazing team at Buddiepet have added me to their website! Their customers can now click directly to my website for custom paintings of their fur babies. If you love your pet enough to get them cared for and walked by the superb Buddiepet team then hopefully they would love an original, colourful artwork by me to keep forever of their beloved pet.

If you're local to Southampton, Hampshire and are in need of dog walking, pet taxi, home visits for cats or smaller pets, then I couldn't recommend Buddiepet enough. Charlotte is a qualified RCVS veterinary nurse, trained in the best care and practices to look after your pets so you can rest easy knowing they are in good hands. Just look at the outstanding reviews on their website for all the proof and reassurance you need.

And it's not just that we're both local to Hampshire that we've 'buddied' up, I've actually known Charlotte ever since I can remember pretty much! Being my best friends cousin, I've seen her all throughout my life. I think it's so great that we now have complimentary businesses and can work together to provide great things for pet owners, whether that be a helping hand to look after pets in a busy schedule or a painting to remember the pets we love.

Please do check out their website, you won't be disappointed! Also take a look at the many cute customers they have over on their instagram @buddiepet_pet_care_southampton

Stocking Work in Wild Art Gallery

 Hello everyone!

Sorry it's been a very long while but I'm back and have lots of blogs planned for you!

I wanted to update you on where I now have some of work stocked in Hampshire, UK. A lot of my paintings, prints, wood slice decorations, coasters, cards and resin pallets are the Wild Art Gallery in Wickham. It's a beautiful gallery run by the amazing Sarah, who is also a talented artist. It stocks a lot of other fabulous work from other artists, all centred around nature and wildlife, and they're all local to Hampshire!

It's a great way to support local business and local artists - you can't go wrong! 

I regularly pop in to drop off new work and top up on the stock so please let me know if you ever want anything in particular of my work in there! If you live further afield I am more than happy to post work to you as well. Or I am always happy to chat about commissions if you'd like something brand new!

With it being October, I am starting to take some Christmas cards and decorations in to the gallery - only2 months to go! Paintings, prints and handmade goods like my coasters always make great, unique gifts for people so please do take a look if you want to shop local this Christmas. It makes little artists like me very happy if even one thing sells, just knowing someone is enjoying our work and liked it enough to buy it blows my mind every time. It makes all the doubt and hard work worth it for sure!

Find out more about the gallery here https://www.wildartgallery.co.uk 

Take care and speak to you guys soon!

Stocking my work in Wild At Heart Gift Shop

My greetings cards and Puffins Prints are now available to purchase in Wild At Heart!

Wild At Heart has two shops, one in Broadway and the other in Chipping Norton, selling lovely  jewellery, accessories and other gifts. I’m thrilled to have a selection of my stock for sale in their Broadway shop! So if any of you are in the Worcestershire or Oxfordshire area, pop in and take a look!

People seem to like my products, the first day they were for sale I managed to sell two of the dog greetings cards, one that looked like a ladies dog and one that looked like her friends dog! I thought this was really sweet. With any luck they will all sell!

I am looking to stock my work in other gift shops/galleries that are local to my studio in Hampshire as well as carrying on with my commissions and creating new designs for prints/greetings cards. If you have any suggestions for shops that you think my work would fit well in or ideas for new designs please let me know!

We Got A Dog!

If any of you guys look on the Beth Frost Art Facebook page, you would’ve seen we got a dog! I shared a couple of photos with you but didn’t really explain how it happened.

I’d like to introduce Sandy! Or Sandrew (like Andrew) or Baby Snoot as she is also know haha. She is a 3 year old (soon to be 4) working Cocker Spaniel with the prettiest face and a heart of gold. We were given her from relatives and are so happy to be able to give her a forever home! Previously living in the kennels outside, we were unsure how she’d cope coming inside permanently, but she’s been an angel!

We think she has had some sort of gun dog training from other previous owners as she loves chasing birds and diving in and out of bushes. She’s also picked up retrieving really quickly and loves her pheasant toy!

Sandy has just recently become a mum! Being pregnant when we first got her, we knew we’d have to give her back to have the puppies, but she’ll be back home with us as soon as her babies are grown up and gone to new homes. We thought she would have a big litter as she became very tubby! But she had three massive puppies instead, all strong and healthy.

Mr Beth Frost Art and I can’t wait to have her home, and I’m sure she’ll be the subject of a lot of my future paintings!

Biggest Commission I've ever done!

I haven’t written a blog post in a while as I’ve been super busy with commissions, moving house and life in general! But I wanted to share with you guys one of the commissions I did that was a bit out of the ordinary.

If you follow my work you can tell I am usually a watercolour painter, not venturing past paper much bigger than A3. This commission however was on canvas and done with acrylic paints/mixed media! I used to do a lot of acrylic painting at college and university so I accepted the challenge, excited to get back into my old painting style.

The client wanted something to represent the conflict on Wall Street, a key talking point in his office. He was interested in the  ‘The Charging Bull on Wall Street’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charging_Bull) which often associated with capitalism. Most will agree that capitalism is conflict both good and bad. However, right now many are innocent victims are suffering from the side effects of capitalism.

So he wanted to show the conflict in a painting - “the bad of Capitalism being represented by an animal i.e. the iconic Charging Bull” being fought “Good” being a represented by an equally powerful animal often associated with gentleness ; a bear”. Bears despite their obvious size advantage bears rarely attack and their diets are 80-90% plant based etc (no to mention bears association our childhood toys/cartoons).

So I set to work creating a large textured painting, using bright colours to lighten up his office and with a slight abstract style. We agreed on tall buildings, a road and flashes of yellow for taxis to represent the New York setting in the background of the painting. The foreground would be the bull and bear. 

I decided on cool purples and blues for the bull which are traditionally used to represent the ‘bad’, and then warmer yellows and oranges for the bear to portray the ‘good’. Purple and yellow are also opposites on the colour wheel, making them great colours to use together as they make each other stand out to make sure both subjects are noticed equally. 

I wanted to have the animals in interesting positions, not just charging at each other from opposite ends of the canvas. So I decided to paint them at slightly more interesting angles, giving the feeling of tension and anticipated conflict without showing them directly fighting.

I added some highlights with metallic paint at the end to give the painting some more depth, adding another texture when the light hits it. This painting was definitely a challenge for me but it was great to refresh my acrylic painting skills!

permanent job as a creative designer

Much to my delight, I have now been offered a full time permanent role as a Creative Designer for Microlearn. I found the 6 week work experience offer through the careers service at the University of Portsmouth, where I am just about to finish my MA Illustration degree. 

I managed to utilise the resources and information they equipped me with, including making a creative CV to impress them with, to secure the placement and now a great job. 

As the company is quite small I am excited to be included right at the beginning to see it grow and help develop it.