THE RUNNING PHEASANT ART

HOW DID THIS ALL START & WHERE DID THE NAME COME FROM?

Like so many stories you have heard before, this started as a hobby that grew into my own little craft / art business.

Once upon a time (a few years ago) I was getting married. I wanted to personalise my wedding so I created pen & ink sketches of our favourite holiday location for our table names and also our made fingerprint wedding guest posters. I never know what to write in the traditional guest book ones and want something I could look at and remember the day more often than I would with a book tucked away.

With quite a few weddings in the family around that time this swiftly moved on to creating gifts and artwork for friends and family for their big days.
My Pen and Ink was going smoothly until I was challenge by sister in law to pick up my paint brushes again and create a series of watercolour birds for her wedding table names. This ended up as the start of rekindlling my love for watercolours and other colourful mediums. I hadn’t realise how much I had missed art in general since entering the main stream workplace. I missed it as an outlet for my creativity.

I have always been inspired by the countryside, whether that countryside is foreign or domestic, I marvel at the colours, shapes and diversity of the world around us. I try to capture a little of this on my sketch pad, screen or canvas.

“WHATS IN A NAME?”: So the NAME is a bit of a tenuous link to nature… so I have to I admit it does have a link to one of the images I was painting for my other sister in law during the early days, In fact it was her wedding fingerprint poster. It happened to be a proud male pheasant. My husband, Charles and the happy couple started saying I should show my art off. (shh.. don’t tell them they were right). I decided “ok, I’ll give it a go” and as this little guy as my inspiration, I decided to be “The Running Pheasant”… and my online profile was born on Facebook and then on instagram as an art showcase page.

BABY STEPS: The next step or diversification of my art really came when I was pregnant I searched for name art sign ready to commemorate the birth of our child. Sadly I couldn’t find anything that jumped out and spoke to me. There were lovely items but nothing I saw would stand the test of time as a cherished item, I didn’t want the images to be too babyish.

I wanted something sweet enough to commemorate a baby but that could also help teach a toddler something, that a teenager wouldn’t mind and an adult could also admire. I set about creating my Animal Alphabet. I wanted to have every letter made from an animal that’s name started with that letter. I thought this could help one day in teaching my own child in a fun way about animals, the alphabet and how to spell their name.

Let me tell you that challenge was not easy I started with common names but admit I have had to branch out into species and scientific names for some of the more obscure letters. (Ever heard of an Unau … the common Sloth or a Yabby - Aussie Crayfish).

Whilst on maternity leave, as a mum to a wonderful new little girl, I decided to see if everything people who knew about my art were saying was true. I wondered would other people be interested in purchasing my creations and designs? So I started to share more of my work with the world and updated my social media, little did I know that a global pandemic would shake up the world so I had more time for my art and to try harder at social media than I ever expected, thank god for a baby that slept (ps new mums don’t hate me, I’m sure number 2 will get its revenge!)

It seemed that my friends and family were right.. people seemed interested and followed or liked what I created and people started to order names.

This brings us to today, with me sat at a computer trying to tell you about little craft/art business and not waffle (May have failed re the Waffling)

NEXT STEPS: Whats next for me, we this site and looking at designing more products from my artwork and some surface pattern designs.
WATCH THIS SPACE…… Thank you for visiting my site,

Please take a look around and if you can’t find what you're looking for message me.

Regards

Dawn Edge xXx