Olympic torch coming to Stroud on 23rd May

Stroud is certainly looking extremely festive with Olympic banners all all over the town, great shop window displays and  Union Jacks and bunting for the Diamond Jubilee too!  What a year!  And Stroud Site Festival 2012 continues until the end of May with the second of the Open Studios week-ends tomorrow and Sunday as well, so the distinctive yellow and black Site 12 or Open Studio signs add to the colour!    My Union Jacks featuring the Queen's portraits on stamps is proving popular among studio visitors and Canvas prints, cards and larger prints are available. I also have other versions of the flag as a stamp collage with the word LOVE in the centre, which makes a great gift!   As well as our own wonderful flag, I've created flags of many of the other nations from their own stamps and many of these are on display here in my studio at the moment, along with pictures of ships, gardens, birds and more abstract stamp collages.

See http://www.sitefestival.org.uk/ for details of all the studios open this week-end - some artists' studios  may also be open at other times if you phone them for information.  See Page 20 venue 35 for my own studio information.

2012 London Olympics - National Flags in Stamps!

I was set a challenge last year and that was to create stamp collage flags of all the nations taking part in the 2012 London olympics. Of course, I should have started an awful lot earlier as here we are in March 2012 with just under 5 months to go and I've completed flags for about 25 countries. Rather a lot to do ...

It's been fun, but much more difficult for some flags than others, due to a number of factors.

Red, white and blue flags are relatively easy to make dependent on their design of course. Our lovely Union flag, or Union Jack as it is popularly known, is one of the more complex designs and very distinctive and we've issued plenty of stamps which are predominantly blue or red, as have France, and the Netherlands. Availability of stamps is a big factor - shown above are the flags of the Beijing Olympics highest Gold medal winners - third came Russia, but I've yet to make their flag due to a shortage of stamps!

The flags of 22 different nations currently appear on the Flags page of my website and I've recently completed flags of Spain and the Netherlands so will shortly add those. At the moment I'm working on the flag of Greece, which is blue and white. Greece was the country where the Olympics began and the challenge is to complete this one by the end of this month - and I can award myself a treat, if not a Gold Medal!