In that respect it's just like our Advent Calendars, and at least you won't have to listen to Christmas carols while you do it! The Christmas and New Year parties and celebrations are just a memory; cold, damp weather seems to seep in through every keyhole; and Spring still seems a long way off.

Maybe you kept your spirits up in January by playing with your Jacquie Lawson Advent Calendar, but even that is beginning to pall by now. You look through the window at a bare, grey garden and you dream of the days when you'll be able to get out there, sow lovely flower seeds, nurture the seedlings, and eventually plant them out to form brilliant banks of colour.

But all that is weeks away yet! Or is it? Here at JL we've been working on a new project which will fill your world with sunshine and flowers! Not only that, but it'll also fill that Advent-Calendar-shaped gap in your life. Keep an eye on our newsletters and home page for the latest news If you were lucky enough to receive a card, you had no way of finding whether you'd hit the jackpot and the sender was indeed the girl or boy whose attention you craved, or whether you actually had a secret admirer of whom you had previously been unaware.

And meanwhile, you'd send a card to the object of your love, hoping madly that he or she wouldn't think it was from someone else. Because, of course, Valentine's Day cards were always unsigned. To put your name on a card was considered frightfully bad form. I don't know if people still send paper Valentine cards in this way, but we do occasionally get requests from members to send anonymous Valentine ecards opens a new window.

Sadly, however, the technicalities of the internet, the risk of abuse, and the need to get our emails through spam filters all conspire to make it almost impossible for an ecard to be sent anonymously. The star of our latest floral arrangement is Ranunculus asiaticus , which belongs to the same family as the common buttercup. Curiously, the Latin word "ranunculus" actually means "little frog", or "tadpole", and it's thought that this may derive from the fact that ranunculi grow well in damp areas near rivers or streams.

The cultivated ranunculus, with its dense layers of soft petals in wonderfully bright colours, is imported to Great Britain from Italy and other Mediterranean countries, and is at its best in January.

So it seemed like a perfect subject for a card to brighten up a grey winter, and our artist Bev dutifully went out to purchase some prime examples to act as models for her paintings. It seems, however, that the good folk of Devon share our enthusiasm for these pretty blooms: several florists proved to have sold out completely before Bev was finally able to purchase the fine specimens you see below.

But tucked away in a corner near the pub, and hidden from view by trees, is the equally beautiful church of St Laurence. The oldest part of the church is early Norman, while the tower dates from the 14th century.

But perhaps the most interesting architectural feature is a very unusual wooden gallery running along the southwestern wall of the nave. Built in the late 16th century, it once housed the village school! As can be seen in the photo below, the opening to the gallery has no door.

This presented a problem when we were making our latest Christmas card opens a new window , since Bertie needed somewhere to hang his painstakingly-prepared wreath. No problem: with a little poetic licence and some clever artwork, a beautiful 16th century oak door was constructed especially for the occasion. How about doing something similar, but with music made up of the sounds of a Thanksgiving meal being prepared in a kitchen?

Well, I'm never one to do things by halves, so I decided that I would forgo traditional instruments altogether, and see what I could make using only the objects available to me in my own batterie de cuisine. There followed many happy hours of clattering about in the kitchen testing different saucepans, spoons, glasses and bottles for their musical qualities.

I can't imagine what the neighbours thought I was up to. My only slight cheat was to use Kontakt sampling software to provide a full scale of notes for the pitched "instruments". With this program I was able to record just a single wine glass "ping", then tell the software that this single note was as it happened B flat, and the software then magically gave me an entire scale, so I could play fully chromatic wine glasses on my MIDI keyboard!

If you listen carefully to the bass line, you may wonder what it is that's making that rather satisfying sound. Sounds almost like a pizzicato string bass, doesn't it? That was the idea: but in fact, it's the sound of a large paella pan being hit with an overgrown courgette! The first and second Advent Calendars "Village" and "London" featured a single, full-screen scene designed only for desktop computers; then we introduced a secondary, indoor scene where you could curl up with a jigsaw puzzle and various other entertainments; and by the time of "Edwardian" we had several secondary scenes, and things were getting a bit out of hand!

Then, to allow for the small screen on an iPad, we brought in horizontal scrolling and a three-layer parallax design, and all the games and puzzles from the secondary scene were brought into that main scrolling scene.

The bare bones of the scene are shown below Although the house looks for all the world like a mediaeval manor, it was actually constructed between and , but adhering strictly to 15th century architectural style and using original stone, woodwork, fireplaces and so on from other ancient houses. The driving force behind this extraordinary effort was Lord Moyne, whose great-great-grandfather Arthur Guinness founded the eponymous Irish brewery. Mediaeval houses were all the rage at the time, and for five years after its completion the house would have been the scene of glittering parties for the elite of London society.

But after the death of Lady Moyne in the family left the house, and a few years later Lord Moyne was assassinated, while working for the UK Government as Minister of State in Cairo. In these more peaceful times, Bailiffscourt is now a posh hotel where you can go to enjoy the peacocks and parkland over nice a cup of tea! But in the years since then, the need to keep things fresh and fun has led us to a variety of amazing settings.

We've had a festive trip to London, we've spent Christmas in a country house in the Edwardian era, we've shopped till we dropped at a Christmas Market, and last year we got our feet wet at an English seaside resort! So, where are we going for Christmas ? Somewhere pretty and Christmassy, of course. We need snow, too: snow is an essential part of the Christmas tradition, even though in London the chances of a white Christmas are only about one in 17!

A bit of history will lend interest, while some dramatic scenery and the opportunity for fun outdoor pursuits will keep us amused throughout the countdown to Christmas. Below is a snapshot of work in progress for one of the interior scenes. Maybe you can guess the country we're heading for?

If we need a group of singers for a card, our normal partners in crime are the wonderful choir of Salisbury Cathedral, but they were in the USA on tour and unable to do the recording in the time we had available. Into the breach stepped the Aquae Sulis Chorale, a group of current and ex-choristers from Bath Abbey, who did a fantastic job at short notice. Many thanks to the choir, and to Shean and Bruce for their contributions in directing and recording the performance.

You should be able to hear the lyrics quite clearly, but some of our transatlantic fans might find the English accent hard to follow. They're not exactly great literature, but in case you're curious, here they are in full:. Drip drop drip drop! Ducks love water, Drip drop pitter patter! Get wet? Doesn't matter! Splish splash splish splash! Who'd 've thought a Drip drop drip could be quite such fun!

Nineteenth-century London was a city with many problems. The industrial revolution caused a dramatic increase in population, and into this cauldron of bad housing, unemployment, poverty and disease there arrived in a year-old Irishman, Thomas Barnardo, intending to train as a doctor with a view to becoming a medical missionary in China.

A few months after his arrival an outbreak of cholera swept through the East End with catastrophic effects on poor families, and Barnardo decided to give up his dream of going to China and to devote himself instead to helping destitute children. In , still only 25 years of age, Barnardo opened his first home in East London, where boys were trained in carpentry, metal work and shoemaking to enable them to secure apprenticeships and work. By the time he died 35 years later, the charity he founded had opened 96 homes caring for more than 8, children.

Since then the focus of the charity has of course changed dramatically to meet the needs of today's young people, and their services include counselling for children who have been abused, fostering and adoption services, vocational training and disability inclusion groups. You can read much more about their wonderful work on their website. Please send Christmas Lights opens a new window to your friends and family this Christmas; and maybe you and your recipients might consider making a small seasonal donation opens a new window to help Barnardo's with their valuable work.

In May , Maggie Keswick Jencks was told that her breast cancer had returned and was given months to live. In the time left to her, she and her husband Charles Jencks worked with her medical team to develop a new approach to cancer care.

In order to live more positively with cancer, Maggie and Charles believed you needed information that would allow you to be an informed participant in your medical treatment, stress-reducing strategies, psychological support and the opportunity to meet other people in similar circumstances in a relaxed domestic atmosphere. Maggie's Centres are built in the grounds of NHS cancer hospitals, and they provide free practical, emotional and social support to people with cancer and their family and friends.

They're places to find practical advice about benefits and eating well; places where qualified experts provide emotional support; places to meet other people; places where you can simply sit quietly with a cup of tea. Please take the trouble to find out more about this remarkable charity, and consider making a seasonal donation opens a new window. The Duet for Two Cats has an interesting history, not least because it isn't by Rossini! It was the little-known Danish composer Christoph Weyse below left who in came up with the idea of a Katte-Kavatine or Cat Song with miaows for lyrics.

No-one knows for sure who was responsible for putting it all together, but for some reason Rossini below right usually gets the credit. And yet it's the sinuous felinity of Weyse's melody, and the crazy humour of his original idea, which give the piece its real charm. The Duet is usually sung by two sopranos, and accompanied ad libitum by feline frolics which make it well worth hunting down a good recording.

One of my favourite performances is that by the divine Dr. And if you haven't heard of Hinge and Bracket After a few moments pondering this thought, we decided our correspondent was quite right, and why hadn't we thought of that? Here's a link to his IMDb page opens a new window. So it took about five minutes for us to say "yes please, when can you start? Prepare to be truly spooked! Thanks to a recommendation from my friend Pippa, we got in touch with Tagline Quartet, winners of the British Association of Barbershop Singers national contest in And after a few hours one Sunday morning in a tiny London studio, we had a fabulous recording in the can.

The music is an arrangement of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow", with some silly lyrics written specially for the card. Words that rhyme with "fellow" are a little thin on the ground so we took a few liberties! But I also had to mug up on the somewhat esoteric technicalities of barbershop style: I hope I gave them enough of those ringing sevenths.

It was an Olivetti, and this wonderful machine liberated me from my dreadful handwriting, allowing me to type newsletters for school societies, programmes for school concerts, and even the odd letter to friends and family. Just sitting in front of it made me feel like a famous novelist or daring war correspondent. It became part of me, an extension of my body, like my piano or my motorbike, until computers came along and changed the world. When the package arrived I opened it in front of my young daughter, who was fascinated.

I explained it was a machine that people used to type letters and important documents, before the invention of computers. But equally, we pride ourselves on choosing and arranging music which fits each card perfectly in mood, tempo and overall duration, so we have little choice. When we went to Salisbury Cathedral last week to record Mozart's beautiful little motet Ave Verum Corpus , we decided to try something new. We had already worked out a reasonably musical way of cutting the Mozart to 76 seconds, as required for the ecard, and that was soon in the can.

But while we were there, why not also record the entire piece, and provide it as an MP3 download to accompany the card? On a PC or Mac, you can download the MP3 file directly from the ecard or by right-clicking the image below and taking "Save as Once you've downloaded it you can import it into iTunes or transfer it to your phone or tablet.

If you only have an iPad or iPhone then you can still click the image below to play the music. Here in the UK alone, around , people are on the autism spectrum and in the USA there are over 3. Our card can do very little by itself: but if you send it to your friends and family this Christmas, we hope that they'll click the logo at the end, and read about the marvellous work which the NAS undertake, and maybe even head over to their website to make a small donation.

The great thing about ecards is that unlike paper cards, people won't think you're a bit odd if you send more than one! So please, help promote awareness of autism and the NAS by sending Sleigh Ride opens a new window to everyone you know. His own family have been his inspiration, and while much has changed since those times, some of their toys are as familiar to children today as they were to their Victorian predecessors: jigsaw puzzles, dolls' houses, tea-sets and alphabet bricks.

If you study your Advent Calendar carefully as we're sure you do you may spot a little girl learning to read, just like Tom's own daughter Polly, who is now of the age where she brings a book back from school every evening. Our forthcoming Advent Calendar will include a virtual art gallery a bit like the one you may remember from our London Advent Calendar a few years ago , so we needed to research paintings of Christmassy or wintry scenes by Victorian artists.

To achieve the greatest possible realism, Farquharson painted from a specially constructed mobile hut, complete with a big glass window and a stove to keep him warm. This technique certainly seems to have done the trick. Maybe for our next Christmas card we should try sending a JL artist out into the snow in a hut on wheels!

Winter, , Joseph Farquharson So we thought you might be amused to see a little of the work in progress. We love his red and white socks.

Maybe he's getting some new boots? We're not sure After a few days training off the east coast of England, Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell apparently turned out to be quite good sailors! But the scenery in the paintings which are artfully brought together to make this card is that of the south coast of Devon, where our artist Bev Pask-Hughes lives. When I asked Bev if she was keen on sailing herself, her laconic response was: "Oh no!

Too wet! Can't swim! Housman's poem "The Lent Lily":. Housman once joked rather self-deprecatingly that he always consented to having his poetry set to music "in the hope of becoming immortal somehow". But when no less a composer than Ralph Vaughan Williams had the temerity to omit a section of one poem, Housman reacted furiously: "I wonder how he would like me to cut two bars out of his music?

Our forthcoming Easter card features a brand new musical setting of The Lent Lily, sung by our young friends at Salisbury Cathedral Choir. But we have a confession: to keep the song within the one minute straitjacket of the ecard, we were forced to omit the second verse. Our apologies to AEH. If you opened your Advent Calendar on 4th December you'll have enjoyed watching Ted's fantastical ride.

And earlier today, on a beautiful sunny morning here in the glorious Georgian city of Bath, I snapped the above shot of our own magnificent example. The Bath carousel dates from Victorian times and as you can see, it's a wonderfully elaborate extravaganza of colour and light.

On a chilly Monday morning there weren't many takers for rides, but when the evening comes and the city fills with families out for a Christmas shopping trip there'll be hordes of children clamouring for a turn on the merry-go-round, followed by a sizzling sausage sandwich and a cup of hot chocolate, while their parents warm their hands on a steaming paper cup of spicy mulled wine.

What could possibly be more Christmassy? A few weeks ago the team met up on the coast of Devon to spend a few days bouncing ideas around in the search for mutual inspiration.

To that end, parked on the beach next to the hotel was something new to all of us: a sea tractor. Initial investigation showed it to be no more than a motorised platform on wheels.

Surely this clumsy-looking contraption couldn't take us all the way to Salcombe? Indeed not: it transpired that the sea tractor simply takes you down the beach and far enough into the sea to act as a mobile jetty. A little ferryboat meets the tractor at agreed times and takes you the rest of the way. Necessity is the mother of invention, and we loved the simple brilliance of the idea, and the way it reflected the resourcefulness of people for whom the sea is a daily challenge.

I don't know if the sea tractor directly inspired any new ecard ideas, but the salty air and autumnal sunshine certainly left us refreshed and ready for the Christmas rush. One of our guiding principles has always been to show that ecards do not have to be ugly cartoons accompanied by characterless music: they can be beautiful creations.

One wonders what William Morris, the most famous proponent of the Arts and Crafts movement, would have thought of electronic greeting cards. He considered production by machines to be "altogether an evil", so it's unlikely he would have embraced the digital age. On the other hand, the creation of greetings cards by individual artists exercising true skill and personal creativity seems very much akin to the movement's aims, even if the means of distribution would have been almost incomprehensible at the time.

One of the challenges involved in producing a new Advent Calendar every year is to find around 25 pieces of music to accompany each day's animation. But it's important also to bring in some completely new melodies, and this year we've looked for inspiration from a rich tradition of Christmas music from continental Europe.

But they rose magnificently to the challenge and we have a lovely recording in the can. As related below, last year we had a team get-together in Oxford, and one of the items on the agenda was to visit some great English country houses, as part of our research for the Edwardian Advent Calendar. Our newest recruit, Tom Evans, was persuaded to do the tourist thing and dress up in a suit of armour for us all to photograph.

Little did we know that this spark would light a fire in Tom's imagination which culminated in one of our most popular Halloween cards ever: Halloween Knight opens a new window. If you're ever in North Oxfordshire, we'd highly recommend a trip to Broughton Castle.

Unlike so many old houses open to the public, Broughton Castle is still a family home, and that gives it a marvellous feeling of authenticity and history. And we even met His Lordship! This enviable task fell to one of our most experienced and talented artists, Sally Lisney. Many visits ensued to fabulous old houses as far apart as Saltash in Cornwall and Blenheim in Oxfordshire.

After a few were rejected for being too old or too young, too austere or too florid, Sally chose Kingston Lacy in Dorset as her model for the main facade. As Sally says, "Kingston Lacy has long been one of my favourites. The front and rear views are based upon this beautiful house, and the entrance drive, lake and bridge are inspired by Chatsworth and Lyme Park.

Her Ladyship is of course our own Bev Pask-Hughes, who not only designed the sample arrangements, but grew nearly all the flowers and foliage in her own garden, and then painted them and scanned the paintings into her computer.

The only plants which did not come from Bev's garden were the amaryllis, which is too tender to be grown outdoors in the UK, and the mistletoe, which grows widely but is hard to get established. One of Bev's ambitions when she retires is to grow mistletoe! So for the first time this year, Bev grew chrysanthemums in her own garden, and with the help of our Advent Calendar, you can now feature her lovely white blooms in your own Christmas arrangement.

With that in mind we're encouraging people to use the hashtag: JLAdventCalendar. You can try it out right now! Lawson's friend Andrew Dukes, now commercial manager, and nephew Mike Hughes-Chamberlain, now 'technical guru', suggested setting up a business.

They invested in hardware and software and launched a sophisticated website. Lawson, who had been designing her cards slowly with a mouse, now uses a touch-sensitive tablet and stylus. Dear old ladies like me can take it up. Despite her unexpected wealth, Lawson, whose partner Malcolm Caird and niece Sally Lisney also help with the site, continues to shop at her local Tesco, though she has treated herself to a BMW.

She owns two dogs and two cats, including Chudleigh, a labrador-springer spaniel crossbreed who features in many of the cards. It's embarrassing when I have curlers in my hair. This article is more than 15 years old. Doe's paintings are sure to be sought by the discriminating collector. If you have any questions about submitting biographies, please send them to registrar askart. Share an image of the Artist.

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Ok, hide this. Jacquie Lawson is known for Greeting card design. It was meant to be a private display of her new technological prowess. After hundreds of hours hunched over the monitor -- "I don't like to let a machine beat me," Ms. Lawson says -- she had concocted an intricate, animated card that featured pets frolicking around her snow-covered cottage in the village of Lurgashall in West Sussex, England.

Exhausted, Ms. Lawson hit the send button and left for vacation in Australia. When she returned, there were 1, e-mails waiting in her inbox, nearly all from people she didn't know. The e-card had been forwarded over an Artist artworks for sale and wanted. There are 0 artworks for sale on our website by galleries and art dealers. There are 0 galleries and art dealers listing works of art by Jacquie Lawson as either "Wanted" or "For Sale". Research resources. Jacquie Lawson has 0 artist signature examples available in our database.

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