Amidst all the rather heavy news of the last months, something positive: Hungary held elections this weekend, there was a record turnout of voters and the result was the ruling party of the last sixteen years conceding power.

I decided to feature a Hungarian artist for this week’s Colori Combo, one that has a strong political link. This week’s artist is in fact recognised as the founder of political poster art, Mihály Biró.

Biró (1886-1948) was born in Budapest to a Jewish family who had recently changed their surname from Weinberger. He studied at the School of Applied Arts in Budapest and between 1908 and 1910 travelled to Munich, Berlin, and England, where he was influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement. After returning to Budapest, he became the leading graphic artist for the Hungarian Social Democratic Party’s newspaper, Népszava (The Voice of the People) where he soon began producing dramatic images that spoke directly to the working classes.

One of his early works there was the Red Man, a dramatic depiction of a muscular male figure (based on his lifelong friend, Tibor Fischer, who was a Hungarian wrestling champion) wielding an enormous sledgehammer. It became inextricably linked to the 1919 Hungarian Revolution and was widely adopted by leftist movements in Vienna, Berlin, Britain, Italy and China through the 1920s.

Cover of “Pathos in Red”, book published by MAK Design

At the end of the First World War, and after the fall of the short lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, Miklós Horthy’s fascist regime came to power and Biró fled to Austria.

Alongside his continued political work, he took on commercial commissions creating posters for business and the booming Austrian film industry. With the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, he relocated to Czechoslovakia and then to Paris, returning to Budapest one year before his death in 1948. His work influenced generations of designers across Europe and America and his legacy can been seen in many protest posters since.

Read more about Biró from the Budapest Poster Gallery here, find out about the Red Man at the MOMA here, take a look other posters here and in the Pathos in Red book here

Colours are taken from an early 1920s poster encouraging voters to back the Social Democrats. It depicts a male figure (most probably still modelled on Tibor Fischer) constructing a bridge with the wording Magyarország (Hungary).

“No Construction without Labour”, poster for the Social Democrats, Mihaly Biró, early 1920s

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Pale Orange, Denim Blue, Buff & Cadet Blue. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Know someone who might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity? Why not share this post with them?

Shapes

Along with the colour prompt I am including some shapes inspired by the artwork which you can download as a PDF and print out to use as you wish.

W15 Shapes

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This week starts with Easter Monday, I hope you’ve all got some Easter eggs.

It’s also the final days of free access to Sketchbook Revival. If you haven’t already, take a look below. There are over thirty lessons created by artists from across the world, myself included. I’d suggest signing up now and choosing one or two lessons, then if you’re finding them valuable, consider paying for continued access.

All the details

For this week’s prompt I chose a painting I find particularly charming with the pastel coloured eggs linking it to an Easter theme. The painting is called The Eggs by the artist and gardener Sir Cedric Lockwood Morris.

Morris (1889–1982) was born in Sketty, Wales where his father was an industrialist, an iron founder and a Welsh rugby international. He had quite an adventure growing up: after a formal education he failed the entrance exam for an army commission then worked on a farm in Canada and as a dishwasher in America before enrolling at the Royal College of Music to study singing. He quickly changed to art and studied at the Academie Delécluse in Paris before returning to England at the start of the First World War. Now medically boarded from military service, he spent the war years training horses for the army.

Shortly after the war, Morris met his life partner Arthur Lett-Haines and in 1920 the two moved to France where they soon became immersed in the Parisian art circles of the time, associating with the likes of Fernand Leger, Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein and Peggy Guggenheim. Morris established himself as a serious artist with numerous exhibitions and by 1930 when they returned to England he had become well recognised, although a newspaper interviewer remarked that he would rather discuss horses and dogs than talk about his art.

Moving to Suffolk, Morris was drawn to the colours of the iris and began hybridising them. Over several decades, he created dozens of new varieties such as Benton Cordelia, Cascade of Gold and Raspberry Rimmed. The horticultural world took his work seriously and his varieties are still grown today.

In 1937 Morris and Lett-Haines founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing which operated from their home and garden. It became a creative hub during the war years and a multitude of students (including Lucien Freud) learned from someone whose artistic practice extended into the garden.

Morris continued gardening and teaching there, and at the Royal College of Art until the mid-1970s. He died in 1982 and the Tate Gallery’s retrospective of his work two years later confirmed him as an artist of real significance who had expressed himself through canvas, teaching and gardening.

Read more about Morris here and (with available paintings) here. There’s more about his irises in a profile here and information specifically about The Eggs from the Tate Gallery here.

“The Eggs”, oil paint on canvas, Cedric Morris, 1944

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Plum, Soft Purple, Peach & Milk Chocolate. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Know someone who might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity? Why not share this post with them?

Shapes

Along with the colour prompt I am including some shapes inspired by the artwork which you can download as a PDF and print out to use as you wish

W14 Shapes

429KB ∙ PDF file

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We’re coming up to Easter with its traditions of eggs and rabbits. I also wanted to mention that registration is open for this year’s Sketchbook Revival Challenge happening next month. You are invited to join, I’m taking part once again and have recorded a fun pattern focussed lesson and bonus project for this event. Sketchbooks are wonderful tools to develop as an artist, and Coloricombo focusses this week on sketchbooks created by an instantly recognisable writer and illustrator.

If you’re in need of a creative spark join us and discover fresh ideas for creative projects in your sketchbook. From 11 to 21 April thirty five artists will be sharing some their favourite techniques and processes in brand new lessons that will inspire you to play and explore further.

There’s a wonderful freedom in letting marks, shapes and repetition guide us to create rhythm and patterns. In my lesson you’ll discover how patterns can become a language all their own.

Find out more and register here, there’s a free option with both extended access and a VIP bundle available as a costed option.

All the details

Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) is well known for her children’s books featuring animals such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit which she wrote and illustrated. Way before Peter Rabbit hopped onto the page, Potter had been filling sketchbooks with meticulous drawings of plants, fungi and animals. She was a keen observer of the natural world and this careful attention shaped everything she created.

Mainly home schooled by her governesses, she studied at the National Art Training School in Kensington but her real education came from watching and drawing her pets. Potter didn’t just imagine Peter, she studied real rabbits and watched how they moved, their anatomies and personalities. She drew them constantly which is why all her illustrations feel so real, even when they’re rabbits dressed in miniature waistcoats.

What I love about her approach is that she didn’t separate her art from the story itself. These weren’t just quick sketches to support the words, they were made with real care and skill. Her remarkable sketchbooks give an insight into how her work evolved from observational drawings to imaginary characters.

Over her lifetime, she wrote and illustrated twenty-eight books, including twenty-three of her Tales. Altogether they’ve sold more than 250 million copies worldwide. In later life she moved to the Lake District and became a passionate farmer and sheep breeder. Thousands of acres were left to the National Trust to protect the landscape she loved and you can still visit her farmhouse today. We were there in 2003 and I remember it well.

There’s a full documentary on Potter available here and you can see some of her sketchbooks held by the V&A Museum, including one when she was only eight, here and here.

This week’s colours come from her sketchbook when she was ten years old and shapes are taken from a selection of her drawings.

“Sketchbook”, watercolour on paper. Beatrix Potter, 1876

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Baby Blue, Mint Green, Dusty Rose & Egg Yolk. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. If you can think of someone who’d enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity please share this post with them.

Shapes

Along with the colour prompt I am including some shapes inspired by the artwork which you can download as a PDF and print out to use as you wish

W13 Shapes

424KB ∙ PDF file

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Something that’s struck me over the last four years of putting together these #coloricombo posts, is how so many talented female artists studied at the same progressive institutions in the early 20th century. Again and again, I see the numerous Academiés in Paris such as the Julien and Moderne mentioned in biographies with artists often travelling from Australia, New Zealand, the USA and other countries there.

This week’s featured artist is one who studied at a few of them, the American painter, printer and designer Blanche Lazzell (1878–1956).

Born on a West Virginia farm, she enrolled at West Virginia University then moved to New York in 1907 to study at the Art Students League under Kenyon Cox and William Merritt Chase, at the same time that Georgia O’Keeffe was there.

Lazzell’s transformation came in Paris in 1912 where she studied at the Académie Moderne under post-impressionist painters Charles Guérin and David Rosen. She returned to America in 1915, to the artist’s colony of Provincetown which was then a hub of activity for both American and European artists escaping the First World War.

At Provincetown she studied briefly with the printmaker Oliver Chaffee, asking that he teach her the recently developed technique of white-line woodcutting, known as the Provincetown Method. This was based on Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints but instead of multiple blocks, only a single block was used with incised lines separating sections on the block. These would appear white when printed, as visible in this post’s artwork.

As an aside, the Provincetown Method is credited to B.J.O. Nordfeldt. However there were five ‘other artists’ involved who aren’t usually named. They were Juliette Nichols, Ethel Mars, Maude Squire, Ada Gilmore (who married Oliver Chaffee) and Mildred McMillen. They knew each other through their love of woodblock printing and had all met in Paris! The technique had been perfected by them around 1915-16 so whilst Nordfeldt is credited with the invention, the women artists really did all the work.

Lazzell took to white-line woodcuts instantly, seeing them as the perfect medium to transfer everything she had learnt in Paris about colour and composition onto paper. She soon became a central figure in the Provincetown Printers, working out of a converted fish shack on the wharf.

Whilst many of her contemporaries achieved fame, she quietly honed her craft. She lived modestly, hosting teas and working in her incredible garden on the wharf all whilst exhibiting and earning the respect of her fellow artists. Even in her late fifties, she continued learning, studying with Hans Hofmann to explore abstraction.

These days museums and collectors are recognising Lazzell’s talent and her status as an important artist who helped establish Modernism as an American art form.

Read more information about Lazzell here and here. You can watch a lecture about her Lost Studio Garden which includes great photographs of the Provincetown art scene here.

“Star Phlox”, white line colour woodcut, Blanche Lazzell, 1930

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Mauve, Deep Purple, Olive & Peach. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Know someone who might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity? Why not share this post with them?

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Shapes

Along with the colour prompt I am including some shapes inspired by the artwork which you can download as a PDF and print out to use as you wish

W12 Shapes

376KB ∙ PDF file

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Which movie received eight nominations at the 12th Academy Awards in 1940 and won in the Cinematography (Black & White) category? Here’s a hint: it was the same year as Gone with the Wind and there’s a new remake of the same movie on track for a number of 2027 nominations. Any guesses?

The answer is Wuthering Heights, the only novel written by Emily Brontë and self published in 1847.

Wuthering Heights is also the link between cinema and this week’s featured artist, Edna Clarke Hall (1879-1979) who was born in Kent, England, She was the tenth of twelve children of Benjamin Waugh, known as the founder of the British children’s charity the NSPCC.

In 1893, aged only fourteen, she was enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art in London where she won numerous prizes and a prestigious scholarship. When her work was first accepted at the New English Art Club in 1899, it appeared alongside that of Augustus John, considered for a time the most important artist in Britain!

The artist photographed by Lizzie Caswall Smith in 1895

That same year she married William Clarke Hall, a barrister with traditional views of marriage and little interest in art. They moved from London to rural Essex where they rented a manor house which reminded Clarke Hall of the house described in Wuthering Heights. She saw parallels between her own life and that of Catherine, the protagonist in the book and began working in a makeshift studio, retreating into a fantasy world. She collected vintage clothing from London’s East End and overcame a lack of models by drawing herself or sometimes her sister Rosa, as both the ill-fated lovers, Catherine and Heathcliff. These works, all 247 of them, are among the most psychologically searching works in British art and sit at the juncture of self-portrait, illustration and performance.

After a nervous breakdown in 1919 she persuaded her husband to rent her a proper studio in Grey’s Inn and was able to reassert herself as an artist, taking printmaking classes at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and exhibiting regularly at the Redfern Gallery from 1924 onwards where her “Poem Paintings” were shown. Her husband was knighted in 1932 and died that same year, leaving her financially precarious but creatively liberated.

Her works began to enter public collections and a retrospective of her drawings was held in Manchester in 1939. Unfortunately her studio was destroyed in 1941 during the Blitz, a devastating blow which meant she started painting less and less, ceasing altogether in the early 1950s.

The largest collection of her work is now held by the Victoria & Albert Museum and you can read more about her and Brontë’s influence here. There’s a good profile from the Tate here and an article in the World of Interiors here that reminds us that Brontëmania isn’t new!

The watercolour I’ve taken colours from is from Clarke Hall’s later “Poem Paintings” that you can read about here.

“I would forget my lovings need”, ink, watercolour and gouache, Edna Clarke Hall, ~1920s

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Warm Brown, Tan, Indigo & Buff. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Know someone who might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity? Why not share this post with them?

Shapes

Along with the colour prompt I am including some shapes inspired by sketchbook drawings by Clarke Hall which you can download as a PDF and print out to use as you wish.

W11 Shapes

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We have a couple of days left on our break in the Western Cape of South Africa and are spending time in the wine regions around Stellenbosch and Franschhoek. We visited the Spier estate yesterday and this week’s #coloricombo inspiration comes from an artwork depicting one of the buildings on the estate, designed with the iconic gables of the Cape Dutch architectural style.

William Mitcheson Timlin (1892-1943) was born in Northumberland, England, the son of a colliery fireman which isn’t the most obvious background for one of South Africa’s most imaginative and multifaceted artists.

Timlin won a scholarship to the Armstrong College of Art in Newcastle, England and in 1912 travelled with his parents to Kimberley, South Africa, at that point described the Diamond Capital of the World which was then transitioning away from it’s rough and lawless reputation with the closing of the Big Hole open cast mine in 1914 and the consolidation of deep level mines under the De Beers Corporation.

Timlin completed his studies in art and architecture and never left, making Kimberley his permanent home and the place where he would build one of the most extraordinary creative careers of the early twentieth century.

As an architect, Timlin’s influences are all over South Africa’s cultural fabric. He designed several major buildings in Kimberley including the hospital, high schools and war memorial and went on to contribute interior designs to some of the country’s most celebrated theatres including the Alhambra in Cape Town and the Colosseum in Johannesburg, both considered architectural landmarks of their day. He also founded the Art Section of Kimberley’s Athenaeum Club in 1914 and designed the first cover of the Outspan magazine, illustrating many of its stories.

Alongside his architectural practice he produced a remarkable body of watercolours, oils, pastels, etchings and fantastical illustrations - dreamlike, intricate worlds of fairies, goblins, celestial landscapes and otherworldly architecture. In 1921 he began work on a fantasy book, primarily as a diversion for his son. Over two years it expanded into forty eight pages of handwritten text, each one with a colour plate that showcased his extraordinary imagination and skill as a watercolourist.

The book titled The Ship that Sailed to Mars was published in 1923 and has become a fantasy classic, with the publisher so captivated by the illustrations and calligraphic text that they printed it without any further typesetting.

Timlin died in Kimberley in 1943 leaving behind an incomplete second book The Building of a Fairy City. A collection of his works were acquired by the De Beers Company and donated to the William Humphreys Art Gallery in Kimberley, the gallery that took over from Timlin’s own Athenaeum Club.

Read more about Timlin’s book here or watch a brief video showing it’s illustrations here, about the Athenaeum Collection here and available works here.

“Cape Dutch Building (Spier, Stellenbosch)”, watercolour on silk laid on board, William Mitcheson Timlin, date unknown

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Mid Blue, Pale Olive, Biscuit & Clay Ground. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Know someone who might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity? Why not share this post with them?

Shapes

Along with the colour prompt I am including some building shapes inspired by the designs seen on the packaging of our wine purchase yesterday, you can download these as a PDF and print out to use as you wish.

W10 Shapes

334KB ∙ PDF file

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For a late winter break we travelled to the Western Cape region of South Africa and are basing ourselves in False Bay, the Indian Ocean side of the Cape Peninsula. For me, this is an ideal place to recharge, take time to think up ideas and get inspired.

For this week’s post I wanted to feature a South African female artist and discovered one that is completely new to me - I really like her work as a multifaceted artist. Eleanor Esmonde-White (1914-2007) was born in Dundee in the British Colony of Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal), South Africa. Her studies began in 1932 at the University of Natal, followed by a scholarship from the renowned colonial architect Sir Herbert Baker to the Royal College of Art in London and then the British School in Rome where she studied murals.

In 1938 she was commissioned, together with fellow student Le Roux Smith Le Roux, to create a mural in the new South Africa House building on Trafalgar Square, designed by Baker. The resulting artwork, People of Heaven, took four years to complete! It extended around all four walls of the room and depicted the customs, rites and ceremonies of the AmaZulu people.

Returning to South Africa, Esmonde-White joined the New Group, a progressive collective of South African artists founded by Gregoire Boonzaier, and began exhibiting work that challenged the conservative tastes of the day. In 1949 she took up a lecturing position at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, where she established the Department of Design and taught for over a decade. She was also carrying out major public commissions throughout this period: a mosaic for the Cape Province Library, a tapestry for the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town and murals for the Artscape Theatre among them.

Her work centred almost entirely on women - painting them at leisure, at work, in peasant communities and on beaches - with a warm palette of reds, oranges and pinks. Her heavily stylised figures have a quiet, humanist quality to them: timeless rather than dramatic. Primarily an oil painter, she also produced woodcuts and works on paper that are particularly sought after.

Esmonde-White went on to exhibit at the São Paulo Biennale twice — in 1957 and 1961 — and at the Venice Biennale in 1964, bringing South African art onto the international stage at a difficult time in history. Her work is held in the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town and in numerous important collections.

See current Esmonde-White works available at auction here, read about her Festival of Britain mural here and take a look at her published biography here.

“Two Figures in a Wooded Landscape”, oil on canvas, Eleanor Esmonde-White, date unknown

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Iron Oxide, Purple Grey, Yellow Ochre & Heather. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Know someone who might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity? Why not share this post with them?

Shapes

Along with the colour prompt I am including some shapes inspired by the artwork which you can download as a PDF and print out to use as you wish

W09 Shapes

437KB ∙ PDF file

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Windowsill Workshop

For contributing subscribers, I’ve put together a video that shows the processes of stamping on different sized sketchbooks and on watercolour paper. Blocking off techniques are also incorporated to create interesting elements to the florals. By cutting up and folding smaller shapes of cardboard you can explore further. Stamping is a way to create shapes to be worked on in a fast and spontaneous way.

Below are three larger square sketchbook pages with shapes stamped in rows, ready to become florals.

Examples of smaller sketchbook stamped florals. These basic shapes can be expanded upon later.

Video and downloadable PDFs for contributing subscribers follows.

Read more

For this week’s #coloricombo I’m featuring a simple floral sketch by an artist loved and revered in her native Finland but not that well known outside of it.

Back in 2019 I went to see a large retrospective of Helene Schjerfbeck’s work at the Royal Academy in London. The exhibition focussed on her portraits, in particular a series of self-portraits that she’s most recognised for. I would like to do a more in depth post where I will feature Schjerfbeck as part of a month long focus on self portraits later in the year.

Last Saturday, I did a live workshop with Windowsill Workshops, hosted by Margo Tantau titled Imaginary Florals in Mixed Media. The workshop is around two and a half hours long with a focus on using simple materials to create unusual florals. If you missed it, you can still signup for the recording here.

Windowsill Workshop

Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946) was born just outside Helsinki, then an autonomous part of the Russian Empire, her life story is quite poignant.

She was just four when a bad fall left her with a permanent limp. At age eleven she enrolled at the Finnish Art Society School of Drawing. She went on to study and exhibit in Paris and was awarded numerous scholarships that allowed her to explore the artists communities of Brittany, France and St. Ives, England.

It was there that she painted The Convalescent which was described by the New York Times as reportedly the single most famous painting in Finland. She exhibited across Europe and taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki before stepping back from the wider art world in 1902 to care for her ailing mother, who would live for another twenty one years!

During that time she painted still lives and landscape paintings alongside portraits of her mother, local school girls, women workers and self-portraits. Her work took on a unique character: simplified forms, muted palettes and underpainting all with a Modernist twist.

A major retrospective in Helsinki in the 1930s kept her in the public eye and today her work hangs in the Finnish National Gallery and collections internationally with an exhibition at the Metropolitan in New York having just opened. Her birthday, 10 July, is celebrated in Finland as the National Day for the Painted Arts.

Watch a video from the recent Schjerfbeck exhibition titled Seeing Silence at The Met above and read more about her here. I’ve included an article about the Royal Academy exhibition I attended here.

“Small Lillies”, gouache on paper, Helene Schjerfbeck, 1942

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Dusty Pink, Vermillion, Parchment & Mud. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Know someone who might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity? Why not share this post with them?

Shapes

Along with the colour prompt I am including some shapes inspired by the artwork which you can download as a PDF and print out to use as you wish.

W08 Shapes

158KB ∙ PDF file

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Imaginary florals are on my mind this week and for our Coloricombo prompt I’m sharing the story of an outsider female artist. But first let me tell you about the live workshop that will happen this coming Saturday.

A few years back I did a folk-inspired,online live painting session with Windowsill workshops, hosted by the amazing Margo Tantau. I’m back with a brand new flower-inspired project that will cover stamping, printing and layering using simple materials and water based mixed media. 

The workshop will take place on Saturday 21 February at 11am San Francisco time (2pm New York, 7pm London, 8pm Berlin, 11pm Dubai then 3am Singapore and 6am Sydney, both on Sunday).

Can’t make the live workshop?  No problem, you can also sign up for the video recording that will be shared with you afterwards.

All the info

In case you missed my general newsletter I want to remind you about the February discount offer! All my listed courses and online store products are reduced for a limited time.

Get 20% off all my online courses here (use code CREATIVE20) and 20% off limited edition prints and silk scarves in my online shop here This offer expires on 21 February.

To tie in with this forthcoming Workshop I’m featuring colours from an artist who created rather unusual, imaginary floral artworks.

Anna Zemánková (1908-1986) was born in Olomouc, in the Moravian region of the current Czech Republic. She was a budding artist as a child, but ended up training as a dental technician before marrying an army officer in 1933. The next twenty-odd years were spent as a housewife, raising three sons and an adopted daughter.

When Anna was fifty, one of her children found an old suitcase filled with her early paintings and suggested for her to start drawing again.

She followed the suggestion in a rather unusual way, waking up at 3am and drawing for a few hours in an almost trance-like state whilst listening to classical music - Bach or Janáček. By 7am she’d finish and put away her creations of swirling, imaginary botanical creations: alien flowers, underwater plants, and strange organisms in pastel ink, and ballpoint pen, before starting her household chores.

Zemánková exhibited locally in Prague during the 1960s under Soviet rule and held her first open house in 1964. In the 1970s she started adding embroidery, collage and beadwork, layering texture onto her already intricate compositions, the precision learnt as a dental technician was evident in the way she made art. She said that her plants were “more beautiful than nature had ever created.”

International recognition came about in 1979 when she was included in the Outsiders Exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London. Zemánková suffered from depression and was very ill with complications from having diabetes, but continued to work until her death. In the following years, her work appeared at the Venice Biennale (2013 and 2024) and is held by the Centre Pompidou and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. She’s now recognised as one of the most important figures of art brut (aka outsider art), quite an achievement for someone who focussed on creating their own imaginary worlds before breakfast.

Read more about the artist here and see upcoming auctions (there’s currently three of her works at Christies) here. You can also watch a watch a video showing a retrospective exhibition here.

“Untitled”, pastel, India ink, ballpoint and embroidery on paper, Anna Zemánková, ~1970s

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Lavender, Sand, Maroon & Hot Pink. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Know someone who might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity? Why not share this post with them?

Shapes

Along with the colour prompt I am including some shapes inspired by the artwork which you can download as a PDF and print out to use as you wish.

W06 Shapes

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It’s my birthday this week, I had a browse for artists born on the same day which led me to discover the Belgium impressionist Anna-Rosalie Boch (Anna Boch) (1848-1936).

Boch was was born on the tenth of February into a wealthy family, involved in porcelain manufacture since 1748. Maybe you have recognised the surname already: Anna’s father, Frédéric Victor Boch, was the co-founder of the faience porcelain factory Boch Frères-Kéramis in La Louvière while her uncle, Eugene von Boch, merged his business to create the German company Villeroy & Boch.

The arts were important to the Boch family: her brother Eugène painted and her cousin Octave was an art critic. Anna herself was a skilled pianist and painter who trained under Isidore Verheyden. She experimented with Pointillism but is best known for her Impressionist landscapes of Belgian countryside and Mediterranean scenes. Her talent led to her becoming the only female member of the progressive Belgian art group, Les Vingt.

Having said all of that, Boch is unfairly remembered more as an avid art collector with a keen eye for talent. She bought works by Paul Gauguin, Paul Signac and James Ensor and even owned Vincent van Gogh’s The Red Vineyard, believed be the only ever painting that he sold in his lifetime.

Boch knew Van Gogh through her brother and acquired the painting in 1890 for four hundred francs (around $2,000 today) at a Les Vingt exhibition. Apparently Van Gogh was embarrassed that she had paid the full sticker prices when she should have gotten a ‘friend’s discount’. It’s now estimated to be worth over $100m and is held by the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

Boch never married and when she died in 1936 she left her own paintings to her god child (her gardener’s daughter) and her collection was sold with proceeds used to support retired artists, many of whom Boch had championed over the years. She deserves to be remembered for much more than her Van Gogh!

Read more about Boch here and here and about The Red Vineyard here.

“Wheat Sheaves in a Summer Landscape”, oil on panel, Anna Boch, date unknown

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Caramel, Banana, Sap Green & Dove Grey. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Share this post with someone who might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity.

Shapes

Along with the colour prompt I am including some shapes from her Pointillist painting which you can download as a PDF and print out.

W06 Shapes

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This week’s Coloricombo prompt is coming to you from Birmingham, England where I am exhibiting designs and repeat patterns at the Licensing Lab of the Springfair 2026. This is also the place where I’m launching my brand new wallpaper collection, manufactured in England and available on rolls online.

Wallpapers

Week Five’s prompt is inspired by a company with a history of over 150 years. During the late 18th and 19th centuries, Birmingham was known as the workshop of the world and was a leading city of the Industrial Revolution. It was renowned for diverse, small-scale workshop production especially in metalwork which included jewellery, buttons, toys, pens and guns.

Birmingham was also the home of Joseph Hudson and his company J Hudson & Co, which became the worlds largest whistle manufacturer, and they still are.

Whistles themselves have been around for thousands of years with the oldest known one held in the amazing Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, 10,000 years old and made from bone.

Whistles have been used by the Greeks to keep slaves rowing their galleys in stroke and by the English during the Crusades to signal orders to archers. They’ve been made from whatever was to hand: bone, wood, shells and gourds.

How Hudson invented the modern whistle was a combination of poor grip and a police contract. The story goes that he managed to drop the violin he was playing, producing a dissonant sound that just couldn’t be ignored. He tried to replicate the sound, one that would pierce through the noise of a Victorian street and came up the whistle eventually adopted by the Metropolitan Police in 1883. The following year he invented the Acme Thunderer, the first pea whistle, by adding a small cork ball to the whistle chamber. This became the world’s best selling whistle, with total production to date of over one billion.

Have a look at the Acme website here (we use their whistles most days to recall our dogs on walks) and find out about the history of the Acme Thunderer here, including it’s use on the Titanic. You can read about J. Hudson & Co. here and listen to a quick podcast about iconic designs here.

The Coloricombo colours are sourced from a trade mark certificate for the Acme Siren, issued in 1917.

“United States Trademark Certificate”, paper, wax and ribbon, from Acme Whistles website, 1917

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Bright Orange, Air Force Blue, Calico & Oxford Blue. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Share this post with someone who might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity.

Shapes

This week’s shapes are sourced from Popular Science Montly, Volume 33 published in 1888.

Taking the outline I noticed how they appear like comical head profiles, reminding me a little of John Tenniel’s engraved illustration for Alice in Wonderland.

I couldn’t resist adding white dots to represent eyes!

Download the shapes as a PDF below and use it as you choose, maybe as background elements or cut the shapes out and rearrange them. I love seeing what you create and post in the Facebook Group. Keep them coming.

W05 Shapes

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January has been a busy month for me (I’ll show you what I’ve been working on in February). This week I am sharing a post from the #coloricombo archives, Week Four of 2024. I love the soft and warm colour combination of the print by the artist Sheila Robinson, so am featuring it once again.

Contributing subscribers have access to a fifteen minute demo where I show how High Chroma watercolours are mixed with Designer gouache to create the chosen colours.

Remember that contributing subscribers also have full access to all the archives on Substack (which go back to 2023). Here’s the link to the original post.

This week’s Coloricombo prompt is inspired by an artwork of the English artist, printmaker and illustrator, Sheila Robinson.

Robinson (1925-1988) was born in Nottinghamshire, attending the Nottingham School of Art and the Royal College of Art. There she studied under the tutorage of Edward Bawden, assisting him with his large mural for 1951’s Festival of Britain.

Whilst studying, Robinson married the artist Bernard Cheese. They had two children and after their divorce Robinson moved with the children to Great Bardfield in 1957 where she joined a thriving art community of mostly printmakers. Robinson was a skilled printmaker herself and often worked in the distinctive medium of cardboard cut prints, producing a well known body of work based on local street scenes.

Throughout her career Robinson undertook a wide range of commercial commissions, including a series of stamps for the Post Office in 1966 and again in 1970. She produced advertising posters for the BBC and for London Transport and provided illustrations for books including D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and The Oxford Illustrated Old Testament.

Her freelance work comprising illustrations and prints were exhibited at the Royal Academy and other London galleries. Robinson taught at the Royal College of Art who, after her death, created the Sheila Robinson Drawing Prize in her honour

A modest and unassuming artist, she is now principally remembered for her distinctive and beautiful prints which reflect the interest and humour with which she viewed the world.

Read more about Robinson here and from the Fry Gallery in Great Bardfield here.

“Monkton Combe, Somerset’, coloured linocut and card print, Sheila Robinson, 1964 (© Estate of Sheila Robinson)

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Green Gold, Peach, Soft Grey & Taupe. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Share this post with someone who might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity.

Shapes

There are beautiful shapes in the featured artwork, I picked out a few, have a look and find some more to inspire new ideas. Download the shapes as a PDF and use it as you choose, maybe as background elements or cut the shapes out and rearrange them. I love seeing what you create with the shapes and post in the Facebook Group. Keep them coming.

W04 Shapes

480KB ∙ PDF file

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Demo

Contributing subscribers can watch a sixteen minute long demonstration of this painting where, I also demonstrate the mixing of colours. It’s done in my sketchbook on 300gm cold pressed watercolour paper.

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My thanks once again to everyone who’s joined Coloricombo as a contributing subscriber: you make this weekly newsletter possible.

If you’re joining up, please do so from your computer or a browser on your mobile device (e.g. Safari, Chrome etc.) and not directly through the Substack App if you use it.

Reason is that Apple adds their own ‘tax’, a rather unethical 30% to purchases that go through ‘their’ apps so you just end up paying more. I found this out recently when I tried to setup a Facebook advert on my iPhone so this doesn’t just apply to subscribing to my Substack. Oh and Google does the same. For more info, read here.

Lill Tschudi (1911-2004) was a Swiss printmaker and a Modernist whose bold, dynamic linocuts captured the technological and industrial changes of 20th century. Born in Schwanden, a small village in the east of Switzerland, she discovered linocuts after seeing an exhibition by Austrian artist Norbertine Bresslern-Roth.

After finishing schooling, Tschudi moved to London to attend the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, studying under the charismatic Claude Flight from 1929 to 1930. His approach to linocut shaped Tschudi’s work profoundly with cuts depicting motion and speed, ideal to depict the rapidly changing Europe of the Machine Age. Her subject matter included city life, workers on electricity pylons and the London Underground depitched in colour with an almost kinetic energy.

After London, Tschudi spent five years in Paris studying with some of the well known Modernists: André Lhote, Gino Severini and Fernand Léger. These influences deepened her work and she turned her attention to Parisian themes of jazz bands and circus performers. In 1935, she returned to Schwanden where she remained for the rest of her life, producing over 355 linocuts in her career with many of these depicting the physical exertion of sportsmen and women: skiers, gymnasts and runners.

It wasn’t until 1986 that Switzerland recognised Tschudi’s achievements and awarded her their national print prize. Her work is now held in major collections worldwide with the largest at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

See more examples of Tshudi’s work here and here and read more about her here.

“Bells”, coloured linocut print, Lill Tschudi, 1937

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Rust, Cielo Blue, Parchment & Taupe. Use the colours along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Share this post with someone who likes colour and might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity.

Shapes

Here’s this week’s shape, inspired by some of the elements I found in Lill Tschudi’s linocuts. Download it as a PDF and use it as you choose, maybe as background elements or cut the shapes out and rearrange them.

W03 Shape

432KB ∙ PDF file

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Here’s some more sketchbook drawings that I’ve been doing with the same letters, in the colour palettes of Week One and Two.

For contributing subscribers, there’s a quick video demo where the whole word J O Y is turned upside down the and letter shapes are incorporated in curved stems of plant shapes.

I really enjoyed working with the limitations and keeping it really simple. You can download the template I used below.

Joy Letters

234KB ∙ PDF file

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Next up is the five minute video demonstration for contributing subscribers.

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New for 2026 - Find this week’s shapes at the bottom of the post!

Barbara Hepworth’s birthday has just past (10 January) and she happens to be the second artist I featured when the Coloricombo weekly prompts first started back in January 2022. That prompt’s colours came from one of her series of Hospital Drawings from the late 1940s.

For this week’s Coloricombo prompt the the colours are selected from one of Hepworth’s wall based artworks rather than one of her iconic sculptures.

Hepworth (1903-1975) was born in Wakefield, England and was one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th century. She attended Leeds School of Art together another Yorkshire born sculptor, Henry Moore, beginning a friendship and rivalry that would shape both their careers.

‘Perhaps what one wants to say is formed in childhood and the rest of one’s life is spent trying to say it. I know that all I felt during the early years of my life in Yorkshire is dynamic and constant in my life today.’

- Barbara Hepworth

After studying at the Royal College of Art in London and a scholarship learning stone carving in Italy, her work became entirely abstract and in 1931 she sculpted her first pierced figure, a characteristic synonymous with both her own and Moore’s future work.

In 1939, Hepworth moved to St Ives in Cornwall with the artist Ben Nicholson and their children. The Cornish landscape became central to her work and she stated that all my sculpture comes out of landscape. Their studios became a haven for artists during the Second World War and was the basis for the modern art movement the St. Ives School.

The Hospital Drawings series I mentioned earlier came about after Hepworth’s daughter was hospitalised in 1944. She struck up a friendship with the surgeon Norman Capener who invited her to attend surgical procedures. Between 1947 and 1949 she produced nearly eighty drawings of operating rooms in chalk, ink and pencil.

The couple moved to Trewyn Studios in St. Ives in 1949 where Hepworth would work until her death. During the 1950s, her reputation grew exponentially when she exhibited at the Venice Biennale, won prizes internationally and began working on monumental public commissions.

Hepworth was made a Dame in 1965, and at the time of her tragic death (a fire at her studio caused by a cigarette) in 1975 was regarded as the world’s greatest woman sculptor. Her studio is now the Barbara Hepworth Museum and is run by Tate.

‘I rarely draw what I see. I draw what I feel in my body.’

- Barbara Hepworth

Read more about Hepworth here and here. There’s an article about how the landscape of Yorkshire influenced both Moore and Hepworth here.

“Forms in Space”, pencil, gouache and crayon on board, Barbara Hepworth 1946

Colour Combination

The colours this week are Pistachio, Heather, Grey Blue & Deep Olive. Use the colours along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Share this post with someone who likes colour and might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity.

Shapes

This year I started to add a shape to the weekly prompts for some extra inspiration. Here’s this week’s, inspired by a Hepworth sculptural piece called Three Forms in Echelon from 1961. Use it as you choose. You can download it as a PDF below.

W02 Shapes

605KB ∙ PDF file

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It is fun to see what you create with the prompts, thank you for sharing your creations. If you’re posting on Instagram, please tag #coloricombo and #estemacleod and join us in the private Facebook group Creative Prompts.

Please read to the end to download this week’s shapes, new for 2026.

Graphic Designer… Did anyone answer W.A. Dwiggins? It was William Addison Dwiggins (1880-1956) who came up with the title graphic designer in 1922. Prior to that, artists in the discipline worked under a multitude of mostly generic titles so Dwiggins described himself as a graphic designer to try and explain his skillset and the many genres he worked in - a pioneer of advertising, magazine and book design.

Aside from his memorable name, I was struck by photographs of Dwiggins I found whilst putting together this week’s profile - he had a good sense of humour and just looks like such a fun, mischievous character.

“It is not overly legible. It has no grace. Gothic capitals are indispensable, but there are no good Gothic capitals.”

- W.A. Dwiggins

Born in Ohio USA, Dwiggins studied with the legendary printer, artist and type designer Frederic Goudy (most remembered for the font Copperplate Gothic!). He started out doing advertising and lettering work but a diabetes diagnosis in 1922 changed everything. Back then diabetes was often fatal and Dwiggins decided to give up “the more banal kind of advertising”, instead focussing on books and type design.

What set Dwiggins apart was his incredible range. He was once described as a calligrapher, type designer, typographer, a technician in many untrodden ways of illustration and decoration, notable book designer, puppeteer and an authority on puppeteer joints”. He designed 329 books for Alfred A. Knopf, seventeen of which were chosen as AIGA selections, and he brought a boldness and an ornamental feel to book design that brought in Art Deco and Oriental styles.

“Ornament is a music of space”

- W.A. Dwiggins

You’ve probably read something set in one of his many typefaces recently - he designed the popular fonts Caledonia, Electra, Eldorado and Metro.

Read more about Dwiggins from AIGA here. There’s an article about his recently published biography here and you can see all of his AIGA nominations here. There’s also a very interesting article about his lost typefaces here.

“Modern Color”, book cover designed by W.A. Dwiggins, 1923

“Layout in AdvertisingM”, book cover designed by W.A. Dwiggins, 1928

Colour Combination

The colours this week are taken from two books covers as they’re both monochromatic. They are Jade, Chocolate Brown, Sand & Vat Orange. Use the colours along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Share this post with someone who likes colour and might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity.

It is fun to see what you create with the prompts, thank you for sharing your creations. If you’re posting on Instagram, please tag #coloricombo and #estemacleod and join us in the private Facebook group Creative Prompts.

New for 2026… Shapes

2026 has started and this is also the beginning of the fifth year of the Coloricombo creative prompts program. On 1 January I shared a post about how Coloricombo came about along with future plans.

A fresh colour palette will be shared every Monday, and to add some extra inspiration some shapes are thrown in as well to compliment a little story about a past artist, designer or inspiring event.

Using letters to start drawings is something I’ve been teaching in my online courses over the last decade, and three of them have been added in this prompt, the letters J O Y.

Joy

234KB ∙ PDF file

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Print out the sheet or use your own letters, use these shapes as you like. Have a look at the live demo I did on 3 January where the letters are handy anchor points for sketchbook doodling.

Welcome!

A very special welcome to all of my new subscribers and a big thank you to everyone who’s a contributing subscriber, old or new. I’ve said it before, but you help to make this happen: Coloricombo wouldn’t work without your support.

Subscribe now

UPDATE* Apologies for late start, some technical issues, a recent phone upgrade shifted my account on the Substack app to my personal one, not Coloricombo, and this is where I started to record before realising something is wrong. The recording can be seen posted above.

London 3pm GMT, Berlin 4pm CET, Dubai 7pm GST, Singapore 11pm SGT, Sydney 2am +1 AEDT, San Francisco 7am PST and New York 10am EST

Starting the year with a bit of slow Saturday drawing. Join me on Substack at 3pm London time on Saturday 3 January for a bit of art making using the letters J O Y as shapes for a little Let’s Play session.

Come as you are, bring a sketchbook, extra paper and a pair of scissors along with drawing instruments and let’s see what unfolds.

The session will be recorded for replay.

Hope to see you there!

Happy New year to you, join me on Saturday 3 January 3pm London time for a live session of art making to start the year on a colourful note

As we enter the fifth year of Coloricombo, I’d like to stop for a moment to reflect and to share the story of how it came about. Let me start by reintroducing myself - I’m Esté MacLeod, the creator and curator of this ongoing program built around colours and creativity.

I’m a professional artist, designer and educator based in England, a curious creative with a maximalist mindset and a deep love of colour. Creativity is a powerful force: its been my joy to research processes and explore different techniques to be incorporated into online courses with the aim to help others to embrace their own creativity and develop their unique artistic voice.

Colour is my Jam

Playing with colours is fun, everyone has their own personal favourite colours. They affect our mood and have the ability to move us. Colours can energise us or bring feelings of comfort and my philosophy is that they can also be an effective catalyst for creativity.

From Instagram to Substack

The concept of colour prompts started out as occasional monthly challenges on Instagram way back in 2017 and the colour prompts on this post are from that period.

The first dedicated Coloricombo challenge happened on Instagram in September of 2021, when I curated fifteen, two-colour palettes over a month that was co-hosted with Lori Siebert. The response was huge and the positive feedback was the reason I made the leap to turn it into a year long program in January 2022.

On a weekly basis, I selected a fresh colour palette and an artwork by an artist from the past, along with a short backstory. Whilst doing research into past artists, I became aware of how female artists were regularly overlooked and under represented in the past (and still are) so my emphasis over the last two years has been to share the stories of female artists.

Added to the prompts, there’s been occasional videos such as colour mixing demos and to date, over two hundred colour palettes have been shared and emailed to subscribers every Monday.

Coloricombo 2025

Over the last year I shifted the focus to include more random inspirations for colour palettes. Like in June, when I featured the colours and shapes of beach pebbles found on the Isle of Arran in Scotland, one of the most popular post of 2025!

In 2025 I’ve continued to highlighting past artists and historical artworks but also started including some contemporaneous posts like the architect Frank Gehry’s passing and that audacious jewellery heist at the Louvre.

Thanks for coming along on this journey! I’m proud that Coloricombo has consistently been in Substack’s Top 50 Art & Illustration rankings. That’s entirely down to you, the readers, subscribers and especially the contributing members who make this possible.

Fresh Ideas for Coloricombo

It’s time for an annual refresh and here’s what I’ll be adding:

• More colours

  • Weekly palettes will still go out every Monday with a slight change to the current format: instead of the four colours you’re used to I won’t be sticking to that rigidly. They’ll be varied, between two and five (or even more) colours depending on where inspiration comes from.

• More shapes

  • Yes! Since the post in June where I used beach pebbles as inspiration to create florals (Pebbles and Petals) and even for horse shapes, I’ve been working behind the scenes to create a vocabulary of shapes for you all to use along with your Coloricombo colours.

• More mindfulness

  • Last year I intended to do a few slow-paced live Zoom sessions but the year ran away from me. In 2026 I’m looking to add colour-focussed live sessions with an emphasis on slower art making with layered shapes, creating in a mindful way. I’ve three dates pencilled in already and will be sharing more information soon.

How This Actually Works

Full disclosure time! Coloricombo developed from a bright idea into an ongoing labour of love with the weekly prompts put together by myself with Niall (my partner) doing the technical work and making things look pretty.

There’s no team behind the scenes, no virtual assistants churning out content. As a self-employed creative, authenticity matters to me.

Every week, I research and select an image with fresh colours and write the content about the artist or topic. As I mentioned, lesser known female artists from the past have taken priority - I feel compelled to do this and my plan is to continue in this way.

Putting the program together takes a lot of time and dedication - I love doing it but the reality is that I spend around 160 hours per year on Coloricombo, almost four working weeks per year, This covers the the prompts themselves then video demo recordings and Substack live sessions.

So it’s a BIG huge thank you to all of my contributing subscribers. You help to make this happen, without your support I wouldn’t be able to commit this amount of time to Coloricombo.

Giving back to this incredible creative community through shared colours, processes and techniques is important to me. My philosophy is simple: help people feel more creative because it brings joy! That’s always been one of my core aims and it’s what keeps me motivated.

But here’s the reality: these posts reach around 8,000 creatives and colour-curious recipients every week, with less than three in a hundred (3%) contributing subscribers. If you’ve been considering supporting Coloricombo, I’d really appreciate it. Pricing for 2026 remains at $9 per month or $90 per year in your local currency - that’s way less than a weekly coffee!

What Contributing Subscribers Receive

The more support Coloricombo gets, the more time I can dedicate to it and the better it becomes for everyone. If you are in a position to contribute, here’s what you’ll get extra:

• Full access to the archives

  • Including several hours of live colour mixing demos plus full access to everything from 2024 and 2025.

• Behind the scenes

  • Additional information about my favourite tools and materials.

• Discount offers

  • A 30% discount on any Zoom live Let’s Play classes (three to be scheduled for 2026)

  • Ongoing 20% discount off any of my listed and new online courses.

  • There’s 20% off all limited edition giclée prints and silk scarves in my online shop.

• My gratitude!

  • And my commitment that Coloricombo will remain a quality weekly newsletter, posted here weekly and free for everyone.

I look forward to share colour and creativity with you in the coming year!