Its's a jungle in here!

Happy New Year to you all. I am blasting off into 2009 with new art images for your children's walls, all will be unveiled on my websites- CarlaDaly.com and CarlaDaly.co.uk in the following months. I will keep you posted! So, enjoy the first day of the New Year and I hope all your heads aren't too sore!!!

Just to let you know, we are having a sale on both sites - CarlaDaly.com and CarlaDaly.co.uk. Up to 25% off! A great way to decorate your kids room, with some fun, affordable art! Both these prints are available at a 25% discount on both of my sites. We are trying to inject some fun into these recessionary times!

I would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! People have been encouraging me to start a blog for a long time, and I have to say I am delighted I have. It has been fun writing about my art and I am delighted to see so many people are enjoying it. A Merry Christmas to you all and I hope it is a good one! It has been a busy year for me at CarlaDaly.com and CarlaDaly.co.uk. I would like to thank all my customers for shopping on my site and I hope your little ones enjoy their Carla Daly Christmas gifts.

I have illustrated a lot of children's books. My inspiration for my work was from many English and American children's book illustrators. I love Babette Cole, Quentine Blake, Richard Scarry, Ronald Searle, Maurice Sendak and many more children's artists. I remember in college looking at their work and thinking about my work being published one day. This was a dream! Well, I was published and a little book I did with an American writer, Brad Herzog, was Max the monster, I still enjoy this book and loved illustrating it. It is about a little monster that meets an imaginary friend, a little boy, they play together on the beach. Of course, Max's family don't believe him that humans exist, but Max knows better!

I came across Ritzenhoff glasses when travelling in Europe, I thought they were amazing! A few years later I was asked to design a children's milk glass for Ritzenhoff. I was very excited to be designing for this massive company. The brief arrived and what a design brief it was! They really know their design and this brief was like nothing I had seen before, pure style! A sample glass arrived with little booklets of different products they produce, and a very detailed explanation of how the design should be layed out. They want to encourage kids to drink milk, they like the milk in the glass to show through the design. I designed a group of hippos surfing and the milk can be seen through the surf in the sea and the clouds behind the hippos. My milk glass design was printed and looked great! They work on a royalty basis which was fine. My only complaint is, they ask lots of designers to submit ideas and most of them are rejected, they don't pay for this, and unlike Thr...

I love Etsy, some of the work there is fantastic. I did register and add some products but it is a site you would want to be working on full time, adding products and promoting them. My two websites already keep me very busy so Etsy just hasn't evolved for me. It leads me into my hand painted products as Etsy would have been a great place to exhibit and sell them, unfortunately it didn't exist then. I have hand painted- T-shirts, door knobs, vases, greeting cards, chairs, and toilet seats, yes, loo seats! In the early nineties Ireland wasn't exactly a hot bed for designer goods, but one lady had set up a designer interior shop called - Presents Of Mind. It probably was one of the first of its kind in Dublin. I had hand painted some vases and plates as gifts for friends and had such a good response, I thought I would produce them as a product to sell. I approached Presents Of Mind and, bingo, I had my first order. Nothing sold for six weeks and she was about to ask me...

I came across Threadless a year ago and I think it is a great idea and a great website. It would have been fun to have had something like this when I left college. Anyway, it must have been my blog that inspired me, (talking about my T-shirts) I entered some designs into Threadless. I have many designs that I am not doing much with and I thought it would be fun to get some feedback on them. The idea of Threadless is you enter your T-shirt design, people vote for it and leave comments. This is a little scary as they are pretty honest. When the voting ends and if you get a high score your image will be printed, the Threadless team pay you for this of course! I have to add, you would want to spend some time on your entries as there is some serious competition on this site, but it is a great way for a young artist to have their work viewed.

Early in my career I had an obsession or maybe I should say a fetish for.... yes, cows! Coming from Ireland you see a lot of cows, as I love to mountain walk I have encountered a few cows in my time. Ireland is very green and I love the black and white contrast of the cows against the greenness of the Irish countryside. My first successful cow image was an illustration called "Two Cows In A Field" and it was an illustration of just that, two cows in a field! Unfortunately I don't have that image but here are a few other cow designs I have done. There have been vases, candles, door signs , t-shirts, posters, wrapping paper and ...... Cow Parade . This cow now sits in the Children's Hospital in Crumlin, Dublin. It is really nice to know that kids are getting enjoyment out of it. This image above is a lovely print, it sells on my website I add baby's birth details to the print by hand. It is a great gift for newborn babies.

I laugh at some of the things I have done over the years with my work. I had left college to a fairly bleak Irish economy, I had an agent in London and was illustrating children's books. I loved this but there was always a burning ambition to sell my own product. At this stage I had no knowledge of selling to the public or mass production, but had a feeling that to produce and sell my work would be fun. So, I set up Wartissmus. These were hand painted T-shirts with hand sewn adornments on them. Yes, they were WILD! I worked again with Joyce Daly and we started to sell our T-shirts from the Design Center in Dublin. It was such fun and we sold lots of T-shirts. People loved them, it was great. Unfortunately all good things must come to an end and it was our success that brought us to this point. All our products were hand done and we just couldn't keep up with the work. Again, I was back illustrating for other people but waiting for my next solo project. Here are some of our T-s...

Starting a blog has been a very daunting task, I have been thinking about it for a long time. Well, at last I am beginning to blog! I am going to start at the beginning of my career and show work from my early days up to my present day work. So watch this space as I bring you through the years of Carla Daly's art. This is my first post, I know it is small but it is a big step for me.