Merry Christmas

Ginger Rogers in Cheek to Cheek by Emily Tellwright, 2026 New Year Books I had more time than usual for reading over Christmas and New Year, mainly because I abandonned social media. Fortunately, Santa had provided me with lots of interesting things to read, and it being a time for relaxation I picked the lighter options first. If you have read my writing style page, you will not be surprised that many of these are old books, or re-publications of lost works. There is a lot to be learned about plotting, pacing and the balance between plot and character from good vintage mysteries and thrillers. I am sorry to say that I find that the literary quality of many of these superior to contemporary serious fiction. The times we live in call desperately for new stories. I strongly believe that that is true on every level, from politics and economics to light entertainment. That means that the literary but entertaining style is much more appropriate now than experimental language and forms. Engaging plots and characters expressing important feelings and ideas in lucid, readable, good quality prose are what is needed. Reviews With this in mind, I am doing a short video series reviewing my Christmas reads on our YouTube channel with a new short coming out every couple of days. I didn't enjoy all the books, but there was something to learn in every case. Here's the first one. You can subscribe to the channel to hear when new videos are available. New Year Art: More Gingers The Ginger Rogers drawings series is progressing. I am hoping to launch the Fred and Ginger products on the store in February. They have all been challenging, and today's image had pressures of its own being by far her most famous outfit ever. You probably know that if you slow the Cheek to Cheek dance sequence (from which this post is taken) down you can see feathers floating off the dress and getting in Fred Astaire's face. Feathers The feathers are not too difficult to capture, but the pose and proportions need to be just right or she morphs from the epitome of 1930s elegance to a dumpy cloud! Finding contrast and definition in a large block of white is difficult, and I am pleased with the result. One of the things I have noticed while working on these drawings is how the movement of the long skirts closely alligns with her legs underneath, even in this very fluffy example. If you follow the line of her left leg up from her shoe, you will see that it is also the line of the shadow in the skirt. I had expected the dresses to have more independent movement. And that's a note of caution for modern digital photographers. When you draw something complex, you have to spend a lot of time looking at what is really there in front of you. You find that often reality is not what you expect. When I trained in Affinity Photo, I was shocked at the degree to which digital photgraphic processing involved taking an image and then altering it to fit some fashionable fantasy that had nothing to do with what had been in front of the camera lens. History of Feathers The original dress is now in a museum (if anyone knows which one, do put it in the comments). A staff member at a feather processor developed a technique for straightening the feathers to give this elegant, drapey effect. She guarded the secret and never passed it on, and no one has managed to recreate it. So this dress is unique. New Year Books and Art It's been a turbulant start to 2026 for JB and myself at Castle Sefton Press with family and financial challenges. (We are both fine now, so please don't worry). And as ever I seem to be behind where I'd hoped to be. However, we both have new projects under way. I have almost left social media altogether, having previously written about my problems with Meta. Much as I enjoy making short-form videos for TikTok, I have not managed to find anyone interested in my style of reading and writing after four months. I think this is an image problem of the platform. There is no reason why people with those tastes shouldn't be on TikTok, but they probably have a negative idea of what it is like and think it is not for them. So I'm not sure that there is much value in my trying to keep up with the relentless demands of the algorithm. I also think that there are worrying signs that TikTok UK is moving in the direction of Facebook. Less content is being shown to followers and there are more prompts for payment. Whether this has anything to do with the US takeover, I couldn't say. Perhaps all social platforms self-destruct from greed and control when they get big enough. I'm developing a presence on Pinterest and YouTube instead. New Book I have a title for my new novel, which I hope will be the first in a series. I'm planning to sit down and get the first words onto paper in the second week of February. I'll let you know if that happens. It's forming as something deeper and more serious than Ghost Train in my head. But I expect there will be a fair amount of humour when it emerges onto the page. New Art As well as the Fred and Ginger series, I have an abstract series that will be launched around Easter. Over summer I'm hoping to extend my range of animal art and add it to a greater range of products. I had thought of adding some of our range to Etsy, but the fees are now eye-watering. And like TikTok Shop, it is stuffed with what I can only describe as tat being sold at prices that don't even cover the cost of the materials that formed it. Sometimes I feel that launching an online store today feels like opening a shop in Pompeii just as Vesuvius started to erupt: the infrastructure on which you have placed your business is collapsing around you. Thanks So that makes supporters like you more valuable than ever. Thanks once again for reading this post, and do subscribe if you haven't already. I will never send spam or share your details, and you can unsubscribe at any time. If you like videos, consider subscribing to our YouTube channel too, and perhaps visit Castle Sefton Press. Sharing is helpful too, but only with those you think would enjoy my work. I'll be back soon. Hopefully with the finished Fred and Ginger series and news on the start of the new book.

Christmas Tree, by Emily Tellwright, 2025 Christmas Art Breakthrough I'm so pleased with this year's festive art work, not only because so many friends and family members have said how much they like it. I'm delighted because the painting marked a major development in my acrylic painting (the first of my Christmas breakthroughs). A bit of personal art history I have been 'doing art' for as long as I can remember. One of my childhood memories is of coming across some old metal tubes of dried-up oil paint with stained and faded labels. Very excitingly, this was grown-up paint that I wasn't allowed to use, or even touch. So of course it had a magical attraction for me straight away! As a teenager, I did begin to use oil paints. And over the years since school I have had a varied mixture of artistic instruction. We had an art room with a tutor for students at my college, I've been on various courses and to classes and learnt from artist friends. The result of this patchy training was that by my 30s I could produce a good oil painting in terms of the image, but had no technical knowledge of the materials. I'd heard of 'fat over lean' and 'oiling out', but I didn't really know what they meant. In my final attempts at oil painting, I tried to apply what little I'd picked up about them, with the result that the paintings went badly brown and shrunken in places. Action and circumstance I decided that as soon as I had the opportunity, I needed to undertake proper study of the technical aspects of oil painting. And then circumstances changed, and it was a long time until that opportunity came about. By then I was living in a different place, and although the opportunity for study was available, the space and environment were not suitable for oils with their slow drying and strong fumes. This was when I decided to take up acrylics. Actually, I'd grown up with a very negative idea of them. They had none of the magic of those old, forbidden paint tubes! And I'd had one art tutor who had specifically compared them to the emulsion you put on walls and told me to avoid them as they had no character or beauty. Technical developments I'm fairly sure that the technology behind acrylic paints has improved greatly since then. And some of it was perhaps prejudice too. But they are still very different to oil paints, as I soon discovered. Particularly in drying time: acrylics dry fast. I am a slow worker. I like to lose myself in the detail of the painting. I like to make a few colour mixes with the knife at the start and then tweak and mix with a brush as I go. And, quite often, I like to paint wet-on-wet (adding wet paint onto a painted surface that is still wet). I was soon in trouble with all of these techniques. A lot of paint that had dried on my palette while I was working was wasted (and it's not cheap!). I was unable to mix into previous mixes, because they'd dried. And attempts at wet-on-wet became simple overpainting, because the under layer was already dry. I was still producing acceptable-looking work, but I was not enjoying the process! I was uncomfortable painting, and not feeling that the finished works were truly my style. Christmas Tree Breakthrough And then, just like magic, things came together in this picture. It's almost always the way with the technical side of creative work that if you just keep going one day you just 'get it' and everything falls into place. With the use of Gloss Glazing Medium (a mixing medium for acrylic paints that increases flow, gloss and drying time), a stay-wet palette and a few other ad hoc additions, I was suddenly painting in my old familiar way, but with acrylics. Stages Stage 1 In this case I am using canvas board, although I often prefer a smooth board. I'm not a lover of stretched canvas as I don't enjoy the 'give' you get in response to your strokes. I have put a colour wash over the board and drawn the scene in lightly in pencil. Stage 2 I have started to paint in the background, building up smooth layers of colour with a synthetic filbert brush. Before starting I mixed some of the background colours and some greens and yellows for the tree and left them on a stay-wet palette. Stage 3 I like to work from the back to the front as far as possible. The background is now complete. I have sketched in the darkest shadows on the foreground objects to create three-dimensional images. At this point, I can take advantage of the fast drying time of the paint and step away for a short break to let the background dry. This will allow me to lay the foreground objects on cleanly. It is also good for my eyes to have a rest! Stage 4 The foreground objects are mostly laid in using a smallish hogs hair brush and a thin synthetic sable-type. I've used wet-on-wet here, but then let it dry before the next stage. Stage 5 The foreground objects are finished, mostly using the thin sable-type brush. The front parcels are particularly tricky because the image was not set up with painting in mind and the lighting on these very neutral objects is rather ambiguous. I decide to tweak them at the end. Stage 6 I lay in the tree and the tinsel using the hogs' hair brush. I tend to be a tight, detailed worker and the background and foreground objects are all in that style. For the tree itself, I want to paint much more loosely and freely in contrast. I usually work with a small palette of colours. So far on this painting I have used Titanium White, Burnt Umber, Burnt Sienna, Ultramarine Blue and Cadmium Yellow Light. At this stage, I thought that another yellow might have been a better choice! I also have the Gloss Glazing Medium on my palette. Stage 7 The tree, tinsel and lights are complete. I was concerned that the centre of the tree looked too flat, and my stern resident critic JB agreed. So I did a little more on that before completing the decorations. I have worked wet-on-wet quite a lot here in an attempt to get some glow and sparkle. Now I let the painting dry so that I can lay the hanging decorations on top. But I keep some of the greens and yellows on the stay-wet palette to deal with overlaps and touching up. Stage 8 The finished painting. I added some Cadmium Red Medium to my palette and worked in the decorations in two layers. I worked wet-on-wet in each layer but let the paint dry in between layers so that I could lay clean light and shadow over the colour. Then, I also tweaked the difficult foreground parcels, although I think that they remain the weak spot of the painting. I hope you've enjoyed this insight into my new-found painting process and rhythm. Reliving it has been a pleasure for me and made me want to get painting again! A Different Seasonal Breakthrough An instant to reflect It wouldn't be Christmas and New Year without some reflections on the past year and on the future soon to come. The combination of the solstice (here in the Northern Hemisphere at least), a close-to-universal holiday and the start of a new year make it the most appropriate time for that. If you know some mathematics, you might know that if an object is moving in one direction it has to have an instant of stillness before it can begin moving in the opposite direction. That's exactly how Christmas feels to me, that moment of stillness before a change of direction. It's one of the reasons I love it so much. High Society I happened to be rewatching an old movie this morning: High Society. It's a good quality, entertaining film combining a well-constructed stage play with a score by the incomparable Cole Porter and a star cast on top form. One of Porter's lyrics from 'Well, Did You Evah!' caught my attention:   Have you heard it's in the starsNext July we collide with Mars?Well, did you evah?What a swell party this is! I thought that this summed up rather well what it feels like to be alive at this time. Everywhere you turn things are disintegrating and getting worse. Violence, destruction and horrors abound and we are accelerating on the path of our own destruction. Taking Back Control I've been feeling resentful about all this. I am by nature a happy and optimistic person (JB thinks idiotically so!), but I could no longer be so in the face of such a continual onslaught of human stupidity of the nastiest kind. I felt that I was being robbed of my true nature. But I've had enough of this. I can't pretend that I think things are going to get better in the near future, either globally or personally. Still I'm going to fight back and do everything I can to maintain the natural human joy, love and hope that is within me as much as I can for as long as I can. Starting as I mean to go on With that in mind, I most sincerely send you my love and best wishes for this holiday time. I look forward to sharing more creative work filled with fun, joy, love and hope with you in 2026. Have a swell party everyone!

Featured Image for Enshittification and Exhaustion: The Continental December News You might have been expecting something a bit more festive from me than a post about December news. Don't worry, I promised two blog posts in December, and the second one will be seasonal and celebratory. Today I'll be bringing you up to date with recent developments in my author, artist and publisher life. And refreshing the blog with a change of emphasis. Recent Developments Marketing In October, I finally began marketing Castle Sefton Press. There had been some book marketing before then, but nothing on the art side of the business at all. Very few people knew it existed! And I was about five months behind in getting started. We had a few strange setbacks in setting up the Castle Sefton Press store. That meant there were a lot of delays in launching. In addition, I was learning the whole process of WordPress and WooCommerce as I went along, which meant that some times I had to go back and make changes. By the time we were ready for marketing, my work rate was slowing down. I think I am a reasonably good learner, but when I came to learn the various social platforms – not being a natural user of social media – I was struggling because my mind hadn't fully processed all the previous year's new information. I had already learnt so many new technical skills in that time. Marketing is also a difficult subject because there is far too much information available. Most of it is poor quality and a lot of it expensive. So simply finding good, clear learning material on how and where to start can be very time-consuming and involve multiple false-starts. And you are chasing a moving target, because all the platforms and their algorithms are changing all the time and the pace of that seems to be accelerating. Meta As I was embarking on this final process in getting the art and book business off the ground, Facebook changed its algorithm completely. That included the way Meta advertising works. (Meta owns Facebook and Instagram along with other platforms that I don't use such as Threads and WhatsApp). This was a great blow as not only was it more to learn but there was uncertainty as to whether Facebook ads, which had been planned to be our primary paid marketing, would work at all for us any more. In fact, after a stressful few weeks I have abandoned Meta. (I still make an occasional Facebook post for our small group of followers). As a business, Meta was suggesting adding content on average nearly three times a day across Facebook and Instagram in return for 'reaching' about 40 people. Our existing followers were not being shown our posts. There were bugs in our business portfolio that were going to cause issues with advertisements. There is no technical support available, not even a robot. I had begun on Instagram getting a hundred or so views on a post. By the time I stopped, I was getting around five views per post. The algorithm seemed to be punishing me for not adhering to its posting demands or paying for adverts. I decided enough was enough. I don't mind working to build a following, but this is no longer an option on Meta. You are participating in a control game designed to force you to comply and spend. Enshittification The collapse of Facebook as a platform with any real use or purpose is a good example of the process described by Cory Doctorow in his book, Enshittification. Through greed and stupidity, the internet is destroying itself. One example he gives of this is AI search results. AI produces search results by crawling other articles on relevant topics, and these are then shown at the top of the search results. This means that you are most likely to click on the AI results rather than on the articles with the original information. But many of the sites hosting those articles depend on clicks and the corresponding advertising or purchases to survive. They are starting to disappear as the AI search results that have used their information take their traffic. So the range of information available for AI to crawl is reducing and hence so is the quality of its output. Amazon Amazon is another great example of the degradation of online platforms. For all its many ethical issues, Amazon still functions fairly well as a bookshop. I'm not saying that I recommend it as a bookshop – I certainly don't – but in most cases you can still find and buy the book you want on there with few problems. And I don't believe that it is the only villain behind the demise of bookshops. (You will be able to read more about this on the blog as soon as I get round to writing the article!) But Amazon has destroyed many other kinds of shops and producers, particularly in technology and electronics. If you try to find a small item of electronic kit – a small microphone, say – you may never get beyond the hundreds of Amazon results, peppered with those of eBay and other massive shopping platforms. Most of the products look similar and have indistinguishable reviews. Indeed, they probably are all the same mass-produced rubbish. If there are genuine products in those pages of search results, you will never be able to find them. Anyway, the chances are that the genuine sellers and manufacturers have been driven out of business by a combination of Amazon's aggressive charges and proliferation of cheap, fake products. New plans All this means that it's more difficult for a small online product business to get established than it has been for a long time. I have new plans for December onwards, but it means growth will be slower than expected and there will be even more work, trial and error involved. It is a tremendous relief to be free from dependence on Meta, though. New Plans for December Onwards Alternative Platforms Pinterest I have hopes of Pinterest as a long-term growth platform for Castle Sefton Press. I have some good resources to help me start building our profile there. One of the other difficulties of starting the marketing late has been that I was beginning in the run up to Christmas, and the special demands of that season have got in the way. I have learned a lot to prepare me for this time next year, but it's meant that I haven't got far with Pinterest yet. TikTok and YouTube I'm now active on TikTok making short videos. Actually, they are not always that short, being up to ten minutes in length. I'm not sure how effective this will be for the business, but I enjoy it and unlike Meta, TikTok gives you reasonable exposure with no conditions at all. I am also adding all the video content to YouTube, and I'll be improving the quality of our channel there over the next month. Other Options Alternative social media platforms, shopping platforms like Etsy, in-person events and collaborations are some of the options available that I'll be considering. I will be trying to get our books into some libraries. Bookshops remain largely a hostile environment for us. If you buy your books mostly from physical bookshops, it's worth remembering that they only stock the most mainstream works, and that there is a vast range of books available that they never consider, ours included. (There are exceptions of course, but this is still generally true). New Creative Work Art We already have a lot of new art products planned for 2026. This will include the Fred and Ginger Collection, one of which is the featured art for today's post. John Blake has been developing some fun and creative ideas in the run up to Christmas and we are hoping to add those as product ranges too. I plan to concentrate more on painting for my regular art practice immediately after Christmas. So more colourful images will be coming your way. Books I am determined to begin my next book in January, and it may be part of a series. Beginning is always difficult, but once I start I am generally a reasonably fast worker. It would be nice if it could be published before the end of 2026, but that is probably optimistic. However, now the business is established I hope to carry on writing and keep producing books without the long break there has been since Ghost Train. A Change of Emphasis I see the future of this blog as being more focussed on the process of my work. That will include writing, once I've started again, art and the business. I want to outline some of the reasons behind the change. A Consequence of TikTok Videos Making short videos means that I am chatting about the random ideas in my head into the camera, rather than writing them on this blog. I have never felt lost for words or ideas, but this month I found that all the current themes I would have written about here had been spent in videos. You can watch all the videos on our YouTube channel, where I am currently chatting about gift wrapping and books. A Consequence of Marketing Castle Sefton Press is a marketing nightmare. We produce fiction and art, and there are two of us but only I appear in the publicity. Given that focus and consistency are the two main requirements for any marketing programme, most advisors would tell us to restructure our business. Perhaps into separate businesses. I am strongly in favour of keeping it as one, because my original vision was of a complete creative business. John Blake and I have both been musicians, writers and artists and in the course of those experiences we've both met and worked with many very talented creative people. In every branch of creativity you find those for whom that is their whole world. All those authors who insist you must write every day, for example, and musicians and artists whose every waking breath is centred around music or art. It's never been like that for either of us. Since a child, I have always been widely creative: writing prose and poetry, music, visual art, dance, cookery, gardening, home decor and design, knitting, embroidery and more. Neither of us writes or produces artwork every day, but we are creative every day even if only in simple domestic or business tasks. Creative Business The way forward with presenting our business is to focus on this approach and diversity. And that will require some creativity from me! There's no guarantee of success of course, but I'm happy to carry on anyway. It's very hard to get anything unusual and outside current trends noticed at all, though of course if something different does get noticed it will often take off. I feel that if I make the focus of this blog part of that new approach, it can support me in doing this. Consequences of Writing I haven't been in the process of writing a book since I started this blog, because I have been busy setting up the Castle Sefton Press business. Once I am writing again, the blog is bound to have more about the writing process and an author's life. (That doesn't mean there will be no more recipes and food talk!). December News: Starting as I Mean to Go On Latest Art Ginger No 2 Today's featured artwork is the second Ginger in my collection of six Ginger Rogers poses taken from dance sequences in the films she made with Fred Astaire. Charcoal and chalk seemed to me the perfect media to capture these active black-and-white images, and so far I am pleased with the results. Resemblance The most difficult part is capturing a vague resemblance. The source images are blurred, being stills taken from digital reproductions of 1930s films (which have not always been well restored, depending on which film in the canon it is). The drawings are quite small – around A4 size – and this makes getting exact detail with charcoal challenging. Fred Astaire has a very idiosyncratic head shape, and once that is mastered, he becomes recognisable. Ginger is far more difficult. She has distinctive features, but they are masked by prominent make-up which changes as the fashions progress through the films. In this pose, the shadows cast by the powerful studio lights leave only her heavy eye make-up visible. In the previous drawing, last month's featured image, a different and thought-provoking issue of resemblance came to light. Ginger, as a major Hollywood star, was generally photographed and filmed, in more static scenes, from particular angles which were thought to favour her. When you take a still from a dance like this, you can end up with a view of her face that is very unfamiliar. And that is just what has happened in last month's drawing. It is a fair representation of the shot, but not instantly Ginger-like, because you are simply not used to seeing her features stretched in profile. Distinctive Pose One of the things I have found about drawing Ginger that is very distinctive, and that I had never noticed until I began drawing her, is the way she combines perfect stillness and movement in one pose. Both the poses so far show this beautifully. I think I have managed here to portray the perfect, motionless poise of her right side, while her left is still active. In the previous drawing, her upper body is statuesque while her feet are still alive. At first I thought that this was just the effect of her dresses – they keep moving after she has stopped – and they certainly accentuate it. But I have decided that it is definitely a feature of her dancing. It's actually quite different to Fred Astaire. You can take a still at any point of Fred's dancing – I have done quite a few! – and he appears perfectly still and poised throughout his body. Quite astonishingly, he seems to move smoothly through an infinite series of perfect poses when he dances. Like a living animation. Thoughts turning Christmas Lumpy and uneven. The real December news is that I have just been putting the almond icing on the Christmas cake. Very badly! Like so many tasks that you only do at long intervals, just when you think you have finally mastered it (last year I did it perfectly), you have a lapse. Happily, it will still taste good. I am also about to write Christmas cards having finished this year's seasonal art work. You will be seeing it in progress in the next post as it marks some interesting technical developments in my painting. And there will be December news of a different kind, with plans of all kinds for the new year. So until then, I hope you are enjoying the season and not finding it too tiring or stressful. Or making too much of a hash of your icing!