KILCOE STUDIOS CALENDAR

The Kilcoe Studios calendar started as a project with Brown Envelope Seeds in 2012.  I did some illustrations for their catalogue and whilst painting the images, we thought that as it is such a seasonal business it would it be nice to also do a calendar while we were at it . I followed on the next year with the similar theme of the Fruit and Vegetable garden. Slowly then over the next few years I moved more and more into focusing on mainly our native plants .

  I am an artist who is interested in plants but I have no academic expertise so am very much an amateur observer.  The annual exploration of new plants is so fascinating and there is so much to explore and learn.  The education that our children get today about our wild plants { I am sure there are lots of exceptions ! } as far as the curriculum is concerned is not great, and judging by my own knowledge before I started this Calendar project  it was not great before either! So I hope each year that the Calendar can bring more knowledge of our plants to a wide audience.  Here I have compiled all the past Calendars so you can see the images from the pages and also read the text. I hope that the Calendar has given people who would not normally go through a whole nature book a chance to read small snippets of interesting things about plants.

2018 Calendar

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I pass on anything that challenges me digitally. My trusted graphic designer Jonathan does a great job each year in getting it all together. For the first Calendar, we developed a format and design that worked, so we have had no need to change it since then, and I give a lot of the credit to Jonathan for this!

I give some of the credit also for the decision to do an A4 size to my late grandmother who lived until just 2 weeks before her 99th birthday. When I started the Calendar she was in her late 80s and fit and able and was delighted to have such a perfect and personal gift to send to people both at home and abroad for Christmas. The first year I did the Brown Envelopes Seed Calendar in a larger format and I got word back that my Grandmother was going mad trying to find the right envelopes to send them in. This dilemma stayed with me when printing the next year and so the easy to post A4 Calendar was born!