Newsletter 10th July 2025

Shrewsbury Art Trail,

I had a lovely outing to Shrewsbury to see my two paintings in the gallery for the Shrewsbury Art Trail. I’m so pleased to be part of this event. If you are tempted to submit for your local art trail or open exhibition, or competition I urge you to go for it!

Here’s one of the paintings, and the muse. I do love this gallery, there’s such an interesting mix of things in it. Right in the same room there’s part of a mammoth skeleton, a medieval logboat, china from Coalport and apparently quite random collections like this one, which has an African mask, a scold’s bridal, Egyptian shabti and a decorated lions jaw.

My other painting is up a bit high, but still lit really nicely so you can see the quilting.

I could have shown you a better photo of it, but I wanted to use this one which has this massive blue and white jug. It has a crack that’s been mended with big metal staples which makes me like it even more. If you do want a better look at my work you’ll find it all on my website…

After the Art Gallery and Museum we had a quick brunch in the Cats Pyjamas which is just outside on the square. I highly recommend the halloumi toastie 😊.

Then we headed over to The Parade for the rest of the exhibit…

Then we spotted that we were right by another venue on the trail, St Mary’s Church which has the Shropshire Art Society exhibition on until 12th July.

What a spectacular venue, there was literally something to look at on the floors, walls, windows and ceilings!

It felt particularly vibrant as the church was packed out with people enjoying a performance by three local choirs which sounded brilliant as you might imagine in a building with such wonderful acoustics. It’s free entry to see the Art Society exhibition and definitely worth checking out if you’re in town.

There were quite a few red dots at the Art Society exhibition which gave me hope that there are still people out there who buy original art. Sometimes I feel disheartened as though everyone is satisfied with some cheap print from Ikea! If you can, please support local living artists. With that in mind I’ve added another new painting to my website.

This one is called White Roses and it’s painted in acrylic on board. You can take a closer look at this one and the others I have available on my website.

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Thanks for your comments on the last post and emails, your feedback is so useful to us. On the whole the things you said were what we anticipated which is great because it means we are on the right lines. I did utter the words ‘actual physical book’, which got a really positive response, but to be honest, at the moment it’s the least likely thing that we’ll be able to bring to life. Not because we don’t have a great idea. We do! (We have an idea that we would love to write and we have been invited by a publisher to submit our proposal). But because publishing just isn’t the same as it used to be. We certainly can’t take the financial risk of self publishing like we have done so many times in the past, getting that book out to the market is just too challenging in this financial climate and the costs of production and distribution are simply unaffordable. BUT! If you are a publisher reading this and would like to make us an offer we simply can’t refuse then we’ll be very happy to talk 😊.

So, what can you expect from us in the short term?

Studio workshops

I’m going to be offering some workshops in my studio. I realise that many of you reading this will not be close enough to visit, but for those of you who are, I truly believe that you can’t beat the energy that you get in a room of creative people all working and experimenting together. And that comes from someone who’s taught online for 25 something years! I have reserved some dates in my diary and I’ll be sharing all the info with you very soon. In the meantime, if you and a small group of friends would like to book a private workshop with me please get in touch. I can take up to six students in my studio, (minimum of 4). These small class sizes mean we have lots of time for in depth teaching and discussion. A day workshop with me is £70 per person including some materials if not all depending on the activity. You can tailor the day to suit your group’s interests and it might include gelli plate printing, working in sketchbooks, acrylic painting, and creative drawing techniques. If this sounds like something you and your friends would like please drop me a line to discuss dates and details. laurakemshall@gmail.com

(Above: This is my studio, it’s unlikely that it’ll be this tidy when you come, but it’s a lovely creative space to work in).

New online content

Of course we’ll also continue our online offering as we love keeping contact with all of you who are further afield. From your feedback we gathered that you’d often like bitesize, doable techniques and ideas that we can deliver in the most affordable way. You asked us for short and longer online courses and to be honest, we have already covered a lot in the online classes we have on our website (there are hundreds and you can browse them here!) We do have ideas though for lots more and so we’ll be adding some mini lessons, technique demos and how-tos. They’ll be presented to you right here on our Substack page so if you are already one of our paid subscribers you’ll get those at no extra charge! Yes I had to put that in bold 🤩 If you’re not already a subscriber we hope you’ll find the £5 a month fee really reasonable for all the content you’ll have (you get all the posts we publish during your subscription term, plus the entire archive of posts we’ve already written. If you’re not sure if it’s for you, that’s perfectly understandable. Keep an eye on our newsletter here each week (which is always free) and you’ll get a round up of what we’ve created each week and you’ll soon get a feel for whether it’s your cup of tea or not.

For instance, this week we’ve written about:

Comparing making a painting with acrylic paint to one that’s painted digitally in Procreate on the iPad…

Plus Linda wrote about how she’s bending her own self inflicted painting rules…

And Linda wrote the first article in a series on hand stitching. This one is about how to establish a colour palette for your project…

This was a long newsletter! Thanks for getting to the end. If you can find a workshop on our courses website that suits you we’d love for you to sign up. Maybe you’ll upgrade to a paid sub here and give that a try for a month. Hopefully you’ll find that either a really good value and your support of our paid-for offerings really helps us keep this creative business alive. Thank you in advance.

Don’t forget, this news is always free and we’d love for you to share it, please forward it on to anyone who you think might like what we do.

Thanks again, and we look forward to catching up with you again soon,

Linda and Laura x