Ah, the pleasure of having a driveway. When you don’t have a front garden, not even a little strip of pebbles or concrete, neighbours and passers-by staring in, a driveway is a dream of heaven. For me and you it is cars whizzing past or parking outside and blocking the light and the view.

What I wouldn’t give for a driveway, and a nice house at the end of it.

Imagine when a visitor is arriving and you can say down the telephone: ‘Park it in the driveway.’

Of course, in some countries, space is all they have. There you can have a driveway as long as you like.

But in the crowded UK, with a population density to rival that of sardines in a tin, a driveway is a luxury item.

We can’t count the little double strip of concrete you might have that runs to the side of the house, the one that leads to the rickety garage that sits hard up against the neighbour’s fence.

And we certainly can’t count the bit of gravel or concrete out front, just inches from the pavement, where you can park your car up against your own front window. That’s no fun, blocking all your own light and casting a blight over the whole property.

No, a driveway is a fine thing for a fine house, for people with spare cash. Oodles of cash and the right to say: Park it in the driveway.

A Watercolour Painting: Park It In The Driveway

This one is nice. A watercolour painting of a building with a drive, and a purple drive, no less.

A card for every day featuring a grand stone building against a solid blue sky with overhanging trees and a driveway flanked by shrubs. Is that stone? It looks like stone. And a pediment over the front door.

Not a house, more of a public building, or maybe an architect’s office or some such building for one of the creative arts. An ad agency, perhaps. Perhaps something in graphic design. Or an agency building bespoke websites.

Whatever it is, they need the space and the surroundings to get their creative juices flowing. No way could they work with their cars blocking the light with two inches between the cars the road.

If you like the card, click the image and it will take you straight to the product page.

A greeting card for every day, with an ampersand.

And not just any ampersand, but one that is sitting there. You can tell it is sitting there because its ample bottom is plonked on the ground.

And its foot is out front supporting it.

And it is contemplating its nails. Its hand is raised in front of it and it is musing to itself.

Can an ampersand have hands?

Is it alone? Is it musing to itself all on its own or is it sitting with its friend. Perhaps it is in the kitchen and they have just had a cup of tea. Or perhaps they drink coffee. In the middle of the conversation – apropos of nothing – the ampersand says to itself as much as to its friend ‘And another thing, I really must get my nails done.’

It all fits, but how did it all come about?

Rasterise Your Typeface

It happened without much thought in the beginning. I typed in the letter and then I rasterised it in Photoshop. That’s a Photoshop tool that changes a typed letter to a bitmap image. It was now the same as any other image – something that I could manipulate.

I still wasn’t thinking much of anything except that the flat top of the hand looked a good candidate for the Liquify tool in Photoshop.

The Liquify Tool

With little upward strokes, I used the Liquify tool to distort the letter, I had no particular thought in mind. I was thinking about something else entirely, whatever that was. I was just following my nose, as it were, and making what seemed to me to be a good thing to do with the shape of the letter.

That was when the ampersand looked to me like someone sitting very confidently admiring their nails. So I painted the nails and added the text that seemed to fit.

If the card takes your fancy, click on the image and it will take you to the product page for this card, which is called ‘Nails‘.

We also have an Ampersand card. That also has an ampersand on it, with an explanation of how the ampersand came to be. The explanation runs as follows:

The ampersand was made by joining together the two letters of the Latin word et, which means ‘and’. When the ampersand began to be used in England, scholars explained that the symbol was a complete word per se. Soon, ‘and per se’ became ampersand.’