Hi there.

Thanks for popping in.

I’ve been thinking about this afternoon’s TV show, and it struck me that you only ever really see the finished result. You see a new stamp collection. A new set of Landscape Colour Washes. A workshop project. A TV demonstration.

What you don’t usually see is how all those things are connected. So today, I thought I’d show you behind the scenes a little.

Everything starts with a pencil.

If I’ve got an idea in my head, I have to draw it by hand. I’ve never been one for designing on a computer. Old school. Old bird!! Hahaha. Whether it’s a treeline, a hare gazing up at the moon, or a stag standing in the foreground, protecting a little roe deer further off, I always start with paper and pencil. The sketches aren’t masterpieces. They’re simply ideas. Thoughts. A possible concept. I draw on tracing paper, so I can overlay the scenes and work out the composition ideas. If you join me in the SHAC on Monday mornings, then you will know exactly how it works.

I ink them, because that makes the next step easier. Black ink is always better to scan than pencil.

Then those drawings find their way to Jazz. She scans them into the Mac, and tidies them up. Together we begin the next stage. We adjust lines, balance proportions, think about scale and decide how the drawings will work best. Could this become a stamp? Would that make a lovely stencil? Could those trees become a Groovi plate too?

Little by little, the collection starts to grow. One drawing leads to another. One idea sparks the next. We keep bouncing ideas until we hit a sweet spot. That famous SWEET SPOT at Clarity. Sometimes we find it instantly; sometimes we bounce a little longer. But we never settle. Some ideas get shelved. Literally parked. We have a place where we park designs we can’t quite feel the love for. We don’t bin them – we just park them up to rest, and come back to them another time. Some stay there for months. Occasionally, one of us wanders past, takes another look and suddenly sees it differently. Funny how ideas have their own timing.

The Canopy Stamp Set is a prime example of inked overlay idea turned into stamp set. I drew the tree trunks and branches on one layer, and then the leafy canopies on another layer. The leafy sections fits over the branches perfectly. See the little deer and hare? They were already drawn; we just used them in miniature for this set, and decided to create larger stamps with them later – today!

A few weeks ago I took these very stamps along to one of our Clarity Workshops.

The project wasn’t so much about the stamps as it was about teaching fifty people how to create beautiful landscape washes using handmade paper and colour. We spent the day experimenting, playing, sharing discoveries and producing some truly gorgeous backgrounds.

It was one of those days where creativity fills the room.

Then, afterwards, as we looked at all those handmade washes spread across the tables, another idea arrived. Why not preserve them? Why not take those handmade backgrounds and reproduce them exactly as they were, so that anyone could enjoy working with them?

So that’s exactly what we did.

We carefully scanned the originals – I made a load more, so there was a really good selection – and we printed them onto beautiful cardstock, keeping every soft blend, every bloom of colour and every little happy accident that makes handmade work so special.

Now those backgrounds have become our new Landscape Colour Washes.

This afternoon, on TV, I’ll be showing you how those original drawings and the new printed washes work together.

When I stood back and looked at the whole process, from initial concept with the tree lines and separate leafy canopies, I realised something.

This is how Clarity has always worked.

Ideas don’t arrive in departments. They don’t begin with somebody saying, “What shall we sell next?” They begin with an idea. With drawing. With making. With teaching. With watching. With learning. With one idea naturally leading to another.

And it made me realise something else. We’re actually rather unusual these days. Almost everything we create happens within these four walls. The ideas are born here. The artwork is drawn here. The stamps are manufactured here. The stencils are manufactured here. The Groovi plates are etched here. The samples are made here. Well, not physically here – our dream-team-design-team are sent the prototypes and then make art for us, which they sent back to us. The workshops are taught locally. The TV demonstrations and online courses are filmed here.

It’s all connected.

There’s a business expression people use these days: owning the rails. In other words, controlling the journey from beginning to end. It wasn’t a grand business strategy. We didn’t sit around a boardroom table thirty-three years ago and decide to “own the rails”. We simply kept solving the next problem ourselves. We learnt how to manufacture stamps because nobody made them clear – the way we wanted them. We developed Groovi because we wanted parchment craft to flourish. We invested in print because quality mattered and we wanted to control how much we were making. Looking back now, I realise we’ve built something quite unusual.

It reminds me of baking a cake. Of course you can buy one. You can even buy a very good one. But there’s something deeply satisfying about baking it yourself, isn’t there? Measuring the ingredients, mixing them together, watching it rise in the oven, knowing exactly what has gone into it.

Well, at Clarity we don’t just bake the cake… We create the recipe first.

Perhaps that’s why everything fits together so naturally. The stamps inspire the workshops. The workshops inspire new techniques. Those techniques inspire new papers. Those papers inspire more artwork. Round and round it goes.

Nothing is forced. Nothing is created just because we need another product; It all grows quite organically, one idea at a time. There has never been a shortage of ideas at Clarity! And if we just can’t keep up at the production end, we simply revisit the vast library of beautiful products we have, which have perhaps only had one outing, and we let Dave and the production team catch up with us.

I feel incredibly lucky that, after all these years, I still get to do what I love most. And with a smashing group of young people:

Have an idea, sit down with a blank sheet of paper and a pencil, let go of everything else, and just draw.

Who knows…Perhaps one little sketch will become the next collection, the next workshop, the next TV show, and maybe even the beginning of somebody else’s creative journey.

I think that’s rather wonderful.

See you this afternoon.

Love always,

Barb x x x

All products available HERE

Made by us. For you. In Kent.