One of the things that I do quite frequently with my art is to create bespoke birthday and special occasion cards to send to family members and friends. I generally paint these on rough-edged, rag paper that I bought a stash of a couple of years ago. This fits nicely onto a 5 x7 inch recycled card blank to give the finish card a really distinctive appearance (quite apart from the fact that the picture is a one-off painting completed specially for each occasion). Obviously, the idea with these is to paint a picture that has some kind of special significance for the recipient, and to that end, within the space of a few weeks in the later months of of 2025, I found myself painting two pictures of different football stadia.
The first of these (see above) was for a birthday card for my younger daughter’s partner. For his sins, he is a fan of Tottenham Hotspur, although at the moment this isn’t something that he is particularly quick, or proud, to broadcast, and fortunately, he’s now also a season-ticket holder at Plymouth Argyle. I’ve heard it said that the new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is the best new stadium in the country, and it certainly looks impressive when viewed from afar, with a satisfyingly neat and modern, wraparound, design. When painting the picture, I focused on putting a good amount of detail into the stadium itself to ensure that it was distinctive and recognisable, and then I just tried to capture the general impression of the surrounding streets, roads and buildings (partly because it was pretty much impossible to do otherwise). I think that this contrast works well and I like the way that the picture turned out overall.
I followed up my Tottenham Hotspur Stadium picture with a painting of Carrow Road (see below), long-time home of Norwich City, for a birthday card for my father-in-law. He was originally a Chelsea fan, but Norwich City become his adopted club when he moved to the city in the early 1970s, and he was a season-ticket holder there for many years before it became too difficult for him to make it to games. Carrow Road is a stadium that has been developed and upgraded multiple times over the years, and so unlike the sleek lines of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, it consists of an assortment of stands of different sizes and structures. Looking at the Carrow Road picture now, I can’t help but wonder whether my photo shows the final version, because it surprises me that I apparently left most of the surrounding buildings unpainted. However, this seems to be the only photo of this painting that I have, so I guess it must have ended up that way. Funnily enough, I quite like the unpainted buildings and kind of wish that I had left the ones on the left-hand side as uncoloured ink drawings too. Perhaps this is a style/approach that I might deliberately incorporate into another picture someday. I also like the way that I put in the cutting stripes on the pitch, and the way that you can see the countryside landscape that surrounds the city in the background.
It’s always fun to create these bespoke birthday and special occasions card pictures, partly because they are always well received of course, but also because it’s interesting to tackle subjects that I might not otherwise attempt to paint.
