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Chrissy Cottrell
Creative Marketing Manager
Chrissy Cottrell is a creative marketing professional specialising in brand strategy, content marketing and customer engagement. As Creative Marketing Manager at Specialist Crafts, she leads content and brand initiatives that connect products, creativity and learning. Outside of work, she maintains an active creative practice with a particular passion for mixed media and printmaking, exploring materials, techniques and experimental processes, bringing both industry knowledge and hands-on experience to her content.
Our Latest Posts
Essential Monoprinting Techniques for Artists
Explore Monoprinting: Essential Techniques, Texture, Colour & Creative EffectsDiscover how to monoprint with our step-by-step printmaking video series for art students and teachers. Learn how to ink a printing plate and explore additive and subtractive monotype, trace printing, ghost printing, layering, stencils, texture, chine-collé and ...
10 Contemporary Monoprint & Monotype Artists Every Art Teacher Should Know
Looking for contemporary monoprint artists to inspire your students? From expressive portraiture and atmospheric landscapes to abstraction, identity and storytelling, contemporary artists are using monotype and monoprinting in remarkably different ways.For secondary art teachers, these artists offer much more than examples to add to a ...
How To Guide: Experimental Botanical Monoprint Collage
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12 Contemporary Acrylic Artists to Inspire Your Next Secondary Art Project
Finding contemporary artists that genuinely engage secondary students can be surprisingly difficult. Many artist lists rely on the same historical names, but introducing practising contemporary painters helps students see that painting is still evolving and remains relevant today.Whether you're teaching portraiture, abstraction, landscape ...
Essential Acrylic Painting Techniques for Artists
Master Essential Brushwork, Texture, Blending & Special EffectsAcrylic paint is one of the most versatile and forgiving painting mediums, making it ideal for beginners, students and experienced artists alike. From smooth colour blending to bold textured effects, mastering a range of acrylic painting techniques will help you develop confidence, ...
Exploring Mixed Media Concertina Sketchbooks with Karen Stamper at Kettle's Yard
Recently, we hosted a mixed media concertina sketchbook workshop with artist and former art teacher Karen Stamper at the inspiring Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, bringing together art teachers for a day of experimentation, creativity and practical classroom inspiration.
The workshop focused on building expressive sketchbook pages using layers, ...
Teaching Oil Painting Without Solvents: The Secret Science Behind Water-Mixable Oils
For centuries, every art student has learned the same rule:Oil and water do not mix.Yet today you can buy oil paints that thin with water, clean up with water and often don't require solvents at all.So what changed?Have chemists somehow broken the rules of painting?Not quite.Water-mixable oils are one of the most significant developments in ...
Print Without Limits: Monoprinting in the Secondary Art Room
Colour, Process and Possibility in the Print RoomMonoprinting tends to settle into the classroom quite quickly.There’s usually less hesitation. Students get started sooner and the room has a bit more movement to it. It’s not because the process is easier, but because it changes the starting point. Instead of working towards a fixed ...
Layered Linocut: Colour, Process and Possibility in the Print Room
Layered Linocut: Colour, Process and Possibility in the Print Room Explained
Layered linocut is bold, physical and rooted in tradition, yet it feels contemporary in the way it builds colour, texture and narrative through successive impressions.
For GCSE and A-level students, it also answers a persistent challenge: how to move beyond flat, ...
Stretching the Story: How Concertina Sketchbooks Help Students Develop Visual Narratives
Narrative is one of the hardest things to teach well in art. Students often have strong starting points, a feeling, an issue, an image; but struggle to sustain ideas, sequence meaning or show development clearly over time. Pages fill up, but the thinking stays fragmented.Concertina sketchbooks offer a simple structural shift that can radically ...
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