Alfred Heaton Cooper

Victorian landscape painter from Bolton
His sketches of everyday life are very nice, but his landscape paintings rock my socks. He went to Norway a few times and married a woman from there, so there are a lot of paintings of fjords and glaciers and things alongside lake district and lancashire views.

The paintings that really catch my eye are the ones with the big differences in hues or changes in light and dark.
He mostly used watercolour and oil. Not at the same time though.

FAYE SIMMS

http://www.arenaillustration.com/Artists/thumbsFayeSimms.html

Faye Simms went to University of Falmouth to study Illustration.
I applied there too, for the same course, but I was cruelly rejected...

(I know why now, of course)

http://www.havenforscofflaws.com/

An inspirational website full of cartoons and bits of advice thrown out in blog form.

The thing I like most about it is the mixture of traditional painted backgrounds with a computer generated cartoon in the foreground, or the ones that look like they should be computer generated because of the style, but are actually done with acrylics on paper.