What was it like painting the china animals?
Painting on china is much more slippery than painting on paper. It’s very difficult to control the paint. I learnt a great deal of paint brush technique while I was there. And I got very good at painting fur and feathers. The ornaments were very detailed and some of them were very big. The race horses were the size of small dogs. Often people would send in photos of their own horse or dog and we painted the china model to look like the photos. My favourite models were miniature owls, about the size of butterflies. (We used to paint butterflies too.) I used to paint lots of owls at a time and each one had about 200 brush strokes on it. The company was called Border Fine Arts and all the ones I painted had HC written on them in tiny letters. No-one used the same initials so look carefully at your Grandma’s ornaments. I may just have painted one of them.
