Artist Statement

My name is Karen Johnson and I'm the Derby based artist behind Millie Moth. Inspired by my wild garden, I create 2 styles of vibrant flower designs to feature on cards, artwork and homewares, mainly using alcohol inks as my medium.

My work is full of colour and I aim to convey the happiness I feel when I’m around flowers and foliage. There is such a wealth of life in every small growing space and I try to capture that beauty and vigour by injecting a little wildness and joy into every piece.

WILD GARDEN COLLECTION this technique involves "painting" with alcohol ink pens and dripping splashes of neat alcohol onto a non absorbent synthetic paper called Yupo, allowing the inks to bleed and run together in beautiful and unpredictable ways. The vibrancy of the ink colours is absolutely mesmerising and I adore choosing the colours for each piece, which I then more or less create intuitively and without much forethought! This is a technique I evolved myself after discovering other artists using these beautiful inks. After a lot of trial and error and applying them to my own creative urges, my Millie Moth signature style was born!

WILD COLLAGE COLLECTION created digitally, this style features a combination of my alcohol ink paintings, drawings and layers of isolated photographic images which I photograph in my own garden or local area where possible. I like to include photos of items which are meaningful to me, for example my 2 cats, little wooden cottages I've made in the past, favourite planters from my garden etc. This technique came out of a frustration of not being able to create enough layers in my alcohol ink paintings - ink will only layer over itself so many times!