Sandybrow greetings cards are unique and original because they are all hand painted to our own designs. They are painted with professional pigments on top quality art paper. Their colours, textures and detail makes each one highly distinctive. Some people like to frame them to keep as small works of art.

Our greetings cards are mainly designed by Ann Bernard, a prolific English artist, teacher and writer.

Ann adores the countryside in all its forms, and has been painting English landscapes, flowers, plants and animals for more than 60 years. She learned many of her techniques from her mother, Shirley Herbert, who started painting in the 1920's. Sandybrow is the name of the house on the brow of the hill in Kent, where as a child, Ann developed her appreciation of nature, and where she honed her artistic skills.

Ann's love of the countryside and of painting, led her to create her own style of greetings cards which she hand painted and sent to a small circle of close family and friends. She chose Gouache paints to reproduce the wide range of hues and textures from the woods and open country of southern England.

Her designs are punctuated with small butterflies, beetles and hedgehogs - just as nature throws up its own exquisite surprises at every turn.

Ann received so many requests for her hand painted cards that she needed to start painting at the crack of dawn in order to meet demand. Conversations with family members led to the idea of teaching additional artists to help hand paint her card designs.

Drawing on the values of fair trade, international cooperation and ethical business, we developed the idea of working with Indonesian artists to produce Ann's cards. We also realised that this would provide an excellent channel for them to promote their owns designs to people around the world.

Working through family contacts, the idea now allows Indonesian artists to build their own livelihoods by reaching international card buyers in a way which is all but impossible without strong and caring international links.

We provide artists with the chance to learn our painting techniques, and to paint both our English designs, and their own local designs. This gives them the ability to paint cards for existing customers, while offering the opportunity to develop their own artistic creativity. Our approach is to give the artists the freedom to experiment, and to grow with our business.

We welcome visitors to our studio in Jakarta to see for themselves. If you can't make it to Indonesia, please have a look at close-ups of hand painted cards on our Showcase page.

If you would like your own designs to be reproduced by hand by our artists, please contact us via the contact page.

We hope you will follow our progress over the coming months and years as we add designs and start to bring you more beautifully hand painted cards from Britain and Indonesia.

Please see our links page for further information on our sources of inspiration.

If you are also inspired, and if you like our ideas, we hope you will visit our order page to place an order for beautiful hand painted cards, for the people you care about. We will contact you directly to discuss you exact needs.

Many thanks from us all.