Karen Phillips is our featured artist for May. Self taught, her only formal art training was to GCSE level art where she experimented with a variety of different media, before finding her real passion for graphite pencil wildlife art and animal art. She lives and works near Knutsford in Cheshire.
I'm 39, happily married and mother of Kate (5 years old) and Charlie (3 years).
I trained and worked in finance for 16 years, but set up orchardcards.co.uk in April 2006 because I couldn't easily buy tasteful and unsentimental cards in my local town - I used to visit John Lewis (an hour away) every few months and stock up on about 20 at a time, and I figured there must be others out there like me who would like to buy nice cards by mail order.
The other members of the Orchardcards.co.uk team are my husband Richard and colleague Becky Pass