See also: About Lurgashall How the cards are made
Jacquie originally trained as an illustrator at St. Martin's School of Art, and has over twenty years' experience of working freelance in many areas of drawing, painting and design, including architectural perspectives, book illustration, and cartoons.
In the Autumn of 2000 Jacquie created her first animated e-card - the "Christmas Cottage" e-card which is still available from these pages - and sent it to a few friends by e-mail. Over the subsequent weeks she was amazed to receive e-mails from hundreds of people all over the world who had received the e-card from friends.
During 2001 Jacquie drew a few more e-cards, and in November a simple website was created to show off her work and allow people to download the e-cards. In December the "Snowdog" e-card was added to the collection, and the website simply could not cope with the demand. A proper e-cards service was set up and launched in February 2002, and Jacquie has been spending all her available time making new cards for the site ever since.
Jacquie lives in a perfect English country cottage in the village of Lurgashall in West Sussex. The cottage you see in the first Christmas e-card is hers, and the village green in the "Snowdog" card is right outside her cottage. She is a regular at the Noah's Ark pub opposite!
Sally is Jacquie's niece, and she joined us initially with a view to setting up her own website. The card "Santa's Jigsaw" is an example from those early days. But she turned out to be so good at the job that we didn't want to let her go!
So for the last year or so she's been helping Jacquie with the cards on jacquielawson.com. She used to be a violin teacher, and you may have noticed her influence in the "Teddy Bear" cards.
The photograph on the left was taken when she was still learning "Flash" (the animation program which we use to make the cards). Happily, her working hours are a bit more productive nowadays than they were then!
Mike is technical guru for the web design company McLintock Internet Services which originally sponsored Jacquie's site. The software behind this website is entirely his work, and he completely accepts responsibility for any bugs - the only mitigating factor being that most of it was written late at night!
Mike read Music at Oxford University before taking up a career in IT, and the music for the e-cards is also his work - either original compositions or arrangements of popular tunes. He lives on a farm in deepest Somerset with his wife Morag and two children.
Bev paints the exquisite watercolours of flowers, fruit and so forth, which Jacquie scans in and animates to create the floral e-cards on this site.
Beverley studied Textile Design at Loughborough College of Art where she won a Bursary from the Royal Society of Arts. Since then she has worked for over 20 years as a freelance designer in both dress & furnishing fabrics, as well as designing for china, cards & wrapping-paper manufacturers. Her designs have been sold all over Europe and the United States, including Harrods & Bloomingdales! She works mainly in watercolours and gouache, with the occasional venture into acrylics.
Bev spent one Summer painting botanicals for an exhibition run by the Royal Horticultural Society, for which she was an RHS Medal winner. Since then, her designs have concentrated mainly on botanicals, and she is also a keen and knowledgeable gardener: these two skills combine to produce the exquisite colour and detail which you can see in the flower card animations.
Like Jacquie, Bev lives in Lurgashall, and like Jacquie, she is a frequent visitor to the Noah’s Ark pub! She has two dogs - a white Standard Poodle called Roo, and his son Billy, who is Poodle x Lurcher.
Malcolm is a Chartered Accountant and a member of the Institute for Independent Business. He has a dozen or so separate clients, acting in a different role for each depending on their circumstances, but always from a financial perspective.
Working from home in Lurgashall allows him the time to take up his other profession, for which he is a qualified CLOT (Canine Linguist Or Translator). Being Molly’s owner (or is the other way round?) was ideal training, and it is this qualification which has enabled him to ghost write Chudleigh’s diary, setting down in writing the various exploits which Chudleigh gets up to. The miracle is that everything in the diary is based on a true story.
Malcolm plays for the village cricket team - the younger members describe his fielding as "statuesque". He also takes every opportunity to visit the Noah’s Ark, but only to independently verify the alleged tales which Chudleigh confides to him and join in the frequent planning meetings with Jacquie and Bev. During the winter months, Malcolm strays outside the village to perform each Saturday as a rugby referee.