Art's a doddle for doodling toddlers.

Byline: By Gayle Tomlinson

She may only be 10-months-old, but Lily Mae Buckley is already drawing on her experience of life to help build a business.

Forget oils and water colours, Lily Mae prefers her fingers and pots of paint, and her artwork is adorning the fronts of greeting cards.

Her parents' firm Vanilla cards, based on Gateshead's Team Valley, is using children's natural talents to design specialist cards.

The toddlers have fun drawing a picture and the firm then turns it into a card with a photograph of the budding artist on the back.

Owner Nicky Buckley, 25, said the idea is taking off and the firm is now receiving orders from parents with children in four nurseries in the North East.

Nicky said: "It is a brilliant way to get the kids' drawings on to cards.

"I think the artwork we get from kids is so bright and vibrant. It looks fantastic.

"We have researched this in depth and there is no-one that offers this as a service."

Nicky decided to set up the firm after her other company Positive Designs had a slow summer.

She said they had sold some of their own card designs to Fenwick but were only going to get 1p for each card sold. She then decided then to cut out the middle man and do it herself.

At the moment, the company is limited to taking orders from parents who want their youngsters' designs made into cards but Nicky said they are looking at the possibility of putting out a children's range.

They are also thinking about extending their business to take on designs from older children and from art students who might want to turn their paintings into cards. She said: "We do foresee us bringing out a range that is devised from children's art and going in to mass production but that is quite far down the line."