Drawing, reading, painting

Its been my first relatively 'free' weekend in awhile, and I've been enjoying having the space to do some non-work creative stuff. Buying a watercolour painting kit and having a play (mmm I really like this medium) , starting to read The Artists's Way, and doing some drawing with a nice new technical pencil.

It's been aaaages since I've done any drawing - inspiration is few and far between for these. But I like how this one turned out, inspired by my obsession with lofty warehouse spaces. mmmm.

Almost There

This little girl wasn't originally going to make it all the way to the digital inking stage. She just sat in my notebook, because I wasn't completely happy with the way her dress fell and the balance of branches on the tree.

However a close friend of mine happened to be over when I was getting the other treehouse print done and told me that she met one of her closest, bestest friends up a treehouse! So she wants to give the two prints to her friend as a birthday present - very sweet, and very flattering.



Okay back to work! I'm working on this epic, epic flash website job that's due to be launched in two weeks. And then i'll be free! freeee!!

printing fun

Inspired by the positive response to my prints over the last week I got another small collection printed today and popped them in the shop. It's been heaps of fun - very uplifting.


My latest drawing 'treehouse' was thrown into the mix and I'm happy very with how it turned out :)

Thanks so much for the support everybody, and have a fantastic weekend.

treehouse!

This girl, her happy places always seem to be around trees :)



Maybe she'll get printed tomorrow...

blown away

I'm quite blown away - all of my prints have sold. I got more printed today and two of those have sold already again. It's such a flattering response, and inspiring for me to keep drawing and see what happens.

In other news, my close friend bought me back these fairly lights from Thailand on request. They were insanely cheap - $6 AU, although i've seen them online selling for $25 US! I've finally got them working by having to attach an aussie power plug because it came with a thai one (which I did myself, very proudly ;).

canvas printses

I don't consider myself to be a 'proper' artist by any means (what does that mean these days, anyway?) but I thought it'd be nice to get some of my recent drawins printed onto canvas at good old imagescience and see how they go in my etsy shop. I just love the way things look printed onto that canvas:









Hmm, I don't know what i'll do with them if they don't sell - it'd feel wrong to have them up on my own wall, and weird to give them to friends unless someone asked for one specifically. Anyway, just rambling now - we'll cross that bridge when we come to it!!

Meanwhile, I went to mum and dad's last week and collected all my old screenprinting stuff out of the garage - most of it guiltily unopened and unused - screens, emulsion, ink, squeegees. Hoping to have a screenprinting day sometime soon (maybe with miss wendy if she's keen) and make some of that patterned fabric myself. Geez I've been talking about that for ages, I just need to go and do it!

Armchair love

What a crazy tropical weather weekend. Pouring with rain outside but sitting with the air-con on inside. Good weather for drawing though. I had a lot of fun working on the detail of this one, and it's great when you can combine two things you love, in this case drawing and patterns :)



However, again I'm having the same old trouble with choosing colours. It's one of those abilities that can turn a mediocre piece into a good one, or a good piece into a great one...

the red tree (my 100th post)

This weekend I received a copy of this very beautiful book - The Red Tree by Shaun Tan. I don't have the words to describe it fittingly, but the ilustrations are amazing and the feel of the book is very touching... and inspiring.



I've had a really sleepy and dream like weekend, and just felt inspired to draw. Of course, my illustrations are nowhere near as lovely as the ones in the book, so I feel like writing a big wad of text here to separate the one above from the ones below...





Drawing has never been my forte, and I have yet to really find my style, but I'm slowly getting there. I think I think too much when I draw, and have trouble turning off that logic side of my brain. I think thats why I like textile design - it requires a good mix of creative and logical/technical thinking...

P.S. - I can't believe this is my 100th post! 100 posts of yakking on about myself. Hah.

printing woes and joys

Although I've done some weird and wonderful things with my Gocco, i've never actually done a plain old proper run of cards. So I decided to Gocco print my xmas cards this year, but they were a bit of a disaster colour wise.

The problem all started when I absent mindedly squeezed out too much blue ink onto the mixing palette. Not wanting to waste it I tried to make a green out of it anyway by adding not-enough-yellow. The end result being that really gross middle-green colour that looks completely boring coupled with plain old red. See below left:



The project was partly rescued by scraping off all the ink, mixing it together to form a muddled greeny brown colour, and printing the design 1 colour:


Oh, it's supposed to be a partidge in a pear tree... if it's not obvious :)

As the title of this post suggests, not all my printing experienced this week have been woeful. Sometimes it's better to leave things to the professionals, like my favourite printers ImageScience, who specialise in high quality inkjet prints onto lovely archival cotton papers and canvas (and happen to be across the road!).

I had a bit of leftover canvas real-estate from another job with which I printed these:



I'm thinking of putting them up on Etsy and seeing how they go. I have no idea how much I'd try to sell them for though. They're 11cm x 16cm plus the white border. Any suggestions welcome!!



Well, that's all from me for now. Hope everyone is on top of their xmas shopping and not too stressed out, and I hope you all have a fantastic christmas and new year!! I'll be back in the new year hopefully with some new patterns and projects and fun stuffs! xo

Facts for the day:

If you're in Melbourne and looking for a filing cabinet, go past those outrageously priced office furniture stores and straight to Dallas Trading on Macaulay Rd, North Melb. We got an awesome solid metal ex-office one for only $80,and she aint half bad looking either. And she has wheels!

They have some other antiquey furniture numbers too, like these cute little nested tables we scored for $80 also!



Craft: magazine is awesome - arrived in the mail yesterday! I'm not sure if i'll actually make anything from this issue (although they do have a good screenprinting tute) ... but somehow just having it makes me feel more connected to this otherwise intangible online world.

Bad skin? Flaxseed oil! Well it's certainly working for me. I started taking it a few weeks ago and I can definately see differences. A smoother complexion and no little breakouts. I went through roaccutane crap-ness back in my teenage years so this. is. sooo. nice.

Meanwhile, keeping sane under work pressure with a bit more drawing practice. Nothing too speccy but it's fun to play around:

Undies

Well I think I'm over my little slump. I blame the weather. I know, a bit of rain is supposed to be a good thing, but I'm a warm weather creature.

Thanks for the nice comments on the little pics - glad nobody else thought they were as unoriginal as I did. But then again who's going to post a comment saying "yeah you're right, these suck". I quite enjoyed drawing the maple leaves though - it's fun when you learn to draw a new thing, so I had the idea for the painting below. It didn't turn out quite right - it's a little obscure I'm thinking and missing the details that make it immediately obvious that she's lying on the ground covered with leaves.



I had a bit of a breakthrough with my drawing this weekend (at least I think so). I've always found drawing people a little difficult - mine are always lack character and the proportions are all wrong. But this time I tried something a little different - drawing them in their underwear first :) This made things so much easier. I could focus on the body shapes and positions first, and then add clothes later ... or not at all. Who needs clothes when it's a warm spring day and you have apple print undies?