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!

Freshly Blended Patterns

I just completed my first ever commissioned pattern design job! It was heaps of fun. Nicole from freshly blended needed some patterns to compliment her new brand, site and packaging, and in return she's making me one of her beautiful hand bound books. I'm very excited.





What is it about collaborating with someone from the craft world that feels so much more satisfying and enjoyable than collaborating with someone from the graphic design world? The reason struck me when I was writing an email to Nicole about this very topic, and I wonder why I never conciously registered it before. The graphic design world is male dominated. The craft world is female dominated. I'm making some massive generalisations here I know, but to me the graphic design world often has a hard edge and can be quite competitive. The fact that there is so much ephasis amongst 'top' design studios on winning design awards is a testament to this. On the flip side the craft world is soft and nurturing and encouraging, and has helped me to flourish creatively.

Thinking back on the contract jobs I've done in studios around Melbourne (admittedly not that many), only one place had another female creative. Crazy.

Anyway ... /rant. Hope everyone has a great weekend and doesn't become a puddle in the heat or an icecube in the snow.

P.S. - thanks to Jem from Imagescience for mentioning my blog and website in his newsletter!!

2007 ahoy

Happy new year everybody!! It's 6:30pm here and it amazes me to think that some of you in the States are just about to reach midnight now! Our celebrations already feel like forever ago.

I'm on holidays for a couple of weeks so have heaps of stuff to blog about. One of my favourite pre-christmas projects was this book I made for Pete's mum, which I can finally put up here now that she's seen it in real life.





The idea for the cover came when I was getting a design printed at imagescience onto canvas. It struck me that the canvas was tough yet flexible enough to use as bookcloth. This method opens up heaps of design possibilities - I'm no longer limited to thoughts of 1 or 2 colour screen prints, I can print anything.



It was also a great opportunity to put one of my patterns to good use. Pattern designs look so much better and more profesh when shown in a proper context :)



So yeah, that was fun to work on. And she really liked it, which is the best part of all :)

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