Good mail day

Often I find myself compulsively checking the mailbox 2 or 3 times a day. Even when I know it's too early for the postie to have come, or impossible for him to have come between then and the last time I checked.

But today when I got back home (after putting in my first ever pair of contact lenses - OMG so good!) I was finally rewarded with some much anticipated exciting mail:


These gorgeous prints from the yumi yumi etsy shop. Much much better in person - I need a better camera!!


Some much awaited swatches from www.pickhemp.com. Piles and piles of beautiful hemp/linen/organic cotton based fabric swatches. And decent prices too! Only problem is that the shipping costs might really blow the price out. Just waiting to hear back on that now. Fingers crossed!!

New Moo

My new set of Moo cards arrived this week! I still think Moo cards are the best thing since sliced bread. 100 cards with up to 100 different designs on the back all for only $25 USD sent anywhere in the world. You can't go wrong.



My justification for getting a new batch printed was that my old ones said "interactive and graphic designer" which is too limiting these days so these ones just say "designer". Ooh how fancy.

I got an email from Nicole today suggesting that Craftree would make a good print. I hadn't even thought about it, but I think it's a nice idea. My local giclee printer can run off A3 canvas prints basically on demand, so I decided to put a few A3 options up on Etsy. here's just a couple:



I put some of my girls up A3 size also, just to see how they go.


Ooh and have you seen Etsy Mini? It's an Etsy widget that creates little thumbnails of your shop items that you can put on your blog. I've got one on the right hand side of my blog. Very handy.

Design*Sponge

Eeee, I woke up yesterday morning to find a bunch of etsy sales in my inbox and this great comment from Stereotte: "dude, did you know your prints are being featured over at Design*Sponge????" Haha! Wow I never thought that would happen!

Small & Round and happy

Yay for impulse purchases off the internets. I just bought these two prints off one of my fav artists - Jeremiah Ketner of Small & Round:


They're available in his shop for $30 US each. Limited edition of 30 screen prints. Sooo cute.

I feel like I'm totally cheating here by posting more pics of my prints that i've already talked about, but I haven't got anything else to post about this week and I think they look cute all framed up. I put together these two pairs of prints for a friend. One set is for her, and another for her best friend who she met up in a treehouse.



Also, here is one of the first 'real' drawings you get to do in the Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain book. You get to cheat a bit by first placing a sheet of perspex on your hand, tracing the shape of your hand directly onto the perspex, and then copying that onto paper. You then add the finer details and some shading.



I was really happy with the result, and I love the way the book's exercises seem so easy and yet leave you feeling pleasantly surprised by your achievements. That's a little retro button i'm holding :)

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.

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!

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

New Friends, and where to put them

This week our apartment has some new friends! Firstly the three Ashley G prints, which I managed to frame nicely for a grand total of $10 all up - yay for dodgy little $2 shops on Smith St! Yeah I know, they deserve a bit more attention than that, but it's an effective short term solution until one day we have some better wall space.



Our second new friend is a living one! Don't get too excited, this little friend only needs to be fed once every month. It's the cutest little Golden Jade tree, and I confess, I'm a little overly obsessed with it at the moment. I picked it up from the Vic Market today after spotting it when doing the groceries last week.

We'd been talking about getting a Jade tree for awhile, and when I saw it I knew it was perfect. It's so bonsai-ish and seriously looks like a quirky illustrated version of a tree! Yay! Although unfortunately, when I brought it home it wasn't what Pete had pictured in his mind at all. Turns out we were thinking about two quite different plants. I blame Google image search :)


Look at that stumpy little trunk!




sorry for all the pics. I couldn't seem to adequately capture it's cuteness in a single photo.

Sometimes you work on these really labour intensive projects that just don't end up working. Like these two prototypes below. I spent hours cutting little shapes out of poypropolyene, to find the end result just didn't make a good earring. Maybe the left hand one would work as a pendant with some darker coloured material.



The whole process can be pretty disappointing... but at least it's one step closer to finding an idea that works. If doing this stuff was super easy then I suppose more people would be doing it, and then it'd lose it's uniqueness and value. For that reason I kinda enjoy working on labour intensive stuff ... so long as I don't completely ruin my back working over the coffee table :)

Anyway there's lots of good to come with the bad. Firstly, the awesome Shannon has been helping me out heaps, suggesting I try to sell my patterns here and also offering to take some of my jewellery to sell at her sister's upcoming craft party. Thanks again Shannon!

Also I went on a bit of an impulse buying spree and bought these three prints from ashelyg's etsy shop:


Veeeeery much looking forward to receiving them in the post.
Aren't parcels great?

Meanwhile, I continued my purchasing spree by buying this design-nerdy hoodie from veer:


Ok, less spending and more doing - time to think up some new ideas that actually work this time. Wish me luck!

Finally another gocco print

Closeup... decided printing on fabric looked heaps nicer.


Using the transparent registration plate to position the fabric properly, in order to print a repeating pattern.


The gocco in action