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Back to pattern design for a bit. I'm tending to favour designs that can work with a limited colour palette - a single colour even, so that when I finally get around to printing them I can do a 1 colour screen print.
A splash of colour variation:
Bit sleepy so the words aren't coming tonight. I've been working my way through The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain recently though. Has anyone else tried it? It's fantastic so far and although I can already more or less draw, there's heaps of insight into the drawing mindset and how to 'see' like an artist does.
Sleep time, g'night :)
A very quick thankyou to Irene from bloesom blog for not one, but TWO posts about my work!! If you haven't already, head over there and check out her blog - she posts about some amazing design stuff (so naturally i'm flattered to be included). Some of her posts are in Dutch but most are in English too :)
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!!
Sitting on the couch yesterday watching the movie Russian Dolls (with all those gorgeous cosy parisian homes) I felt inspired to make something for our apartment. We have those kind of ugly light fittings that sit on the ceiling covered by an oyster shell thingy (oh how i'd love to have hanging lightbulbs that I could put funky lampshades on) so I decided to make a sort of lampshade thing that sits flush on the roof and covers/pretties it up a bit.
I spent about 7 hours working on this project up till 1am, always thinking "once it all comes together it'll hold it's shape better... it'll be okay". Well, the only way you learn these things is to try and fail.
Lesson learnt: If you want to make a lampshade you need a solid frame that can hold it's own weight. A frame made out of polyprop doesn't cut it. Behold:
Okay it might look _okay_ in these photos but in real life, hanging from my ceiling with the light on it looks like a saggy, unrefined mess. Maybe it's rescuable if I line the inside with some stiff wire? What bugs me most is wasting that kimono fabric - I might have to cut this fella up and rescue the pieces.
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.
This girl, her happy places always seem to be around trees :)
Maybe she'll get printed tomorrow...
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 ;).
I've been dying to blog about this since Wednesday, but Pete's camera suddenly went 'blind'. It displays black, and takes pictures of black! So i'm back to my crappy old Ixus for now - 'scuse the poor quality. Anyway, I was roaming around Mailing Rd in Canterbury the other day which is known for its old worldly shops and antiquey stores, and at the back of one antiques store i found something i'd always wanted:
It's an old printers typecase drawer - yay! Just the sort of thing you hope to find when rummaging at the back of those places. And how cute it looks with little ornamenty stuff in the compartments! For any Melbourne peeps who want one too - there's about 6 left in the store, selling for $40 each. Not bad.
Hey I have a question to ask. Does anyone know who makes the beaker/mug thing drawn below? I found it on a blog somewhere and thought it was ingenious (so much easier to hold that a useless teacup handle!) but didn't bookmark it :(
Update: It was on Sia and Bloesem's blogs - thanks Sia!! The cups are by Mokkatanten. After all this effort I should go out get some :)
I had to laugh because their stockists were located in Berlin, Copenhagen, Amsterdam ... and Brunswick. Yep, good old Sydney Road, Brunswick, 10 mins from my apartment.
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...
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!!
Well, for the first time ever i've been 'tagged'! Stereoette tagged me to do '5 things'. The rules are as follows:
1. someone tags you,
2. you post five things about yourself that you haven’t already mentioned on your blog,
3. you tag people you’d like to know more about.
I tried to think of some more witty/interesting things but they'll probably come to me when I'm not thinking about it so much! Here goes:
1) I can't stand ticking clocks. When I stay over at other people's places I take the batteries out.
2) When growing up I was an avid fan of The Mysterious Cities of Gold, and the first website I ever made was a fan site about the series. I used HTML frames and thought I was so clever.
3) I once worked as one of those annoying people who hand out perfume cards at Myer. I had to wear a tight orange top that said "make someone happy" which triggered lots of oh-so-original responses from men like "you can make me happy, luv".
4) Lately at about 3 in the afternoon I jump rope for about 5 minutes and do weights.
5) I just had 9 fillings done over the last few weeks and have 1 more next week (my last, thank god). Floss, people.
Shannon, Kristen, Julie, Anna, Helen - you're next :P
Looking back on my childhood, there was a distinct trend of me jumping from one crafty pursuit to the next to the next. Mum found this a great source of amusement and birthday/christmas present ideas. One minute it'd be china painting, the next candle making, then flower pressing then fimo modelling then bead looming then soft toy making and so on.
The one thing that I did manage to stick with for a considerable amount of time was ceramics. I think i did it for about 6 years. Too small and weak to handle the wheel I just did freeform modelling - mainly dragons and wizards and castles - all that stuff I was mad about at the time.
Anyway, it's become really obvious to me (and maybe to you too) that this trend has continued into my adult life, well in the last year at least. Drawing, painting, gocco printing, jewellery design, pattern design, bookbinding ... and now I've found a new one - silver clay modelling!
Has anyone else tried Art Clay Silver before? It is awesome. It's a type of modelling clay made up of silver particles that you mould into any shape and then fire on a gas stovetop. The result is 99.9% silver. Madness. I bought myself a starter kit from The Bead Co the other week and here's the development of my first piece:
The piece still in clay form. It was quite fiddly to model and I found that I had to keep wetting the clay so it wouldn't dry out when working with it - basically it was just like working with normal clay -similar consistency and drying behaviour.
Firing the piece on the gas burner (it's covered with a mesh cage in case it explodes)
The final piece, polished up (kinda). I can't take full credit for the shape though - it's partially based on a piece of jewellery I saw somewhere that's got stuck in my head. (edit: ahh, now I know where! it was Kyo Hashimoto's work!).
It'd be awesome to be able to keep dabbling in a range of crafts as my job. I think that's why I'm so reluctant to join a studio and be boxed into one role - web designer OR graphic designer OR textile designer OR OR OR. I can't imagine a studio job that would let me do all the things I love. And I don't see myself as being particularly good at one thing over all the others. Hence I'm still working from home on my own. Lonely business but very rewarding. I imagine that there are a lot of crafters out there who face this same problem. How have you tackled it?
I had a fantasic christmas. A great day with my family, which included a Skype session with my brother's family in the States, sitting in our respective living rooms opening presents in front of a TV eqipped with a webcam - it worked surprisingly well :)
I received lots of gorgeous thoughtful presents from my boy, and from my folks I received the classic Breville Wizz that almost everybody's mum had whilst growing up and which has barely changed in design over the last 20 years (i see that as a good sign). We made pasta dough with it and used our pasta maker for the first time. Home made pasta is oh my god ... sooooo, so good! I think I will be getting right into it and this could become a pasta making blog, hehe.
I am now also the proud owner of lots of great craft/melbourne/design books, including Handmade in Melbourne, and guess who I found inside! What a nice surprise and now I can put faces to the names - congrats girls!!
Back tomorrow-ish with more - hope you're all having a great break!! :)
This is why I love Christmas:
Yeah I know, I'm supposed to say that I love Christmas for all the family togetherness and sharing (which I do) but what I really, really love is the look of a pile of presents all wrapped up pretty and under the tree. I love gift wrapping. I love buying lots of little things for people as an excuse to wrap them all up individually. So much fun.
Shannon has a great post on her blog where she sums up all her achievments from 2006. It's such a good thing to do - to look back over the year and see how far you've come.
I'm not usually one to be very realistic about my own achievments, but when I look back myself I can see a massive difference between the Lara today and the Lara one year ago. A year ago, I had very little confidence in myself and my work. A year ago, I didn't draw. I didn't make & sell jewellery, and didn't even make patterns. Oh, and I didn't have a Gocco, either! Earlier this year I was really struggling to work from home on my own, emotionally. It's still hard, but heaps easier than it used to be.
And here's the part that I'm hearing echoed all over blogland at the moment - I'd like to send out a huge thankyou to all of you who have been reading and supporting and inspiring me along the way. It's really made a world of difference. I don't think I would have pursued any of it (esp. jewellery design and pattern making) if it wasn't for all your encouragement.
Have a fantastic Christmas everybody and see you in 2007.
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
Today greeted us with 38 degree (100 F) heat and a smoky haze over everything from all the bushfires raging around the state.
Despite this, I started to get stir crazy about 2pm from being indoors all day. I think it's because I work from home, and there's a certain amount of being at home that one can handle before becoming desperate to get out.
So I braved the heat and headed down to Fitzroy - I'd run out of bead making supplies again (I never buy enough, out of lack of conviction that my necklaces will sell as well as they have). I also wanted to pop by the Rose Street Artist's Market to look for a Christmas present for Pete and to check out Wendy June's stall full of handmade toys and other gorgeous things. Her husband is doing a bit of programming for me but i'd never met Wendy before, and both she and her stall were really, really lovely!!
Some button badges that she was selling :)
I don't think she has an online shop yet but her toys are for sale at www.modamuse.com
At least we can shop online without having to brave the elements. Yay the internet!
I just drank a blackberry beer I found at the Vic Market. So yummy, and so good after a sweltering market shop tugging my rickety trolley full of vegies around. I feel like a real Aussie now. However it has rendered me unable to work (coding flash stuff, supposedly) so I'll write here instead :)
Last weekend was super productive. I found myself awake and up just after 7am on Saturday (!!) and made use of the time producing more jewellery pieces for the Modamuse shop. I mailed this lot off yesterday:
(best viewed full size)
I hope they sell as quickly as the last lot and I haven't missed whatever it was that caused all the others to sell like hotcakes! But there's some new designs of the blue dot necklace (which really needs a better name) and some matching earrings too, so fingers crossed :)
Also, I finally got to meet my screenprinter and have a chat about printing patterns. His prices were very reasonable and should be able to print the fabric in 50cm x 65cm pieces, which is definately big enough for people to work with. So that should be happening over the next week or so, hopefully :)
Also, thanks to those who gave feedback on the pattern size. I'm going to go with my gut feeling and scale the patterns up a bit, suitable for bags and pillows and lamps and dresses and all sorts of things. Very exciting :)
Hope you're all surviving the heat/bushfires/snow wherever you are in the world :)
Madness. The modamuse shop opened this week, and has already sold three of my blue dot necklaces. I can't believe it. It's so very flattering and confidence inspiring. Thankyou to those who bought them!! I will get on to making more this weekend, and might try a few different designs :)
Meanwhile I've been inspired to really get going with printing my patterns onto fabric. Some people have been giving me some really nice feedback and prompting me to do so, so I will dilly dally no longer :)
Buuuut, first I need some advice from all you crafty people out there. What scale should I print them at??? It's a tough decision: either print them with small, tight repeats, suitable for small patchwork and craft work, or scale them up a bit so that they're suitable for bags/dresses/lamps etc. I'm also not 100% sure which ones to print in the first place. I've chosen the fairly simple 1-2 colours ones for now, but I'm not sure if they're the most appealing. Any advice/suggestions would be much appreciated. The full selection is viewable here.
I did a few test prints onto A4 to try and figure out the scale. Here's what I came up with (Ignore the colours for now):
What do you think? Too small? Too large? I will have a large area to play with, around 50cm x 80cm per print which is pretty expansive, so ... I could turn them into funky large scale repeats instead. As you can tell, I'm at a loss! Thanks in advance for any suggestions!
