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Firstly, I just want to thank everyone for the overwhelming amount of feedback on the pattern decision. And it was definately overwhelming! I spent so long struggling and stressing over which patterns to print and it kept me awake with racing thoughts for a couple of nights. But I've finally made my decision and am just waiting (somewhat frustratedly) on the fabric. I am SO itching to get moving on this!!
Meanwhile I got the coolest package in the mail today. This is Nicole upholding her part of the patterns-for-handmade-book bargain, and my god did she uphold it. I had a giggly old time unwrapping each part of the package she put together for me. Soooo gorgeous, every bit of it. And check out that wrapping paper!
In the forgeound is the beautiful handmade book she made me. It features different patterned papers front and back, fabric lining, a velcro buttoned pocket at the front containing a Certificate of Authenticity (with a familiar pattern on it, hehe), and pages and pages of different found papers waiting to be drawn all over.
Thanks again, Nicole :)
Would anybody be so kind as to tell me which of the patterns below they'd most like to see screen printed onto fabric?
I've chosen the ones that I feel would work best as a 1 colour print. I'm going to print two patterns for my first print run, and am off to Charles Parsons (thanks Kristen!) this arvy to buy some fabric. Ooh the ball is finally rolling!
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!
I have never felt so much relief putting a website live than I did last night. I've been working on a monstrous Flash project for most of the past year and. its. finally. over. whoo!
For anyone who's interested in what I do for my real day job, you can check it out here. I'm not 100% proud of this project mind you. It might be visually impressive (albeit clunky) but I don't think it does what it's supposed to do as well as it could - which is provide 'young people' with information on some very serious topics.
I don't think such a heavy focus on 'cool' was appropriate here ... but I lost that debate with the art director ;) Who knows, I could be wrong. We'll wait and see how successful it is.
Anyway, the best thing about finishing that project is that it leaves me free to do some things that I've been talking about doing for ages. Today I finally went and visited 'Print Ink' - a screen printing studio who print fabric yardages (who also happen to be around the corner. How I love N.Melb). I was very impressed. They were exactly what I'm looking for and were such lovely people too! The prices were reasonable however require me to be fairly confident and commited about printing my designs and trying to sell them. Ahh well, whatever happens it should be a heap of fun!
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?
