Windows

I am loving the slightly colder evenings we're having. This time of year is so exciting for me as I always associate it with the beginning of term and new experiences. Plus the way the sun sits quite low in the sky (and the amazingly clear days autumn brings) means it can be a magical time for lovely contrasty photographs.
Anyway, this little picture was made after leaning out of my velux window in my room for some time this evening. The composition isn't amazing but I quite like the feeling of it. It makes me want to wear tights and snuggle up at home.

brrring brrring!

We bought this amazing phone this morning at the car boot sale near us. It's great for posing with. And it sounds pretty good too!

Farewells

Today is my last day working at my university job before I begin my degree. Yesterday I said goodbye to everyone at my school job, I'm really sad to leave both. On the bright side, I was given the most amazing pencils EVER!!! So there's no backing out of Illustration now...

Above is a new collage called "I built you a village". I think it seems a bit sad for some reason but maybe that's just because I made it last night and was feeling a bit nostalgic. The trees are made from 20 year old marbled paper that I made at pre-school.

Next week I'm doing all my registering stuff at uni - I'm so nervous! I've got that beginning of term feeling! Hope you have a good weekend everyone, wish me luck for next week!

Happy feet

This was a drawing I did of my feet dangling over the riverbank on our last fishing trip of the summer holidays. I was pretty happy with it at the time as it encapsulates my odd-looking feet, but seeing them on screen makes them look even more bizarre to me. I think maybe feet are just like that though, if you look at them for too long it's sort of like saying one word over and over and it losing all meaning.
Anyway, I had a little play scanning in the drawing and painting in the blue using Photoshop. I find the result quite pleasing :)

Cut it out

I was trying to make a complicated cutout picture thing the other day with different papers but got really annoyed with it and then discovered that all the bits that I'd discarded as I was cutting said complicated shapes out, were actually more interesting that what I'd been trying to achieve! I of course only realised this once I'd thrown them allover the floor in a rage. But whatever method works for you, right?
Hope you have a happy weekend all, I'm off to buy new shoes and colour pens...yum.

Geometry cake

I made this delicious looking geometric dollop this evening whilst watching telly. I was going for abstract and bold, I ended up with a graph paper dumpling. Nevermind. Dragon's Den was worth it!

Red graph paper!

It's the future! Yep I discovered red graph paper on Friday and am just a bit excited! I found it in two shades of red and I have one large sheet of orange which is to die for! God bless those cartographers at work who use the stuff. Hopefully they won't mind me using a couple of sheets to play with, it's like the best stuff ever!
I'm going to do more experiments later combining it with other coloured paper in a more abstract-y way. Watch this space for more paper-related geekery...

Framing happiness

I just thought I'd mention this beautiful oil painting that I started making a rather elaborate frame for today. I absolutely love it, and have become a bit obsessed with it. The colours are so gorgeous and the stylised bottles are lovely. It was painted by the husband of the woman I'm framing it for and it had a pretty amazing voyage back to her.
Her husband had sold it many years ago and it had been handed down to relatives of those who bought it. It had become very dirty and had a huge rip in the middle when eventually the persn who ended up with it thought he should return it to who would truly appreciate it, so tracked down my customer. She's had it restored and I'm now making a lovely frame combining oatmeal-canvas-covered wood with a natural pale wood outer frame. It's always a bit scary framing something old and delicate but it's a pleasure nonetheless. If only I could keep it....

Listed

I finally got round to mounting one of the prints I did a while back from that car boot sale woodblock and listing it on etsy here. I photographed the print against my landlord's trailor that I look out over from my bedroom window. I'd been admiring the colour of it for some weeks now, and finally had a reason to use it!

In other exciting news I bought some lovely charcoal grey over-the-knee socks today, I think I'm going to put them on right now actually...

Drawing stuff

So to get me in the groove of doing observational drawing again in readiness for my course, I've been drawing random things around the house. This is the payphone in our living room. I've never even used it but it's quite a cool shape, and was tricky to draw with all the angles and stuff. It's not the best drawing ever so I spruced it up a bit on Photoshop with some pretty colours...

Illustration Exhibitions

On Wednesday we saw some nice Illustration exhibitions in London. I've only just got round to googling some of the illustrators from them but these were some of my faves. I needed a bit of inspiration as I'm a little nervous about starting my degree in Illustration Sept. We are apparently due for six solid weeks of observational drawing. I'm expecting some gruelling times ahead...eek!Marcus Walters at Concrete Hermit



Tom Burns


Naomi Ryder - yes that is stitching!!!


and Sarah Gooch, all at The London College of Communication (Association of Illustrators exhib)

Ribbon paintings

I've had a very nice evening painting these little things. There's nothing like having a plate covered in little pools of freshly mixed pastel colours and a tiny weeny paintbrush to apply them. That could possibly be one of my favourite things ever. I think I'm going to mount them on card and bung them on etsy. I am loving these bits of wood I bought the other day. Best £3.95 spent ever! AND we're off to London tomorrow to see some illustration exhibitions, hooraaaaaaay!

Happy new home

Not for me, but for my pins. Lovely vintage Sellotape tin bought at the weekend from a car boot sale.

If you like pottery...

I've just found this brilliant website called Retro Select that lists loads of gorgeous pottery from the 50's and 60's (yes my favourite period for pottery...) and tells you patterns, dates of manufacture, names of designers, how rare they are and rough values. I've pretty much spent all afternoon browsing and writing wishlists to then look up on ebay. Be warned you may lose a couple of hours with this!

Treasury!

Yay! One of my beach bags has been featured in a treasury by Pugs in Space. Mine's on the left, second from top. You can see the whole treasury here. I'm still working out how to do screengrabs properly on a mac so excuse the bottom being cut off!

Continuing a theme...

He he, so I'm obviously still finding the idea of wooden hair quite amusing! I bought a bag of little bits of wooden veneer the other day and have been experimenting. You need to stick cellotape onto the back of it before you cut it with scissors otherwise it will just crack along the grain but it's pretty fun once you get the hang of it. I'd love to be able to use a laser cutting machine to cut intricate designs and make my own inlays and stuff with contrasting colour wood. For now, I'll stick to the wooden legoman hairdos...

The second picture is of me and Jacob, photo realistic I think you'll agree!

Summertime!

I just bought this on ebay. I feel quite guilty as it's absolutely not essential but I rather fancied it and thought I deserved a treat! On Friday I had another interview at university to swap my course from Fine Art to Illustration. It sounds like an amazing course, and I think the interview went really well. I think it's nice to have things around the house that you actually use most days which remind you of a certain happy time. So this (which I'm now pretty sure has not got it's original lid, but hey) will have the dual functionality of storing sugar, and reminding me of the beginning of the next exciting stage of my life. Can you tell I'm trying desparately to justify my buying it..?

It's a Hornsea pattern called "Summertime" in case you wondered and totally goes with my other 1950's yellow and turquoise kitchen stuff.

Haha!

I think I like facial hair! I was playing with some lovely sticky-back wood effect vinyl that Lucie Summers gave me yonks ago and thought wouldn't it be funny if hair was made out of wood!? I was watching Futurama too so that probably made me come up with this little bunch of beardy weirdies! Tee hee!

A day at the beach

We headed off to the beach yesterday and are spending today recovering from sunburn and general activity! It was gorgeous, if a little strange at a couple of points during the day...

We got to Wells-next-the-Sea (not Wells-next-TO-the-Sea like you might expect, no no, exactly how I typed it, so you can almost hear the Norfolk twang) at around 10:30 and headed straight to the beach to find the tide out and the sea about 10 miles away! We wandered out and found a nice bit of sand next to an inlet to paddle in. From previous experience I knew that it was only too easy to get cut off from the mainland by such inlets and channels. We packed our things up just as a girl came running over with little sister and two dogs. She had left it too late to cross the channel and was scared her dogs wouldn't be able to swim in the strong currents. We obviously helped them cross and considered it out good deed for the day. Little did we realise that on our way back to the car we'd end up helping some lad who'd come to the beach alone, forgotten his insulin, had been drinking (yes, i rather lost sympathy at this point too...), and had no money on him. Anyway we helped him too so I think we are owed some serious good karma sometime soon!

Anyway, now we're back home and I'm battling with Dreamweaver, domain name websites and webspace providers to try an get a new website up, it's about time really. Wish me luck, it's only reduced me to tears twice so far!!!

Weekend

Look what I did at the weekend! I'm pretty pleased with it. I'd already stuck the plate hangers to the plates and then yesterday morning we went out to our local car boot sale and I found the clock! I think orange and turquoise are my new favourite colours. Can you tell?

Other than hanging plates to a wall like a crazy person, I went to the World Peashooting Competition, which surprisingly is on a village green in a tiny place near Ely.

Weird huh.