my folk lover

in the sun...

Today was such a lovely sunny day, I decided to go on an adventure down the back of the garden. What I found was an army of rabbits and snails looking longingly at and ready to pounce on my new little seedlings. In fact the whole situation looked a little bit like this...

Well ok, not that many rabbits. I managed to fend them all off and my seedlings are continuing to grow happily and peacefully. I'm using a weed mat this year and it is working so well, I don't need to use so much water which means I can grow all my vegies mostly on rain water. I wonder if they taste better with rain water... probably I suppose. Anyway, here are some sunny growing pictures...

p.s. I keep meaning to mention this... over here at the wonderful blog of Victoria E is an interview with one of my all time most favourite artists, Evan B Harris. If you're interested it really is a great read, you can also see more of his work at his flickr account.

frankie and magnation...

Thankyou for all the comments about my exhibition, it will be very exciting to see some of you there. We are hanging it early next week and I'm too embarrassed to tell you how much work I still need to do. Instead I will show you some pictures of the window painting I did at Magnation. Frankie asked me if I could paint two girls looking very sweet eating cupcakes for the release of the Nov/Dec issue. Here is what I came up with...

a book by its cover...

Today I just want to show you something that I have been gazing at for a good while. These are some pages from Jen Corace's sketchbook that I find just wonderful...

They come from one of my favourite blogs of the moment called Book By Its Cover by Julia Rothman. She reviews a large variety of beautiful books and it is alway an inspiration to browse through her selection. She has started posting snippets from artist's sketchbooks each friday, hence the above images by Jen Corace. If you haven't already seen this blog, hop over here to take a lovely look...

a cloth covered button...

Last week I was wandering around the city and I remembered a new little magazine that I had done some illustrations for. As I was quite near the magazine mecca that is Magnation, I decided to try and hunt it down. Its name is A Cloth Covered Button and it is all about fashion, not your typical latest trends style glossy, instead it is full of some very interesting commentary and essays... and illustrations! Here are a few pictures, including the pages where my illustrations made an appearance...

our show...

I just saw the invite to our show and it looks lovely! Oh my goodness... I have so much work to do!!

Any Melbournians out there? We would love to see you at the opening!

Here's the invite (If you click on it, it should grow to become more easily readable)...

two little originals...

Just a quick post to say that I have uploaded two little originals over at my store. They are from my 'Curious Adventures on the High Seas' series and have recently found their way back into my company...

You can find them right over here.

kokeshi pink...

Here she is... I finished my little Kokeshi doll yesterday. Now I have to wrap her up, post her off and hope she gets there on time!

Here is the invitation for the show...

kokeshi exhibition...

Today I am sitting at my desk sniffling into a tissue, surrounded by blank objects that need to be completed... a blank little paperquilt card from Dawbis, another blank wooden bottle for the Kingbrown Magazine launch in Perth, and also a blank little wooden Kokeshi doll. I need to remove a few things from my to-do list so I have decided today will be Kokeshi doll day. If you are wondering what a Kokeshi doll is, here is a photo of my blank one...

She will be part of an exhibition at Subtext gallery in San Diego, curated by Christina Conway in celebration of a Japanese national holiday called Bunka-no-hi. There is an amazing line up that will be part of this show and each artist has been given the same little doll to customise. You can take a look here to see the artists involved, here to take a peek at some finished Kokeshi dolls, and here to find out more about the project. Well, off I go to start-a-painting...

ahh... i'm in vogue...

Well things have been moving very slowly around here at the moment... partly due to the fact that soon after I got home I got sick and my cloudy head just would not think straight, I think Japan wore me out! Anyway, enough of the boring news... onto something more exciting. Yesterday I received a package in the mail all the way from Korea, I opened it up to find Vogue Girl Korea...

I then went on a little search and finally found...

... me! There I am sitting along side two fantastic artists, Eveline Tarunadjaja (who I will be having a show with in a few weeks!) and Caitlin Shearer.  Woo hoo... cool! Here are the rest of the pages of the article, some of my favourite artists were included such as Julie Morstad and Hannah Jane Barton...

p.s. While we are on the subject, I promised my Mum I would post this before I left and I never got round to it. I was in the A2 section of The Age a couple of Saturdays ago, woo hoo again!

home again, home again...

We're back! I have had the most amazing two weeks in Japan, it is a fantastic place that I hope to visit many more times in the future. We did so much in two weeks however I can't help but feel that we didn't even scratch the surface. Here are some random photos taken in both Tokyo and Kyoto...

I still have to post photos of the wedding we went to, it was amazing. Set in a Shinto shrine the whole bridal party wore kimono, there were three outfit changes and a sixteen course meal! Of course I managed to forget my camera on that day. This was partly due to the fact that ten minutes before we were ready to leave Neil realised he only packed one shoe, so we had to drop everything and do a mad dash around the burbs of Tokyo looking for a shoe shop. I'm sure I will be able to pinch some photos off someone else.

Now it is back to the real world! Thankyou for all the comments on the last couple of posts, I'm sorry I couldn't reply to each one but I have enjoyed reading them very much. Also thankyou to anyone who bought something from my shop while I was away, I'm slowly getting all the orders sorted and packed so you should see yours very soon!