❤ Hearts & Stripes

Hello! I'm quite excited about this blog post as it is all about a swap I did with Keri from HeartCharlie. Keri hails from Brooklyn, NY & has an undying love for stripes. I love her outfit posts and her inspiring story of switching careers to become a costume designer. A scary move but well worth it in the end.

She's been making some beautiful necklaces that are intricate and delicate. I'm now a proud owner of this pretty necklace below. The drawing above is inspired by her necklaces and this is what I swapped with her. Thank you for the swap Keri! ◕ ‿ ◕

Check out the cute envelope my necklace came in:

Thank you to LOVEBENTO for featuring me! There's some awesome art/fashion on there. If you like my illustrations you can show your love here by voting. There's no winners, it's just a show of appreciation :-)

In other news it's been quite a big week, Darren's grandfather was very ill so I caught the train to the central coast on Thursday night to say goodbye. Sadly he passed away on Friday morning - RIP Pop, I'm going to miss showing him my published illustrations & listening to him complain about how too many chefs use garlic. We get free magazines at work so I used to save them up and give them to Pop to read. I always made sure he never got the Masterchef magazines as the garlic-laced recipes would irk him as he was allergic to it. Pop was awesomely talented and was quite apt at making things like grandfather clocks and this ship below:

Someone also backed into our brand new car so now it has a hole in the bumper! Friday afternoon was quite funny, we were invited by Google to go on a boat ride around Sydney Harbour. I won 1st prize at the Google M-themed party dressed as Mickey Mouse haha.

Well I hope your week was not as dramatic and please go visit HeartCharlie!

Explosion of Colour & Patterns

Hello! Welcome to my explosion of colour & patterns post! These illustrations are mock ups for the Smiggle Skin Design competition where the winner gets their skin printed and sold throughout Smiggle stores. How amazing is that! You can enter here. They asked me to create some mock ups to give Smiggle fans some ideas.

You can read a little interview I did with Smiggle right here.

Inspired by Bubbles

Hello!

I hope you are all having a nice weekend. The weather has cooled in Sydney and it feels more like winter now, a nice break from the scorching weather we have had. So what have I been upto? Well Friday I attended Cinema Alley's outdoor cinema showcasing a collection of video art by chinese artists. Some were really good and some not so good, so bad that some people left, which is sad because the event was free and fully booked out, so I stayed for the whole evening to show my appreciation.

I think it was the 30 minute video of a chinese factory that drove people mad. At one point, an old lady was trying to thread a piece of cotton into the small eye of a needle....I think this part of the video went on for about 10 minutes and finally she threaded it through. Everyone watching cheered, whooped and clapped haha. I guess the joke was on us having to experience the arduous, repetitive, mind numbing job of a factory worker. I did once work 12 hour shifts in a pea factory during my summer holidays so I can relate to this mind numbing work.

Saturday: I drew some pink faces and robots that I will show you soon. Darren and I headed to Bondi to spend our Spreets voucher, we paid $20 for a voucher that entitled us to $40 worth of sushi. Guess what, the deal was too good to be true because the sushi was terrible, we had one sushi dish from the sushi train, which were four little stale bits and 2 miso soups - to the value of $10. We waited 25 minutes for our bento box to be told "sorry we have no rice left" even though we were the only people in the place. In the end we fled in tears...not really but we did leave and had a happy meal to cheer ourselves up. haha.

Today we had some delicious, fresh Mexican burritos and salads from a place on Oxford Street. Thinking about it now, I would like to eat some more. We then ventured to the Art Gallery of NSW, where they are currently exhibiting Art Express - a collection of art created by HSC students. Some very impressive work, especially a metal/copper sculpture of a preying mantis and also a concertina story book illustrated in pen & ink about a girl battling anorexia. I highly recommend visiting this exhibition.

So here I am back home with a cup of tea, finishing off some illustrations. The top illustration is inspired by StyleBubble - I like her blog because it's English. I don't follow many English blogs because I started blogging when I got to Australia. So if anyone knows any interesting English blogs (art/fashion etc) please let me know. It's nice to read about home.

p.s. my website is broke at the moment, it should be fixed within the next 24 hours. I made a change to the cname and shouldn't have! oops, but now I have undone the mistake but it takes 24-48 hours for the fix to propagate.

A Smiggle Sensation

Please note: if you visit Smiggle and can't see the illustrations on your screen it might be because it is too small and you will need to zoom out. For PCs hold down CTRL and minus, for Macs hold down command and minus :-)

Welcome to the Smiggle Sensation! These are the illustrations I have been working on most recently for the awesome Smiggle. The above is a screen shot of the current live home page which is running their "Smiggle your Desktop" campaign. How lovely and colourful! If you look closely you can see the Smiggle pattern I also created.

These are the Smiggle people with their designated colours and all the cute things you can buy for your desk. I really enjoyed drawing all the types of stationery.

You might be wondering why there is another screen shot below...well this is the Back 2 School campaign that ran on their homepage for the past two weeks. Some how I clumsily managed to miss the launch of the first set of colourful illustrations. But luckily I got a screenshot of the images on their website today before the creative changed over.

This campaign was all about getting your lockers organised for school. Hence the messy lockers, I remember when I was at school, everytime I opened my locker my games kit would fall out, along with my hockey stick and all the textbooks....

I hope you enjoy looking at these illustrations as much as I've enjoyed creating them! A little bit different to my usual style isn't it? Thanks for the opportunity Smiggle!

All you need is love

Hello! Wow it's been a hot week in Sydney reaching 40 degrees celcius in our house and only fans that swirl the hot air around, but finally today the temperatures dropped down to a cool 25. I had to put ice packs in my bed to stay cool!

Above is one of a series of posters I have been working on for a coffee shop in England. I've really enjoyed this commission as I don't often work with text & I've been working on pattern-making most recently. I think it makes a cute little poster, what do you think?

On Friday I went to see a band called The Beards - check out their video below, it's so funny they sing about beards. Darren's band played a gig along side them last year. It's not often I see a band that I don't know but instantly like. They have great voices and harmonies and they make you laugh...