Onehunga princess

A little blanket label drawing...from a blanket made here:

Light as a feather

 Still playing around with feather designs...here's one I finished on my lunchbreak today and coloured digitally.  Might paint it these colours and turn it into a collage!

Interviewed

Just a note to say there's an interview with me up on the Auckland Fair blog which you can read here!   I'm hoping to bring some prints with crazy patterned feathers to the Fair this time and this is a design I've been playing around with... 

Slings and arrows

The last few nights I've been drawing some repetitive stylised feathers and playing round with colour combinations, painting them with watercolours.  Tonight's feathers are going to be pastel icecream colours I think!  

Sardine dream

A fishy little drawing from my sketchbook...

Anemone

The dairy up the road from me has the best anemones.  I got a bunch of them and rushed to draw one before they dried up or the cat wrecked them by smooching them too much !

Typographical solutions

 I've been working on a print based on all the things I superstitiously wish on, and I finished inking it this afternoon.  I was working on it in the cafe by my work the other day on my lunch break...when the waiter brought me my coffee he asked me if I was working on "typographical solutions."  Um, yes, I guess I am.  Sounds better than sitting around drawing!

Mitre Peak

 

When we were on tour in the South Island in February we were lucky enough to play in Milford Sound, be taken out into the sound on a boat and visit the very magical underwater fish observatory.  When we arrived there in the early evening the light was very magical and I snapped a fuzzy picture of Mitre Peak on my phone, to capture the colours.  I knew I wanted to turn it into a painting so the last couple of months I've been working on it, with half my bedroom floor covered in a drop cloth and strewn with paints.  And here it is hanging in our lounge:

You can see how very full of granny squares our couch is...at one stage we had so many granny square rugs we had to keep some of them in the car!

I'm having fun doing some landscape painting...I think next up will be one of the Manukau Heads!

Green ribbons, tall mountains

 I've been experimenting with some new ribbons for my huia brooches and thought I'd try out some in my favourite colour, a mossy green (I have an embarrassing number of cardigans that colour).

 And I've been planning a painting of Mitre Peak, probably one of the most painted places in New Zealand, but after I visited Fiordland earlier in the year I thought I'd love to have a giant painting of it in my lounge.  I'm having a (legitimate) sick day off work with a cold, so I thought it was a good chance to steal some time and get started on it!

I'm starting with the man in the mirror

I had a go at drawing a self portrait yesterday...it didn't really turn out looking like me and not just because I don't usually wear a fox around my neck!  But it was fun, back to the drawing board with that one I think!

You are next in the queue...

I usually keep the things I'm waiting to draw on my drawing table in a loose sort of a queue, which can end up an odd assortment of things!  First in the queue I have this kakabeak branch, which Mr Millicent Crow kindly brought me on the plane from Wellington.  So far not too weird...  

 

But I've also got this gaggle of dinosaurs!

 

I want to make some dinosaur fabric, and seeing as I can't draw the real things from life I thought I'd draw them from some quite detailed dinosaur toys.  They probably wouldn't have had such a civilised meeting in the wild!

My creative space: A cat among the...

 In my creative space today I've been testing out my new huia print silkscreen:

 The prints need a bit of troubleshooting, they're a bit blobby and uneven, but it's so exciting to see the pattern!  I might try it on a smoother fabric next.

 I'm going to print a whole lot of small pieces of fabric and make those into pouches a bit like these.

 And they seem to make a good cat seat. Someone will have black ink all over her tail!

How about you, what have you been making?

Joining in with "My Creative Space" today over here.

Happy Thursday!

My creative space: cabinets of curiosities

It's so easy to overlook things that are right on our doorsteps, isn't it?  I realised the other day that despite working just a few minutes walk from the museum, I had only visited it once in over a year.  So I decided to make an effort to go there more to draw, and I've started with drawing the huia.

I've spent a few lunchtimes drawing these slightly bedraggled beauties - and getting a few weird looks from people.  I think drawing in public is a good thing to practise though!

The cat guarded them for a while, sadly the opposite of what would have happened in the wild:

And now that they're fully inked they look like this:

and this:

Now I'm playing around with them in Photoshop, making them into a design to be printed on fabric.

 I think it'd be great to have some huia fabric to make into pouches and bags and bits and pieces.

So hopefully I'll use that treasure trove of inspiration more often - I might draw some exotic butterflies next!

Joining in with "my creative space" over here today.

Happy Thursday!

Collaged

 

A public holiday, finally time to deal to some of the stack of pictures waiting to go into my inspiration book!  These are some of the images I've been collecting to inspire me:

 
 I see there's a bit of a bird theme going on as per usual!

 And even an Easter bunny.  A very happy Easter to you!

I redrew a bird's eye view

I redrew this drawing the other day and I'm getting some copies of it printed as A4 prints.  I'm thinking about making it into a gocco print too...maybe venturing into gocco prints with more than one colour! 

My creative space: a bird's eye view

For my creative space today I've got a drawing that I did in good old black biro, then played around with in Photoshop.  It's an idea that I've got for a new zine...which I want to call "Birds Saying Bird Sayings."

 Here's the original before I coloured it in Photoshop

 

Speaking of birds, kind of, I just finished this great book Show Me a Story.  It's a whole lot of interviews with famous picture book illustrators, including the great Mo Willems of Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus fame. I highly recommend it. 

How about you, what have you been making? Read any good books lately?

Joining in here with "My Creative Space" today.

Happy Thursday!

Practice

 Last night I learnt how to make a repeat pattern in Photoshop, something I've been wanting to work out for ages.  So now I can work on designing an image to repeat on fabric...here are some of my ideas - trying to get the feather right has meant lots of repetition of the hand-drawn variety!