Giveaway winners

Wow, thank you for all your name suggestions, they're fantastic, and very appropriate for the fellows in question! My old-fashioned gentlemen will be so well-named. Tonight I reached into a hat and drew out five winners.

They are:

Congratulations! Email me your address to
millicentcrow at gmail dot com and I'll pop a zine in the post for you!

Sapphire

Armstrong Siddeley, isn't that a lovely name for a car? If you've got some old-fashioned names up your sleeve you've still got until tomorrow evening to enter my naming competition...

My creative space and a giveaway

For my creative space today I thought I'd have a bit of a giveaway. I'm always looking for good old-fashioned names for the characters in my drawings and paintings, so my giveaway today is very similar to this one I had earlier in the year.

This time I need some names for some gentlemen I've been drawing, so if you'd like a chance to win a copy of my new zine, Denizens, all you need to do is suggest a name I could give each of the numbered dudes above. You can use the numbers to show which one you mean, e.g. 1. Albert, 2. Eustace, 3. Ormond, 4. Jasper. I've got five copies of the zine to give away and I'm happy to post them anywhere in the world.

I'll draw five winners out of a hat next Wednesday evening.  Good luck!

To see lots of other creative spaces, pop on over to the "our creative spaces" blog...

Happy Thursday!

A little collection

Some of the things that have found their way home with me lately...I've been finding lots of lovely-shaped leaves lately and I always seem to come home with my pockets full of them. I bought the beetroot especially for drawing but it'll be good in a salad too!

Simplifying

I made some more rubber stamps this afternoon based on some little treasures I found at home. I had lots of fun working out how to simplify the images I used from this:

To this:

To this:Then I turned them into patterns:

I'm hoping to have a go at stamping these on fabric...maybe for patterned pockets for a plain skirt. And I'm eyeing up the four fresh new erasers I brought home from the supermarket!

Have a good weekend!

My creative space and Queen Anne's lace

The other day I made myself a giant doily brooch, something I've been meaning to do for ages.

I trimmed the middle out of an old doily that was shaped like an eye and sewed it onto some black fabric that I had reinforced with interfacing. I then sewed that onto some black wool felt (that was a beret in a previous life), also reinforced with interfacing, and sewed a brooch back onto that. Here it is on a jacket to show its size:
On this green silk fabric (soon to become a green silk top) I reckon it looks a bit like that plant Queen Anne's lace.


See?

To see a whole lot of other creative spaces pop on over to the "our creative spaces" blog.

Happy Thursday to you!

Inspiration

Inspiration's a funny old thing, isn't it. I came home from the post office today with both hands full of plants I wanted to draw and put them on my desk next to the dead praying mantis and butterfly also in the drawing queue (I shouldn't confess to the time I kept a dead bird in the freezer for drawing). I love saving things to draw later, but it can make for a messy house! I also save a whole lot of pictures for inspiration...I used to glue them into my sketchbooks, but that made the sketchbooks too fat, so now I keep them in scrapbooks, a whole lot of jumbled up collages. I thought I'd give you a peek at some of my scrapbook pages:
How about you? Do you have particular ways you organise the things that inspire you?

Rubber stamps

I've been seeing lots of lovely hand-carved stamps around the place lately and I thought I'd have a go at making some. First I did some sketches of things I'd like to stamp:

Carved some of them out of some erasers I had lying around:Made some more (after realising I'd need to simplify them quite a bit):

And covered my sketchbook with stamps:They're quite addictive - I had to resist filling up my whole sketchbook with different stamp patterns! Now to replenish my stash of erasers...and make some more...

My creative space

 Remember all those drawings on brown paper I was doing?  I've turned them into a zine about the secrets of the inhabitants of the town of Ruby, on the South Island West Coast, not on any maps...

Here's a preview of what's inside:

I had lots of fun making it...I now have plans for a giant drawing done on brown paper.  I'll have some copies of my zine to give away soon so stay tuned!

What have you been working on?

To see lots of other people's creative spaces pop on over to the "our creative spaces" blog.

Happy Thursday to you!

Red shoes...

...are just so cheery that I seem to have acquired four pairs. One for each season perhaps?

So much for the capsule wardrobe!

Kittehs

A pet portrait present - a picture of my friend's slinky kitties. I drew the cats with ink and gouache on brown paper and stuck them onto some white watercolour paper...maybe next I'll do a pet portrait of my own cat, who unfortunately does not have such a slinky silhouette!

Hello October

It took us about 4 1/2 hours to walk to and from our Saturday afternoon coffee; there were lots of detours to lead us astray...