My creative space: the owls are not what they seem

A day off calls for:

 Real coffee

Impractical silver boots

Saying hello to the pigeons

 And printing up a storm.  

On my day off my lounge has been invaded by owls - I've been screenprinting a whole lot of these owl totes.  I might do some with a matching blue feather print next...or maybe some owls in a different colour...

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

Happy Thursday!

My creative space: bits and bobs and creative tips

In my creative space I've been:

Playing around with different uses for things I've made:  

I stuffed one of my owl patches and made it into this stuffy brooch. 

Sometimes he lives on my coat

And sometimes with this little collection of things on the back of the stove.

Drawing a seahorse:

 I'm hoping to put some ink and gouache on it and maybe turn it into a banner for my blog

And reading this book:

It has some great creative tips.  

Today's theme for my creative space is sharing your tips for staying creative and here's mine: 

Fit little bits of creative work into your day when you can.  Draw on your lunch break, crochet on the train, sew on brooch backs in bed - chip away at creative projects in whatever little pockets of time you have in your day.  Sometimes you get the best ideas when you've got limited time but you're doing a bit of something creative.  One of my favourite kinds of creative multitasking is drawing or sewing while I'm doing my market stall.

Right now I'm going to use one of Austin Kleon's tips which is "Step away from the screen" and I'm going to take my seahorse drawing up the road for a coffee.  Looking forward to reading your creative tips over here.

Happy Thursday!

My creative space

In my creative space today I've got a few updates. Remember this drawing? The other night I turned it into a multicoloured gocco print:
It was my first go at gocco printing using more than one colour at once...after 10 or so prints the colours started blending together a bit so I think next time I'd put some sellotape or dureaseal between the images to keep them separate. I think it'd be fun to have pyjamas with this print on them!

And remember these owls? I've turned one of them into a brooch, which I think Mr. Millicent Crow is road-testing today. I printed the owl onto calico then sewed it onto some wool from a scrappy old blanket. I put a couple of layers of interfacing in the middle to strengthen it.

Here's another picture of it just because I love that old "Flight luggage" logo.

And remember this feather skirt I was making? I completely stuffed it up. But hopefully I'll make another one soon.

What have you been making? Pop on over to the "our creative spaces" blog to see lots of other people's creative spaces.

Happy first day of Spring (or Autumn if it's Autumn where you are)!

My creative space

My creative space this week is full of owls, owls, owls.

These little ones, screenprinted on calico, are going to become brooches, a bit like these feathers. I've had a bit of a brooch production line going on lately, I must line up some movies to watch or some podcasts to listen to while I handsew on all those backs!

I've also got some bigger owls, these ones are screenprinted on calico grocery bags.

Stacked up together they kind of remind me of Matryoshka dolls.

What have you been making?

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

Happy Thursday!

Paper trail

A4 to A3? A5 to A3? I've been playing around with enlarging and reducing some of my drawings today, as you can see from this giant pile of paper full of tails and feathers and owls and huias. Soon, hopefully very soon, I'm going to get them made up into a silkscreen with lots of different images on it, so that I can print things onto fabric at the drop of a hat.
Hopefully the finished layout will look something like this:
but without the giant rip in the screen!

Owlcatraz*

I was mucking around the other night drawing an owl in the back of the scrapbook where I keep my inspiration pictures and I came up with this fellow:
I didn't really want to cut up my scrapbook cover to transfer him to a gocco screen, so I tried to redraw him on white paper, but it didn't work out, so I sacrificed the back of my scrapbook and cut it up.

Then I printed him in silver on some cream-coloured cards:

And some nubbly-textured red ones:

And I still had some ink left over so I made myself some owl envelopes for posting the prints I sell in my shop.

*Yes Owlcatraz is a real place! It's a bird sancturary in Shannon where they have owls with really bad pun names. Like Owl Capone. And Owlfalfa. And Owlvis Presley. I really want to go there, it'd be a hoot!