The Mixtape Project

Well! This has been an exceedingly long absence hasn't it?

I haven't been resting on my laurels though!  I've been taking part in the wonderful Mixtape Project , every month you produce a CD, it can be on a theme or just music you like and then you send it to your assigned partner and they send you back theirs.

You can see the groups Flickr page here.  There are some awesome artists taking part. 

And here are some pictures of the CDs I have made so far-

The first one was called 'Elements'

The second was 'Vive La France'

And the third, and most recent was, 'The Animals Went In Two by Two'

I have also been working on a big commission since the start of the year and now that I am finished with it I am eager to start working on my own projects again.  Hopefully I'll have some new work to show you soon.

Have a lovely, lovely week :)

Mapping

 

This is a map I drew one rainy afternoon to entertain my darling Gelibean girl, it's our kitchen, sort of...

If our kitchen were Middle Earth and we were very tiny and were going adventuring in it!

I was super excited to seee it featured on The Hand Drawn Map Association website.  I love this intriguing website and maps and diagrams in general, I really enjoy trawling through their archives, if you're a fan of cartography then check it out.

Best Books Ever

This is what I'm reading this week - 'Flights of Fancy' by Peter Tate, and honestly I think that it might be up there with my favourite books of all time.  It contains lots of traditional stories about birds and all the different beliefs surrounding them.  I find books like this so inspiring, it's made me want to do a series of bird pictures, just as soon as I have some time...... it's the eternal cry isn't it? If only I had 6 hands and 48 hours in a day!!!!

Illustration Friday - Afterwards

Originally this was started as an idea for a contest on Red Bubble that asked for an illustration of a poem, conveniently the theme of Illustration Friday this week - Afterwards - also fits in perfectly with my idea.

The poem is this one -

Time Does Not Bring Relief: You All Have Lied

by Edna St. Vincent Millay 

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied   

Who told me time would ease me of my pain!   

I miss him in the weeping of the rain;   

I want him at the shrinking of the tide;

The old snows melt from every mountain-side,   

And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;   

But last year’s bitter loving must remain

Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.   

There are a hundred places where I fear   

To go,—so with his memory they brim.   

And entering with relief some quiet place   

Where never fell his foot or shone his face   

I say, “There is no memory of him here!”   

And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

It's such a sad, heart achingly unhappy story and I hope that I managed to capture the mood of it here.  The background was black ink thrown in a slapdash manner at some cold press water colour paper, 11x16, with lots of water and much splattering which I enjoy greatly (although afterwards I had to clean quite a lot of it off of the kitchen which I don't enjoy so much) The ever so sad lady was drawn on to tracing paper in ink and then painted on the reverse before getting down to the nitty gritty and adding all the detail on the front.  The background details were added lastly with black and white ink.

I've really fallen for the tracing paper technique, I suspect I'm going to be using it quite a bit in the future, especially seeing as I had to buy a pad of 50 sheets from the super expensive town centre art shop this week.  I'm so disorganised!  Hopefully next time i'll be using it for some slightly more cheerful subject matter though!  Happy Thursday! XXX

Illustration Friday - Spent

Something a bit different for me, and I finally managed to finish an Illustration Friday topic before Friday!

Topic was 'Spent'....nuff said probably! :)

All Souls Day

Happy All Souls Day to everyone, I hope Halloween went spookily and wonderfully for everyone, here's our favourite pumpkin-headed friend - 

His name is Wobbly-tooth Pirate apparently, and thats my spooky little Gelibean he's snuggling up to :)

And now for a beautiful autumnal interlude - 

Mostly views of south Cheshire over the last couple of weeks, we seem to have spent a huge amount of time under that tree throwing leaves at each other, and that last picture is my new favourite vegetable, it's a romesco cauliflower, it's so alien like, and when it's broken up it makes the most perfect little Christmas tree spikes, so beautiful that even the children love it.  Must get on now dears, many drawings on the go, must finish some so that i can share them soon, hugs xxx

Lower Largo Part 2

So it was last year and it was approaching my Mum's birthday and as usual I was completely and utterly brassic, obviously my solution to the lack of funds to buy a showy gift was to make one, and here is what I came up with...

This was supposed to be a picture of our ex-house.  My parents had just sold it and moved to France, and I had moved down south and I thought it would make a nice present and remind them of home a bit.  It wasn't really on a rock in the middle of the sea, but the cats were ours and thats Robinson Crusoe in the corner, he came from our village..sort of..full story here.

Me being me though I was never very happy with this picture, I always saw it as bigger and better than it was, and with some colour in there, but I got distracted by other things and I never got around to making another version of it until this summer when my stepfathers birthday was coming around and I was still skint and so I began on this one.....

 

Of course I didn't finish it in time, and then I didn't finish it in time for my Mum's birthday this year either, very fortunately the air traffic controllers of France got together and decided to help me out, or perhaps they wanted more money or something, and Mum's birthday visit was delayed for a week, phew!

So last week I presented them with this one and the original, a birthday present that was more than a year in the making!  I think they liked them though.

I'm very much more pleased with this version than I was with the first, and seeing them beside each other it really amazed me how much my drawing style has changed in the space of a year, this feels much more refined, definitely more like what I was aiming for in the first place.

Does anyone else make rather than buying for family birthdays? I'm sure everyone else is better at getting their gifts there on time then I am though :)

Happy, happy Wednesday loves xxx

Giraffes

In typical last minute minnie fashion, today my daughter and I finally got around to making and submitting our giraffes to the One Million Giraffes Project

Obviously hers is far superior to mine, she's terribly excited about seeing it online :) Bless!

And so here it is again :)

And here is mine, 

If you want to be a part of this lovely idea, get your skates on and submit your giraffe today as it looks like the target of a million is going to be reached very, very soon :)

Hope everyone's having a lovely giraffey sort of a week, hugs xxx

Happy Birthday

Well this week I have been mainly working on birthday presents, my partner's mothers and my stepfathers, and here is the first of my efforts completed :)

So Happy Birthday Janet!

On another note, this week I heard about something called the Cut-Click Mailart Exhibition

You can read all about this exciting project here

Me being me, I decided at absolutely the last second that I wanted to send something and I really wasn't convinced that it would make it there on time!

So imagine how excited I was to see it being hung :) See if you can spot it here !

I hope everyone is having as exciting a weekend as I am xxxx

Long Time No See

What a terrible blogger I am! Shame, shame, shame on me!  I have been neglecting things for far too long.  I do have a reason ... or perhaps it's just an excuse :)  

My children and I have spent a delightful several weeks in the South of France at my parents house, it was incredibly hot, at one point ot was 37 degrees! (I'm Scottish for goodness sake, we're not built to withstand such intense heat!) and beautifully verdant and lush and full of life.  We experienced some amazingly theatrical thunder and lightning, many fantastic evenings full of operatic frogs and crickets, woodpeckers and owls, long lazy days during which my most strenuous activity was swinging the hammock back and forth and of course many, many wonderful French markets, including some night ones.

So maybe it was extreme laziness on my part, but I like to think that when your surrounded by such gorgeousness it's probably a good thing not to spend too much time sitting indoors in front of a computer.  Well that's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it :)

I did do quite a bit of drawing while we were away though, so I wasn't totally lazy.  I came across this wonderful idea by the super talented ambird and started working my way diligently through the list, amazingly I got to number 6 before my good intentions fizzled out as they always do with these things, I'm not sure I'm satisfied enough with anything I produced to want to share it though!

I also found this contest which I decided I'd like to enter at the last possible second so here is my very rushed and not at all completed to my satisfaction entry :)

As always I wish that I had had considerably more time to work on it but c'est la vie!

Also as always I have many, many ideas in the pipeline and I'm trying to work on them but August seems to be the month that family choose to descend on us so I'm not sure I'll have much time to devote to art over the next few weeks.

I hope you're all having a super lovely summer so far, been anywhere nice? xxx