More Exhibition

On Tuesday we set up the exhibition in Foyles.  It was a busy day.  There was lots of painting and scraping and pinning and bluetacking to be done!  Here's how my board turned out.  I was lucky to get a nice big plinth so that I could display my 3d sets properly.  I'm very pleased with how the whole thing turned out. 

Victoria Stitch was very pleased to be on exhibition in London!

My postcards and business cards.

Last night it was the private view.  I think everyone was a little nervous before hand.  It was exciting to have so many people come and see our work!

When I left the private view at about nine o clock it was snowing again!  I had to walk through the blizzardly weather to the tube station and then get the train from Kings Cross back to home. It was nice to look out of the window and see the snowy landscape flying by.  Henry kindly came out to meet me at the station so that I wouldn't have to drive home on my own (even though he'd already put his pyjamas on!) I'm not very brave when it comes to driving in the snow.

more snow!

 So that's what I've been up to this week!

There's still time to go and visit the exhibition if you want to! It's on until the 15th of Feb in Foyles bookshop in London.  LINK

Have a spiffy weekend!

black frames/white snow

The other day i was thinking about how to display my work for the exhibition.  I came up with this great idea of having my Victoria Stitch pictures displayed in black gothicky intricate frames.

However.... easier said than done!

I looked EVERYWHERE for black gothicky ornate frames and found barely anything.  I even took a trip to TKMaxx. Nothing!  It was very disappointing.

So... I decided to draw frames for my pictures instead! And you can see my results above.  I'm pretty pleased with them if I do say so myself.  I think Victoria Stitch is too.  Being framed makes her feel important.

In other news, as I'm sure you'll have noticed... It's been snowing!  On Sunday Henry and I got the sledge out of the garage and went across the country to my grandparents for lunch.

Barney (the dog) came too of course.  We dressed him in his reindeer outfit to keep warm.  For a brief few minutes we attached his lead to the sledge so that he was pulling it along.  It was funny because he was dressed as a reindeer.  He didn't seem to mind.

me being pulled up the hill by Henry

After lunch we made an igloo in my grandparents garden.  We only half finished it though.  It got a bit cold and boring after a while.

Walking back home it was twilight.  The sky was so many colours.  On one side it was bright orange fading to pink and then purple and then bright blue.  With the fields of snow lying underneath it really looked magical. I love the way snow glows in the half light.

I hope you had a fun snow day too!

snowman we saw

Love and Snowflakes

Exhibition Preparations

Not much has changed round here at the moment. I am still just spending my time preparing for the exhibition and doing some drawing here and there.  Today I spray mounted my pictures onto foam board and cut out lots of little black cats with a scalpel.  I broke two scalpel blades doing it! It was a fiddly job.

Now here's a little taster of what I will be showing at the exhibition.  (You may have already seen most of these images before dotted around my blog but I thought it would be nice to put them all in the same post.)

Images from my cat book:

Images from my 'Casper and Jasper' project I did last term:

Some Victoria Stitch stuff:

And more! But you'll have to come see it!

Foyles Book Shop in Charing Cross London.  Top floor.  8th- 15th Feb.  LINK

Apart from doing exhibition stuff I have been busy seeing friends and cooking!  Henry got a new cook book for Christmas so lately we have been trying out a lot of new recipes.  We've had bacon and egg pie, jam drop biscuits and hot pot recently. All good hearty meals! Tonight we had broccoli lemon chicken and pancakes for dessert. Yum.

This is the pie.  It's got a cat shape on it.

At the weekend we went to my friend Emmas birthday party.  We played drinking games and ate pink cake. It was fun.

Also lately, I have been getting into Pinterest.  You can find me on it HERE.  I love being able to create online pinboards of images that I like.  I find it inspirational.  I need more people to follow though!

I hope you've had a lovely weekend! Mine was filled with ginger tea drinking, salami eating, countryside walking and cat cutting out-ing to name a few.

Victoria Stitch takes a bath

Victoria Stitch loves to bathe in her bat-patterned tea cup.  Although it hasn't scanned very well, the grey stuff is all glitter.  Victoria Stitch loves to bathe in glitter. It makes her feel euphorically happy and sparkly.

Exhibition! And other things...

Here's the link to the information about our upcoming exhibition in Foyles Bookshop in London.  8th to the 15th of February! I am overawed by the amount of amazing work created by my fellow students.  I'm sure you will be too!

http://www.foyles.co.uk/Children-Illustration-Ruskin

Come!

I feel in a bit of a limbo at the moment.  I am basically trying to prepare and create work for the exhibition.  Any extra little bits that I can.  I keep flipping between drawing Victoria Stitch and doing general drawings that might look good in a portfolio!

Yesterday Henry and I went to town.  I was just browsing in Waterstones when I came across the drawing I did for Egmont in one of their young fiction books.  It's the picture of the guy holding up the Egmont Lucky coin. I felt rather proud I must say!  It's one of my first real proper commissions.  I think it's going to be in lots of their young fiction books.

Also whilst in town I went to to post office and bought some Roald Dahl/Quentin Blake stamps. They look awesome! How cool must it be to have your illustrations made into stamps!  I want to frame them in tiny frames and put them in my castle.  I think the Fantastic Mr Fox one is my favourite.

ALSO recently I have had a really good idea!  Well, I think it's a good idea.  This Christmas Eve me and my friends went round to my friend Brunos house.  It's kind of a tradition for us to meet up on Christmas Eve and do Secret Santa.  Anyway this year Bruno was very adamant that we all took it in turns to read 'The Night Before Christmas.'  I LOVE the 'Night Before Christmas' poem and so when Bruno suggested that I illustrate it for next years reading I was like YES!  I could imagine how I would do it in 3d with tiny coloured fairylights and glitter and things.  For some reason it really really attracted my imagination.  I think it's partly due to the fact that there are some really wonderful and evocative lines in that poem.  Like:

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads.

and,

He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly!

Anyway, THEN I thought how nice would it be if we all illustrated the poem as a personal project over the year.  So I suggested it to Sian and Dave and Bruno and Erin and they all said they would try and do it too.  In fact Dave has already finished his!  You can see it on his blog.

So watch this space for lots of different versions of 'The Night Before Christmas' come December.  (mine's going to take me all year to illustrate) And if you want to join in too drop me a comment! I'd love it if you did!

Hope you're having a nice weekend! Mine so far has been filled with walking up and down windy hills with the dog and tidying.  Last night Henry made  pie with a cat shape on it.

Love and Glitter

New Header!

So as you can see I finally got round to making a new header for my blog.  If you hadn't noticed, the one I had before was rather Christmassy themed and so I thought it was high time to change it!

Here are some photos I took whilst in the middle of making my header.  Everything (apart from the glass jar of glitter) is made from paper. Oh and there are a few sequins thrown in of course!

I had great fun making all the tiny fairy sized pink envelopes and the pen pot and the two little books.  

I hope you like it!  Let me know what you think!

Last of the Kitty Cat book

Here are the last two images from my most recent project. Little kitten and mother are... in a supermarket!

I wish this was really allowed in Tesco's...

These pictures are both created by building 3d sets from paper and then photographing them.  I made all the tiny boxes and tins of food myself.  Took rather a long time! Here (below) you can see them all laid out before I fixed them onto the shelves.

And these were the patterns I created and used to make all the little boxes themselves: 

Cute huh? I LOVE tiny things!

In fact I thought you might be interested to see some of the images I took whilst in the halfway/quarter stages of this project.  

This is the kitchen at the beginning.  At this point I had only done the floor and cabinets and curtains!  Looks bare doesn't it.

^but not for long!

This was the bedroom at the beginning. Bare again.  That cat bed took me ages by the way.  I sewed the little patchwork quilt by hand.

Also I made the wallpaper myself.  

Here's the supermarket checkout in it's full glory.  (that trolley was a NIGHTMARE to make!)

This was me experimenting with a sheet of rainbow colours and shining a light through it.  Didn't really work how I expected though!

This is the wallpaper I made for the hallway:

And finally here are some character designs for the little girl character!

So there you go! I hope you enjoyed seeing some of the processes this project has gone through.  It's been  real experiment, hard at times but very enjoyable.  I'm pleased with the outcome!

Also, I hope you've had a lovely weekend.  Mine was spent eating Lebanese food and seeing friends in London. We went to an exhibition all about lucky charms (called Charmed Life), the National Portrait Gallery, a really good art shop (spent a bit too much in there!) and 'Foyles' the bookshop. (I love Foyles! There are always such interesting books there.)

I also had a rather dramatic Saturday morning because my mum cut her finger badly and Henry and I had to take her to hospital.  But we won't go into details about that!

Love and Black Cats

 

p.s. I know I need to change my blog header as it's not Christmas anymore.  I'm working on it!