Dubai!

Hello! It's been a while.  That's because  have been in DUBAI! And I didn't do a single spot of work (even though I brought loads of art materials with me and planned to do lots)

So I'm afraid don't have any new drawing to show you... but I do have some holiday snaps!

Stripy Rabbit also came to Dubai and was photographed in various locations.

The day we went to the fish market in Sharjah.

Riding the four wheeled bicycle at Creekside Park. We also had a picnic.

My mum and Henry on an Abra boat going across the creek.

View from the restaurant balcony where we watched the dancing fountains.

Underwater swimming in the pool. These were taken through a window.

Swimming as night begins to fall and the lights come on in the pool.

Henry pretending to meditate in the baby swimming pool.

 Me seemingly captivated by the snakes in the Dubai aquarium.

We had such a wonderful time!  Highlights included:

- arriving on my birthday and having a chocolate cake and presents :)

- playing 'Bananagrams,' such a fun game!

- eating yummy food such as squid rings and shark and falafels and the most amazing 'hunger busta burger' yum yum yum

- discovering a really delicious layered smoothie drink at a cafe, mango, avocado and strawberry you should try it!

- going to the Dubai aquarium and going in a glass bottomed boat over the sharks and stingrays

- going to 'Wild Wadi' waterpark, they have some amazingly fun and terrifying rides there

- doing lots of reading.  I think I sort of rediscovered my love of reading this holiday.  Among others I read 'Tintin' and 'Fire and Hemlock' by Diana Wynne Jones. Really good! I also read the last book in the 'Mennyms' series by Sylvia Waugh- a story about a family of life size rag dolls. 

- picking up some lovely sparkly netting in the material shops in Satwa, all shades of pink, purple, black and white.  I want to make more ballerina tutus with them. They have so many craft and fabric shops in Dubai if you know where to look.  They also have an incredible button shop, just rooms and rooms full to bursting with buttons. Also shops full of diamante's and beads in all the colours of the rainbow!

- going to the gold souk and looking at all the sparkling jewelery.  I found the most beautiful stunning jaw dropping diamond necklace there.  It was white gold and all the diamonds were shaped into stars of different sizes.  I wanted it so badly!... but it was around five thousand pounds.  

- cycling in the park on the four wheeled bicycle and having a picnic there by the creek under a palm tree

- watching 'Arrietty' which I got for my birthday.

 - stumbling across a performance at the Bastakyia one day. There was a girl there doing a solo show, reciting bits of Shakespeare and her own bits of writing.  You could sit on bean bags and watch. It was actually really good.

- eating steak and chips on the balcony of a french restaurant whilst watching the dancing fountains next to the tallest building in the world.

Overall a really really good holiday! And it was nice to come back to a sunny England yesterday. Now it's back to work again!

Hope you're having a sunny Sunday,

Birthday Times

There are a lot of birthday celebrations going on around here at the moment.  Henry and I both have our birthdays four days apart and we are currently between the two.  This is probably why I felt inspired to make this image today.  It's Victoria Stitch on her birthday!

Victoria Stitch loves having a birthday and because she's the Queen she gets to have two every year.  She demands that all her presents be wrapped in her favourite stripy and bat patterned paper. She insists that all her birthday cards must be suitably gothic and glittery. And she eats chocolate cake with buttons for breakfast.

I really enjoyed making this picture today.  Lately I feel like I havn't done a lot of Victoria Stitch stuff. I've been busy with commissions and the exhibition and birthdays.  I know I have a lot to do at the moment but I felt like I would go mad if I didn't just let myself have half a day to work on something 'fun.'

This is the card I got for Henry.

Here are some pictures from the weekend. Henry and I had a low key joint birthday party with some friends.  We ate Lebanese food (or Hebanese as we like to call it seeing as it's only really inspired by Lebaese food and a lot of it is our own creation)  We played articulate, drank Jack Daniels and had zelda themed chocolate cake.  My friend Nicola gave me a pincusion in the shape of a cupcake which has a tape measure that comes out of it which is pretty cool.

The Zelda themed birthday cake which I made. Harder than you think!

Rainbow fruit skewers. Yum

View of the table...

Pop up birthday card from my friend Bruno which I love.

Henry blowing out his 23 candles.

The great thing is, that my actual birthday day is still to come! It's on Thursday.  I'm so excited. I'm going to be doing a very exciting thing on Thursday but I can't tell you what it is right now.  You will have to wait and see.

I hope you are all having exciting weeks too!

Love and Glitter,

Snow White

 During the week of the exhibition I spent a lot of time in London.  And a looot of time in the bookshop Foyles (where the exhibition was)  Lucky for me I really love Foyles and could spend all day in there looking at books. The other great thing about it is that its just round the corner from my other favourite shop Forbidden Planet! Yes I am a geek. I love all that stuff.

So on Thursday (it was the day of the private view) I went into London early and popped into Forbidden Planet beforehand.

And what a surprise I had!  Oh I love it so much when this happens!  You walk into a shop just expecting to have a little mosey around when what do you see? A new book (that you didn't even know was coming out) by one of your favourite illustrators sitting on the shelf right in front of you!  In this case it was Camille Rose Garcia's Snow White.  I was so excited. I snapped it up right away!

This is such a beautiful book. I recommend it to anyone who likes a bit of goth. I just love the spiky characters, the stripes and the technicolours.  It's just fabulous fabulous fabulous!  I read the whole thing on the train going home from the private view.  It was one of those books that gave me a tight feeling in my throat because every page was just so wonderful! Camille Rose Garcia paints like no one else I have ever seen before!  I just love that wicked Queen's green and black striped hair.

Also as you can see, every page is so nicely designed even down to the font style and size and the borders and patterns round the pictures. Quite a lot of the writing and patterns are done in gold too. Very shiny!

The story by the way is the original Grimm's fairytale.  And it does have a rather Grim ending!  This isn't the sugarcoated disneyesque version of Snow White.

So yes, to cut a long story short I was as pleased as punch to find this little treasure!  I just had to share it with you.

Let me know what you think!

Ballerina

At last! Something new and un related to my exhibition!

I made this little ballerina birthday card for my friend Sian whose birthday it was the other week.  I partly made it because I know Sian loves dancing and partly because I had an urge to create a character who was wearing a tutu.

I thought you might be interested to see the process I went through to make this image so I took a few shots along the way...

This ballerina started out with brown hair and pencil lines.

outlining...

cutting out carefully...

the tutu is made from scrunched up tulle/netting.

I hope you like her, I want to make more!

What have you been up to this week?  Henry and I have been to Derby to visit his mother.   We went shopping and bought clothes for Dubai, we ate chocolate ganache and scampi and chips, we went to a really old pub and had a drink (fizzy water with lemon for me), we went to the park and walked the dog and we watched lots of episodes of 'Pulling' and a few films (one called 'The secret window' which was really good and had Johnny Depp in it.)  I definitely feel nicely relaxed now!

Hope you're having a wondeful weekend too, 

My last 'exhibition' post. (I promise!)

So my exhibition has now come to an end! I can't believe how fast it all went!

Here are a last few close ups of my sets which were on display there:

Little cat girl swinging on the hoover.

Little cat girl's books and cuddly toys and fort.

Little cat girl's bed.

The bathroom sink where all the potions and perfumes are.

I quite like how they all look photographed so close up.  In real life everything in these pictures is dollhouse size.  All made of paper and fabric.

Last weekend my family all came to see the exhibition which was really nice. Even my grandmother and  couple of my uncles came over from Oxford to see it.  We all met in London and had a chinese in China Town and then spent the afternoon in Foyles looking at the exhibition and the books.
 

It was also really nice that so many of my friends came to see it too! It was so nice bumping into them all on the Saturday especially as I didn't know half of them were going to be there!

Also thank you to everyone who wrote nice things in my 'comments' book! :)

So that's that really.  Exhibition is over which means my MA is officially over now too.  Gotta start earning some proper moneys!

Hope you're all having a nice pancake day.  I just ate mine with nutella.  Pancake day always reminds me of Mrs Pepperpot.  Did you ever read Mrs Pepperpot.  She's a little old woman who seems to shrink at the most inconvenient times and has lots of adventures.  And she's always making her husband pancakes for dinner!

Pancake day also means the beginning of lent.  Are you giving anything up this year?  I am going to try and give up facebook, twitter, pinterest and tumblr.  I just waste too much time on them. I'm just going to allow myself ten minutes of them every day and that's it (don't want to completely fall off the radar!)  I'm going to try and read more in my spare time instead.  I went to the library and got out a ton of books to read yesterday. So no excuses for me!

Love and Lemon juice

Valentines

If you are a follower of my blog then you'll know that last year for valentines day I made Henry a tiny little illustrated book. See it here!

Well this year I decided to make volume two!  It if full of tiny drawings of us together and of all the things we like.  On the left pages are the things that Henry likes and on the right pages are the things that I like.

In our Halloween costumes this year

Henry is a writer. I am an illustrator.

He loves reading Batman comics. I love Scary Godmother.

Us on the snow day this year.

More snow day.

....And Henry drew me this lovely card and bought me white and pink roses.

Apparently this is our future home.  A swimming pool? Yes please!

Altogether a very nice Valentines day!  I hope yours was too!

Love and red roses