ok, ok...

So I haven't been as good a girl as I would like to be. It's hard getting back into blogging when you've been away a while. I am off to London tomorrow for a few days of galleries, museums, food and shopping. Meanwhile, I will leave you with a link to new site, Hipshops, which lists some of the coolest shops around the world. I just wish I could visit them all!

Image above: Hay House, Copenhagen, via Hipshops.

Italy

I'm back from a week in the sunshine. It is raining, but at least my runner beans and squash all survived my absence (they probably do better in my absence!). Italy was glorious, as always.

Things will be back to normal around here now, I hope!

Mervyn Peake and Maeve Gilmore

Most people know Mervyn Peake for his Gormenghast Trilogy, but few venture beyond those books to discover his talent for drawing and painting. He was an illustrator as well as a writer, bringing to life on paper the products of his extraordinary imagination. I would definitely recommend reading Letters from a Lost Uncle, a fantastically strange and often hilarious series of typed and illustrated 'letters' written by an Arctic explorer to his nephew. It is a work of genius.


I received a notification this morning of a new exhibition of some of the work of Mervyn Peake and his wife Maeve Gilmore, to be held from 9th July until 28th August at Viktor Wynd Fine Art in London. The gallery is associated with the Last Tuesday Society, which you should check out if you're a Londoner - pretty weird and interesting stuff to join in with, if that's your kind of thing.

Images courtesy of Viktor Wynd Fine Art, The Last Tuesday Society, and an unknown source (for the Letters image) on Flickr.

I am off to Italy tomorrow for a week, so it's goodbye until then. I hope to resume more regular blogging once I return - hopefully the work will ease off a bit for the summer and I can spend more time doing my own thing. Pigs might fly.

i'm here!

Well, I'm here for a few days and then we are off to vegetate for a week in Tuscany. We will be staying at Fattoria San Paolo, an agriturismo with a bio-pool, which is like swimming in a pond, only a bit less murky. I am beyond excited and definitely ready for some lazy days in the heat and a lot of good food.

Everything here has got a bit out of hand - the house is a mess, my studio roof has sprung a leak, and the garden needs attention rather badly. Progress on the house has come to a standstill.

What else has been going on? We went to an absolutely delightful wedding at the weekend where I saw some old school friends. If you happen to be in Llangollen this week for the music Eisteddfod, check out some of my work at the Helfa Gelf stand. Work is easing off at last. I will be back with some more nonsense later this week.

This and that

Well. I'm nearly there (she says). Merely days away (I hope) from finishing the latest crazy round of work. I have been drawing bits for Honda again, doing some Top Secret character drawing for some anonymous clients, and drawing houses and stuff for a website that I will tell you more about when it's published (which may be a while yet!).

After all this, I plan to be on holiday for a while. I don't know what I will do. I hope that it will be very little. I am bad at doing very little, so probably I'll be messing around in the house, doing a lot of window shopping for things I can't afford and generally wasting time pottering about. Hey, maybe I'll even draw something funny, although I haven't felt funny for a while. We may, if I get my new passport in time, go abroad for a week but we will have to see. I feel a strong urge to go somewhere with some sunshine. Wales is not the place for sunshine. I am finding it hard to form well-considered sentences.

EDIT: Guess what? A new job just landed in my inbox. I think I will say no. Will I be strong enough to say no?

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Apologies

for my absence. Work has taken over my life but an end is in sight soon. Give me another week or two, and I will be back. I hope.

Varoom interview

Pop over to the AOI's Varoom magazine to read a little interview about my artwork for Honda's recent press ads.

Hope you all had a wonderful weekend. Mine was the best I have had in a very long time - a great group of friends, lots of food and a wild walk (or two) in the countryside. Bliss.

Now back to work!

the weekend

Did you have a good weekend? I worked all of Saturday and a little of Sunday, so it wasn't amazing, but at least the good weather is back after what has felt like weeks of sodden greyness. The husband worked like a trooper, cleaning, moving stuff, starting on our skirting boards, mowing the neglected lawn and generally trying to make the house feel more like a home. We have seven guests and a baby landing on our doorstep from Thursday onwards, so it will be a hectic weekend. They are friends from when the husband and I were students at Cambridge and I love them all to bits - we are very excited to be hosting our first weekend party at our new house. We are hoping that they won't mind slumming it a bit here although if the weather continues fine, I think we will spend a lot of time outdoors. In other news, we put up a bookcase and unpacked some of our boxes. It felt like a really big step forward. OK, there's no other furniture yet, but we're working on that.

checking in

Hi all. Sorry things have been a bit quiet lately. I've been a bit busy/tired/distracted. Work continues to pile in. I am meant to complete 60 seconds of animation by Friday afternoon and haven't even started yet (not my fault!), but it's going to be a crazy few days. This may also coincide with the go ahead to colour another six pieces for Honda. I may pop. This could be messy. I need a holiday.

more about me

I have added a new page to the blog today - you'll find it in the side bar - it's just some more stuff about me, in case you want to know! It even includes a proper picture of me, the horror...

progress

We started off with a room that looked like Satan's boudoir, all black walls and gloom that rose into a cavernous ceiling.


Hours of stripping, wrecking, plastering and painting later:






Things have gotten a bit out of hand here. I will be briefed for another Honda ad this morning, then I'm off to the dentist for some unpleasantries. We've been trying our best to knock this place into a habitable kind of shape and, with a large group of friends landing on our doorstep on June 11th, we're going to have to make some serious progress quickly! Oh, and some furniture might be nice. It's all marvellous fun, though.

lost the plot

again.

It's all a bit too much at the moment. I am a bit overwhelmed with stuff. Nothing bad, just stuff.

(Don't ask me why the fox is male. It just is)

DIY lampshade

Remember this post, when we first found our house? I said in it that there appeared to be a George Nelson bubble lamp in the dusty loft. Well, there was not one, but two of them. Sadly, they were not the originals, just some cheapo copy with nasty gilt nipples on the bottom (instead of the chrome ring). They were torn and the wire had corroded inside, leaving a green stain on the plastic. I was loath to throw them away because I like their shape, so after a bit of dithering I decided to strip the plastic off and to find some new way of using them. I'm always advocating the acts of re-purposing and recycling, so to throw them away would have been wasteful.



Now I've stripped them and cleaned them up I'm wondering what to do. I will certainly spray paint them to cover the corroded parts - white is the colour of choice right now, but I also toyed with the idea of using a colour (Yellow? Blue? Industrial black?) and then simply hanging them like cages over some nice bulbs. But then I'm also wondering if maybe I could get a bit more creative with them - covering them in some way - paper or fabric, plain or patterned? I rather like shades like this one (below) from Gong, so I'm wondering, with the right fabric, whether I could make something similar with my frames? Maybe I could even design a fabric and get it printed onto silk by Spoonflower and use that? Now that would be properly bespoke.



Or maybe they can just be the base for something fantastical (by Hutch Studio) or fun.


What do you think? What would you do?