Pola-droids!

There's this great little app doing the rounds at the moment: it's called poladroid and (in the cutest way possible) transforms your images into polaroid style pictures - awesome. The white borders, the messed up colour, the slight vignette, it's all there. Just make sure your friends haven't seen the original images or they won't be fooled! It's such a nostalgic look.

Screenprinting fun

Over the last two Sundays I've done a screenprinting intensive course through the CAE - it was great fun, especially after I got the technique right! It depressed me no end to find out how hard it can be to drag some ink across a screen! Anyway, my style came good in the end and by the second weekend I was printing some stuff with pleasing results. The above image was part of the work I prepared for the course, but really it was way too complicated for a beginner, so I resigned myself to some technically easy pieces while I practiced the process. Oh well. One day these pretty Rosellas will fly, but for now they'll have to sit tight.

Christmas sky

The Melbourne skyline - this quick illustration was done for a colleague who wanted a Chistmas invite done for her sports group. They must be a girly bunch because they rejected my first design (first illustration) in favour of the third one. I must have a more dark and dramatic image of Christmas in my head! For me, Melbourne is very much the colour scheme of the first illustration during the summer time - especially when you're out at night. Midnight blue with a bushfire sky. It's bloody hot during Christmas time, and the city is heaving with dry heat before the skies inevitably open and clean us all down before the next heatwave hits. Lovely. This place where they're holding the event is right down beside the river, so it gets a nice cool hit in the evening - hence the lick of water in the illustration.

They all look nice, though. I've been having fun with new photoshop brushes.

Around town:

This reminds me so much of the neighbourhood I grew up in. Every evening the bats did (and still do) fly overhead on the way to their feeding grounds for the night. Hundreds and thousands of bats overhead, the sky full but totally silent, so beautiful!

Roar and be brave!

I just realised that in this small format it's hard to see the word 'roar'. Anyway, it reads 'roar! and be brave' - just a little encouragement for these crazy times.

The Eyes Have It

Sometimes there's just a shape inside of you that just has to get out: you don't know what it means, or even what it is, it just gives you great pleasure to make it and work with it a while. This is one of those things. Enjoy.

Encouragement!

A friend of mine growing up had signs with this hilarious statement 'can do attitude' hanging all around his house. I'm not sure what the deal was, whether they were serious (that is, his parents had put them up to encourage the children) or whether they were banged up there after someone came home from a cheesy conference, but nevertheless they somehow suited the whole family's similing enthusiasm so well. So whenever I think of him I think of this catch phrase and it makes me feel good. These are some slightly updated versions; the originals were clearly made in MS office and the type was Broadway or something else equally as kitsch... oh the good times!

Teeth:

Portrait: Alex

Portrait: Elly

Strength in the City

Year of the Rat

Another pattern: pill poppin'

Spoons