Favourite new book – Yumeji Graphics.
“This book focuses on the graphic works created by legendary Japanese artist and designer Yumeji Takehisa. It included his illustrations for books, editorial designs for magazines, drawing, typography and more.Takehisa (1884-1934) was a painter and pioneering graphic designer during Taisho era and early Showa era in Japan.”
School is back and Lily has decided to start afternoon napping again which is kind of her, so I am getting a little bit of creative time:
1) painting wooden dolls
2) getting back to those marshmallow bunnies
3) piling stuff on my sewing table
4) reading “On Writing” by Stephen King but not actually doing too much writing. It’s good! I haven’t read much SK before but even his memoir is a page-turner.
Little fuzzy – more doodling on wood… these little blanks I bought from Winterwood and I drew on them with my indian ink drawing pen. The ink bled a little but not enough to worry about. Phil thought I should make an entire chess set. Now that would be fun.
I seriously love painting on these wooden dolls – I can’t believe I put it off for so long.
Working on kokeshi dolls – turned by my awesome Uncle. About to sand out the nose on the front one and try something a little less clunky. School’s back today so it’s back to sewing rabbits. Stay tuned.
Lili Scratchy – so good! I can’t say any more because I am practicing my new “computer off by 9.30pm” rule and it’s 9.34… but do check out her blog and all the wonderful stuff that goes on there. (via the equally wonderful Misako Mimoko).
…the flickr world of artist and illustrator Virgin Honey! She’s a little bit Elsita, a little bit Nathalie Lete, a little bit J Otto Seibold… sort of… and entirely unique. I could hardly chose a photo, there are so many goodies.
I scanned in the inked version of my new drawing and have been playing with some colours in photoshop. Much fun. I have to work out how to deal with those big blocks of colour because I know that I am asking for trouble and blocked up gocco screens if I leave them as is. More work is needed.
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Day 18: Wrote around 900 words today. It wasn’t a struggle really, but it was waffle. Feeling a bit lost with it at the moment – not quite sure if I am really saying anything worth saying at all. Hopefully when the heating comes back on, so will my enthusiasm.
Yeegads – a busy weekend. I think I emptied a tank of petrol with all the running around we’ve had to do. Amelia and I dropped in on Christina and Paul for a cup of tea today and as usual we came away feeling very inspired (and warm! There’s certainly nothing wrong with their heating). Amelia came home and sorted all her Blythe postcards, and I’ve been working away at my Paper Moon sketch, ready to gocco-fy as soon as I can get some time to get to a photocopier. Does anyone know if there is a Melbourne gocco supply source or do I need to go back to Nehoc?
Tonight? We have a chick-flick and the rest of the Green & Black’s white chocolate to devour.
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I’ve lost track of my days. I know I missed one due a packed schedule- and it’s way too cold to get up at 5.30 at the moment. Every other day I have managed to dash down somewhere between 500 and 1000 words, usually in the evening after the girls are asleep, so none of it is particularly good. I do like my 5.30 starts. I also really need to find a solid slab of time to write all my scenes down on sticky notes (a la Will Self) and rearrange the lot so the plot structure makes sense. I think I need to chop out a major subplot which means a couple of my favourite characters get the flick – but hey, this may be the book that ends up in my bottom drawer, and I can resurrect those characters at a later date in my BLOCKBUSTER. Yep.
Photo from yesterday’s Age – by Rodger Cummins.
Subscriptions! So good. Sign up once, and then it just keeps going and going. I subscribe to a couple of magazines and a couple of zines, but there are other things which you can keep surprising yourself with every month.
Wilkintie (above): This one looks awesome – Fine art prints for children by fabulous illustrators printed by letterpress
“Subscription to Wilkintie offers you an opportunity to collect all twelve prints in our first series. Each month we release a new print by a different artist, which we will send to you in the mail at the beginning of that month, wrapped in a little parcel of fun. The artwork itself will be a surprise or, if you’d like a sneak preview of the latest release you will be able to view it on this site. But we think the surprise is all part of the experience.”
When you sign up for the subsciption, each of the 12 prints works out to be only $40 each. You could collect the lot or keep your favourites and give away the others as gifts. Single prints are still the very reasonalbe $80 (Australian).
(via @weheartbooks on twitter)
Threadless 12 Club - I gave this fab subscription to Phil for his birthday and Christmas at the end of 2007 – 12 special edition Threadless Tshirts, one in the mail every month. He got a couple he would rather he hadn’t but mostly he got a wonderful and bizarre collection of shirts that he might have otherwise not thought to buy. And now he won’t need another t-shirt for at least ten years.
Emusic: I have the package which gives me 30 songs a month to download from a vast, vast collection of music. The trick here is to remember to download all your songs before the end of your month or you lose them. I spend ages looking through my recommendations from iTunes and fast.fm to find good things to download. I don’t know how I’d cope if I had the 75 songs a month package. My head might explode.
Etsy: I have also added a couple of subscription based services I found on etsy to my ‘etsy favourites’ which display in the sidebar, or find them here.
Do you have any other suggestions? I wracked my brains and probably forgot something obvious.
