I'm on the Style File!

Good news this week! My work has been selected for inclusion in the Style File, a website that showcases Australian book illustrators. My page is now up and can be reached here and you can see fabulous work by all the artists on the site here.  This is one of the images they selected for my display from a possible eight.  I spent a happy evening making it - constructing a city out of paper and other objects, lighting it, photographing the shadows, and then hand-collaging the little vagabond onto printouts of the photos.  The glowing object at his feet is a cast glass heart that I made in the glass studio.  It was a fun way to make an image and ruffled up the corners of my brain a bit.  There's some great collage in modern picture books - I like the work of Tohby Riddle.

Banner for Watercolor Wednesdays

Here's the banner I made for Watercolor Wednesdays this month (I have to remind myself constantly not to put a "u" in Watercolor for the site).  The scene is the view from a hill in southern England (chalk downs country).  I read recently that painters who emigrated to Australia from England had trouble observing and painting distance in their landscapes, because in England there is a greater 'greying off' of colours towards the horizon.  In Australia, distant hills can appear intensely blue from the eucalypt oil in the atmosphere.  An Irish friend of mine said he had always regarded the blue hills in Australian paintings as artistic licence, until he visited and saw them for himself!  I was surprised by this as I had assumed it to be a universal fact that distant hills look blue. I tried to be quite true to the actual colours in this painting.

Do you have nothing to wear?

Is your wardrobe full of inappropriate things?
This month I had a turn at designing the banner and the month's illustration prompts for the group blog, Watercolor Wednesdays.  My first prompt was 'finding something unexpected in the cupboard' - for which I did this pic - and the second was 'strange pets'.  It's been so rewarding seeing other people's interpretations of these prompts.  If you visit WAWE, you can see the very imaginative and fun illustrations the other artists did.

The land in winter

Saturday was a very wet market day, but I still enjoyed it - thank you to my stout-hearted customers.  On Sunday while everything was laid out at home drying, we drove north about 70 km into the country to see what we might find.  The land is showing its winter bones, but looks spectacular in its subdued bronzes and iron reds.  These are a couple of sketches I did of the landscape near Hamilton, where we had lunch at the historic inn. The pub dog begged politely, but he wasn't getting any of our Yorkshire pud with gravy!  After lunch we had a walk along the River Clyde and were rewarded by the sight of a platypus, rummaging around mid-stream.  Sorry I did not get a good photo of him.

Eurovision Song Contest

On Sunday evening I fell to temptation and watched that ultimate tribute to musical kitsch, the Eurovision Song Contest.  It’s not that I enjoy it – it’s just something that has to be done.  Annually. This year, disappointingly few of the songs were truly awful, but there was a satisfying surplus of hairspray, indefensible shoes, and filmy costumes billowing in a powerful airstream.  Indeed, Ukrainian entrant Alyosha seemed actually to be singing in a hurricane, although her eyelashes remained glued firmly in place.  Bosnia-Herzegovina’s line, “This is the time to melt the ice” was timely in the era of global warming, but Russia’s “Lost and Forgotten” seemed a bad title for a competition song.

For me the great moments of Eurovision come from the truly mystifying songs – like Greece’s effort a few years back, “Use the Password – SAGAPO” (say what?).   This year, Armenia filled that category with their entry, “Apricot Stone”, which featured a beautiful girl and a giant sculpture of – you guessed it – an apricot stone.   Belarus wore pop-up butterfly wings (see pic), France went all sporty and Turkey glowered in black leather.  But none of them could compete with Germany’s fresh-faced, funky Lena whose song “Satellite” was just so darn catchy, it’s been in my head for two days.  I’m going to YouTube to listen to it now.