Orange Hoppy with a Dress!

This is Orange Hoppy. She's a Christmas present for my friend Robyn who, when very young, decided that she was a little brown bunny with an orange dress called Orange Hoppy. We always wondered if the name implied that there might be a few other hoppies around the place... like maybe somewhere there could be a Blue Hoppy or a Pink Hoppy or something? Anyway, this probably isn't how Robyn imagined her but this is how she looked to me! Merry Christmas Robyn!

Naked Orange Hoppy (Not very orange yet!)

Necklace

The necklace is made from a nice piece of Jasper I found on the beach near Ulverstone a couple of years back. It has been tumbled and polished with some other nice pebbles to give it the shine. I then crocheted around it with black cotton to make the setting and added some glass beads. It was a present for my sister! Happy Birthday, Alli!

Mosster

Masks.

Here's what I made for another exhibition. I have to admit, there's not a lot of meaning behind it except that I have often seen faces in leaves and when I looked at this face I saw leaves. My doll for Totem has safely arrived in Melbourne too!

Finished!

Argh. My fingers are about to fall off but the doll is finally ready to fly over to Melbourne for the Fringe Festival! Yay! I hope she will be happy to be in "Totem"! She is supposed to be a spiritual self-portrait. As Tori says: "Maybe she's just pieces of me you've never seen..." Hmm... That reminds me, you can probably tell I've reading Neil Gaiman's Sandman series again... Hello, Delirium!

She now has a head...

My doll has progressed even further... However, she is still a bit naked.

Progression

Here's the headless wonder again. She's been stuffed now so she has more of a figure. Maybe, I hope, by next week she'll have a head too.
I went to the Zine Cloud press release at Pocket Space yesterday which went well. The book is fabulous. You can check out some quick photos of it on Sarah Howell's blog which is on my list of Blog links.

Doll Parts

I have had the flu for the last couple of weeks so not much got done. I did, however do some on my doll for the Totem exhibition. The two long things are the legs and the odd shaped thing is the start of a body. And there's the rest of my wool too. I am hoping to finish the body this week and maybe start on the arms. I am not sure how she'll all fit together in the end but I kind of like it how her body became more shaped as I worked. This wasn't really a conscious decision, but I think it helps to show that the doll is supposed to be female as now she has a definite waist and hips and looks like girls are meant to look: fertile. What does this mean for me in relation to a self portrait? Probably something to do with the creativity and conception of ideas that are later given birth too. It's a slow process with this doll. She takes time because I am using quite fine wool and a compact stitch with a small (3.50mm) hook. Ah well, she'll get there in the end.

One of those weeks...

Not much to post on here picture or art-wise as it's been one of those "writing" weeks again. Or really, with me, one of those "writing once I've tidied the whole house and can't possibly procrastinate any more" weeks. I'm not sure how much of the writing can be used. Some times things get in the way and the point is misssed. Why does Benny have her bike? Is this useful or necessary? I struggle with beautiful and pointless things that must really be discarded for the sake of clarity and utility.

Catty

I gave this to Bethan the other day when she came around for lunch. She seemed to like it!

The current state of things...

Here's what's going on in my sketch book at the moment: the current character concepts for my latest comic. This week I hope to get the story boarding done too.

Moira, Melissa and me.

Um... so, um yes. Well, I haven't actually been making many toys at the moment because I've been writing. So that's good. But I just wish there were more hours in the day. Today for instance: a bit of a dolls leg, a bit of a coin purse, an old romance resurfaces with Moira's red-headed lover (and now I have to sort out a lot of continuity stuff that I've been avoiding for ages!) and of course notes for the snow story. She has moved in now (yes four years after I started the damn story) and the happy family are about to eat their first meal together. Not sure what will happen but something will, I've just (as usual) got one line in my head which all else will have to evolve from: "She liked the ice-cream very much." Oh yes, and I've written the last page of the story now. I don't know if it will stay the same in later rewrites, but I think it gets across the loneliness of James and the hopelessness of his life now. So that's all good. One thing still bothers me though: the smell of chicken cooking in the second scene... Would Melissa cook chicken for James? Realistically, would she? Maybe she'd wait for James to come home and do the cooking? I am hoping that Greg or Sarah can look at the draft for me and help me with some of these details.

Message

From Pale Dress by the Audreys:

"and i try to help
but it's too late in the night to pretend
yeah it's too late, it's always too late
too late and you want her again

you want her, you want her all over again
you want her, you want her all over again
you want her, you'll start up all over again"

You know who you are.

Thank you.

There were certain books that I had when I was a child that were just so precious to me, for their stories and their sweetness. This one, I have finally managed to find on ebay after a long time of searching. When I was about five I used to borrow it all the time from the town library, intrigued by its smallness and by the fact that the main characters were an ant and a bee. It inspired many of the comics I made as a child and still inspires me now. My favourite page was the last one, shown above, as it amazed me that the author had known just what I was thinking when I worried about the skate going over the bump!
I was also very inspired by book I had that was one of those record, read along books.... It was called The little house, I think and was one of the first things that made me think about houses and cities and other inanimate objects having spirits of their own, another theme that comes up often in my art and writing today. These things and many, many others from childhood have had such a deep influence on me and my work that I often wish I could find the people who wrote them and just say a heartfelt "thankyou."

Purple Bear

Cats & Teddy

Oh oh oh oh sweet child o mine...

Oh yeah, here's my slightly more silly purchase that I bought while looking for a new jumper. I couldn't find one I liked so got this instead. Mmmm... where do we go, where do we go, where do we go now?

Starting again

Hello. I've decided after spending a week teaching high school students how to make zines that I really should get on with my own comics again so today I went shopping and got some lovely new sketch books, yay! I was a bit influenced by the fact that Sarah H. and Leigh showed me their sketch books this week and like Sarah, I thought I should try to move onto something bigger than the A5 art diaries I've had in the past.
I've also become rather irritated at my myspace blog thingy lately so thought I'd start up a blog here as well because it seems a bit more reliable. I am, however notoriously bad at keeping up diaries, blogs and the like so I'll just have to see how it goes...