Interview on Petal to Petal

My artwork was recently featured on Petal to Petal, a blog run by the Irish surface pattern designer, Lily Reilly. I'm not sure if you're aware of the warm and fuzzy feelings I reserve for all things Irish, but Lily and her lovely blog are definitely recipients of said feelings :)
She features all kinds of artists on her blog, and  invited me to participate in one of her insightful interviews. I am so pleased to be featured alongside other illustrators like Katy Horan, who's work I've always admired - thanks Lily! x

You can mosey on down to Petal to Petal and read my interview here.

P.S The above picture is of Luna, my beautiful beaded deer head, and is totally unrelated to the post. But isn't she lovely?

Nestle

My little hand carved and painted porcelain girl 'Nestle' found a new home on the very first night of her exhibition. Although it's always a little bittersweet parting with something you've laboured so long and hard over, the feeling is far surpassed by the joy of seeing someone fall in love with a piece and want to take it home. This was my first attempt at working with porcelain, and it was, of course, a lot more tricky and time consuming than I had anticipated. After I had sculpted the figure, she was bisque fired and ready to be painted. I used a very fine brush to painstakingly paint on her hair, which I then proceeded to sand right off again, re-paint, sand off etc. and annoyingly continued to do this about 3 or 4 times before I finally achieved a result I was happy with. Thankfully this process was made a little less agonizing by the wonderful ladies working in the ceramic department, who let the wine flow at all hours of the day and supply endless amounts of hilarity and good advice. The final painted figure was dipped in a clear glaze before going back into the kiln for a last firing. I just love the finish of the glossy glaze and how it brings the colours to life, and I cant wait to get my hands on some more porcelain :)

Because Stickers!

Any kid that grew up in the 90's  knows the joys of these tacky delights. I used to spend hours pouring over my sticker book collections full of wonderously puffy, fluffy, scented, glittery goodness, and occassionally allowed myself to part with a few in order to swap them for coveted glow in the dark Lion King numbers owned by other little sticker collector friends.
In a moment of poor judgement or nostalgia ( I prefer to put it down to the latter), I designed a couple of fun little sticker sheets for Design Indaba with peach (above), mint and grey accents and they sold out, yay! So relieved there is still a healthy appetite for these items! Each little image tears off individually from the A5 sheet, so you can make your own little compositions with them. Or just sticker-ify arbitrary household objects like in the days of our youth....queue reminiscent sigh...