exposure

I have had this project half finished for quite a while, and today I thought I'd get it finished! This quotation started life as a paper cut, and I used long exposure photography to create the images you see here. The above image I used a torch wrapped in tracing paper to soften the light and flashed it behind the stencil. Below I used the same torch covered with my hand to get the red effect! What do you guys think? Hoping to do some more long exposure photography and typography in the future :)

celebration

It's been a while since I have posted tales of my baking skills on here so I thought I'd share with you some birthday fun that I made today for my good friend Holly. You may remember the rainbow cake that I made for Amber - this time I decided to try some rainbow cupcakes. I used the same cake recipe from the Whisk Kid blog that's mentioned in the former blog post, but this time instead of baking separate layers of cake you simply layer the different mixes in your paper cases. I suggest that you use piping bags to do this - I used tea spoons and it took me about an hour! The final cakes came out super though, and I finished them with some american 'carnival' sprinkles that I purchased from Home Sense. Enjoy!

pictures

I was messing around taking photos today ,and it made me realise that I have quite a lot of photos that I am proud of that nobody will ever see, as they don't really relate to anything - so I thought for a change from illustration I would share some of my photos with you. Some of them are quite old but I am really happy with them yet haven't really done anything with them. They're not really related to each other, but they might make a nice collection. I'll try and reference any of the places in the pictures just in case you're interested in seeing any of the buildings for yourself.

(above three photos at Hartlebury Museum, Worcestershire)

(above six taken at the Lost Gardens of Heligan, Cornwall)

Boys swimming on a cold day in Clevedon

Birds circle the roof at Croome, Worcestershire

Carousel at Brighton Pier, East Sussex

Spires outside the Bullring centre, Birmingham

Lanhydrock

So it's been a little busy recently - have been up and down and across the country on trips to Ogmore-by-sea, Falmouth and Brighton so it's been rather quiet on the illustration front. I recently uploaded some old photos from my camera that I forgot about (whoops) so this blog will contain a few of those instead.

British bluebells coating Lanhydrock's grounds

The bluebells covering the forest floor

A wider view of the grounds

One of my favourite National Trust houses here in the UK is Lanhydrock, a stunning house with a rich history. It's particularly stunning in Spring, as many of its acres are bathed in bluebells at this time, which is what inspired me to take these photos when I was there in April of this year. I highly recommend a visit to this property, especially during the Spring and Summer months.

A short blog this time as I have a few projects lined up, but in the hope of not jinxing them I shall update when I have more certain news.

lapse

So it's been a month since I last posted, and I have lots of things to report. Firstly, I have put up my degree show and have finished all of my work! Our results came out on Tuesday and I got a 2:1, which I am really happy with. It hasn't quite sunk in that I will be leaving Falmouth this time next week, ready to join the wider world. It was also my birthday yesterday and I had a brilliant day thanks to my fab flatmates.

This amazing cake was lovingly made for me by my flatmates - Despite the appearance of it (and my cards actually) I was actually 22, not 7!

Another brilliant opportunity I had this week was to work with Natasha, a friend and colleague graduating from UCF this year from my course. She is an aspiring illustrator and photographer, and we decided to have an impromptu photoshoot around the theme of mimes. This is me posing on her bathroom floor! This was a really fun shoot and it was a great way of getting ourselves inspired to do more creative things with the freedom of this small amount of time left at university. Natasha has a brilliant website and for more of her photography you can visit her Facebook Fan page.

christmas

the tree

lovely busty ladies from TK Maxx

A view of Hedwig and the tree

Fiona the fairy and Philip the horse

beautiful glittery candles from Trago Mills

As you can probably tell, it's christmas at my house! There's never been a more creep-chic tree as ours. We have been making a small collection of decorations for the past three years, since we came to uni. The first was Fiona (the fairy on top of the tree), which I made out of felt and tissue paper in the first year of uni.

The second year brought with it the neon blue lights (seriously not fetching but they are bright and fun) and the lovely being that is philip. The horrid christmas pony courtesy of Millie Delacoe (whose amazing journalism/lifestyle blog you can view here, which will probably include more pics of the tree) and his name is Philip. We tried putting him near the door but the boys wouldn't let us, so with Fiona he now rides.

This year, we went a little overboard with ornaments. The busty christmas ladies are from a lovely amazing shop known as TK Maxx and the candles, golden swan and creepy christmas hat stars are all from the most amazing christmas heaven in all of Falmouth, Trago Mills.

Very excited to get to christmas now - I entered the They Draw and Cook holiday recipe contest last week with a recipe for mince pies (aha! which is why I cooked them last week...) and I can't wait to see if they put my recipe on their website. very exciting!

creepy

I love creepy things. Saw this at an amusement arcade in Clevedon, Devon, and had to take a picture.

more

I have changed my mind. I want to be a food photographer. At least I do for now after making these little fellows...

I got the recipe for these from the Hummingbird Bakery book. They were the spiciest gingerbread men I had ever made, but their dark colour made for a brilliant contrast with the bright white icing (which was very hard to pipe, hence their slightly manic expressions). They were a lot of fun to make but even more fun to photograph, so here's a selection of images from the process -

Lots of flour everywhere

laparoscopic appendectomy

Well well well. Welly Welly Welly. Wellity Wellity Wellity.

it has been a LONG time!

As you may have gathered from the technical sounding blog post title, I had something technical sounding happen to me at the start of June. On the Saturday I was feeling a little off and in some pain, just thought, ah well, muscles or something. By the Sunday morning I was on my way to the Surgical Receiving Unit at the RCH ready to have my stupid turgid appendix removed. Yippee! Sunday night at around 10pm I was wheeled off to surgery and by Monday afternoon I was back home. Tuesday saw me zooming back to the midlands with my mom and all my stuff in tow, ready for some recovery.

So here I am, four weeks later, feeling pretty good. I can safely say I will never ever have unnecessary surgery after having experienced very necessary surgery and its aftercare! I am so grateful to the hospital that they got me in there and sorted me out so quickly, and I also couldn't be more grateful to my boyfriend who forced me to phone the doctor - he may have just saved my life.

So since then it's been recovery and stuff, but in between times I have turned into an adult - Yes, 21 years of age, how old am I. (21. yes, I know riight). I had a fabulous day, and a fabulous evening meal with my extended family. An unplanned journey home turned out to be a blessing in disguise as I got to spend my birthday with everyone here instead of in my student house trying not to catch something.

In illustration terms I really haven't had the chance to do anything in between birthday celebrations and recovering from my operation, although I have had the chance to take a few photos. My nextdoor neighbour has recently rescued a Jackdaw that flew down from our roof but didn't make it with the others, and is now trying to train it and get it back to a good condition for flying away. I got to take some photos of him, so I will put them on here too. I also have a few pages from my scrapbook that I was going to upload before my operation so I will probably do those in a new post save me doing them here :)

For now enjoy this whimsical bird. Yay

plethora

Today I have been striving to avoid writing my essay. Yes, the very same essay I was meant to be doing when I last updated nearly a week ago. This morning I've been working on my uni work, a poster for an arts and literature festival, there's a picture of me at the bottom of this blog constructing my prop for the photo for that poster. I used an old book and I sort of collaged and drew onto it. I then put my hand drawn type into it on photoshop.

This afternoon I did a bit of my favourite thing - charity shopping. I'm always on the hunt for Jackie annuals from the 1970's so I always check out the kid's book shelves. Today I didn't manage to find Jackie, but I did find someone called Diana, a similar style annual, from 1978. It's got similar comic stories, and beauty tips, it's so retro and it feels warped to read the style of it today. The moon shaped illustration is from Diana, and I thought it was really beautiful so I wanted to share it with you! I don't know who did it but all credit to them, obviously. The picture of the celebrity stamps is also from Diana, see if you can name all of those 70's faces!

I also found an annual from 1995 on that shelf - Barbie! This annual would have come out when I was 6 when I was just getting into playing with Barbies so looking at it really made me reminiss. The photos and illustrations in there are totally awful in hindsight, but back then man were they cool. I was surprised to see that the crosswords weren't done. Magic

After that I went for a walk with Chris and we took our cameras, and I did a few close up shots of the may flowers - see the snowdrops at the start. The photos are all a bit mixed up sorry!

Diana annual 1978

Barbie Annual 1995

Celebrity St-armps - Diana Annual, 1978

So there we have it. No drawing! I'll get some stuff up soon. I really should do my work. Damn.

Oss

It's been a few days. Sorry!

Over the weekend I went to the mayday festival in Padstow. I have been going for many years, we discovered the festival when I was just one year old and our family has been going ever since. This year I had the privilege of having a good camera so that I could capture some photos of the 'Oss. My dad has always been the one to take pictures but this year I got my camera out! The festival celebrates the first day of summer, and the locals are very serious about their celebrations. It has a unique atmosphere, and I always feel privileged to witness the day every year. The drums and the music stay with you for days afterwards.

parrots

there has been a lot going on but I am far too tired to recount it all right now - I will post again soon so I can really go through! For now, here are some photos I took at the Botanical Gardens in Birmingham. In these particular ones I focused on birds, namely macaws and budgerigars, but I do have many of the plants which I might put up tomorrow. I do think these birds are rather beautiful, especially the one that squawked "ello children!" at us.