quilt

Today, after many days of not doing a lot, I decided to do something a little creative. There was a bag of scrap bits of fabric lurking under my desk, so now they are all happily sewn together in the form a lovely patchwork quilt. :) I have never done this before, and so far I only have the front, but once I have some stuffing and a backpiece it will all be finished in a wonderful feast for the eyes!

I put my hairbrush there in the corner so you can see how big it is, it's about 120cm square (ish!)

After my slightly wonky sewing I think I have a good little quilt. It's a bit skewiff in places but it's going to look fab in my room in Falmouth once it's finished :)

poster

I realised that I talked about a poster I did for uni work in an earlier blog and then never posted the finished product, so here it is. Now that I have finished the year I can share it with you :)

soundtracks

For my birthday, I got two tickets (for me and my mum) to go and see the Sound of Music on-stage at the Birmingham Hippodrome. Apart from being irrationally excited about this, it got me thinking about movies and their soundtracks. Recently I've been more interested in listening to soundtracks than I have artist's albums, I guess they just remind me of the film and they are usually good to sing along to. So seeing as I haven't posted in a while, I thought I would give you a few examples of my favourites, old and new. Maybe it'll inspire you to listen, maybe you will think "oh what terrible taste!"

1. The Sound of Music

Despite how old fashioned or cheesy people might say this is, I think this film is wonderful. Julie Andrews has a beautiful voice, and the songs have become classics. My favourite things, ironically, is my favourite song from this soundtrack, and I think it sounds particularly good when played on a proper record player.

2. Cabaret

I first watched this film when I was part of film club, a recommended extra curricular activity while I was doing my A level in film studies. I love the way that the club is shown, and how beautiful the costumes are! Again, another leading lady with a wonderful voice, Liza makes the songs her own in every scene for me.

3. Atonement

The reason I have chosen this is because of just one arrangement of music - the way that the tapping of the keys on the typewriter transforms into a dramatic piece of music impresses me every time I watch the movie, almost as much as Kiera's amazing green dress.

4. The Twilight Saga - New Moon

This soundtrack is one that I can listen to without really thinking about the fact that the music featured on a film. The songs sound fantastic individually, as well as heard together on the album. The scene in which the camera pans around Bella stands out in my mind as a perfect song choice, with the simple and haunting melody provided by Lykke Li.

5. Footloose

Kevin Bacon, dancing. I think that's all that really needs to be said!

6. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

In my world, Tim Burton's assassination of this story does not exist. So here I am referring to the original motion picture from 1971, with the wonderful Gene Wilder inviting us to look around and view paradise in his magical chocolate factory. This movie struck a chord with me when I was a child but it was not until I was older that I really appreciated some of the music in it - particularly Verruca Salt's wonderfully bratty song "I want it now".

7. Amelie

The music in this film is simply brilliant. It has such life and such character, which perfectly reflects Amelie herself who is played perfectly by Audrey Tautou. Listening to this music relaxes me, and whenever I put it on I always become more inspired by the world around me.

8. Moulin Rouge

I. Love. Ewan. McGregor. Before seeing this film, I did not - it was his rendition of Your Song, a song I had also previously disliked, that suddenly made me realise that I did infact have a place in my heart for him! In particular, Elephant Love Medley is in my most played list on iTunes, which goes to show what a wonderful song I think it is. I think the way that the song has been put together with lyrics from many well known rock and pop classics is absolute genius, and gives the piece a unique dynamism.

9. Sweeney Todd (The Demon Barber of Fleet Street)

Who knew Johnny Depp could sing? Along with Helene Bonham Carter andJamie Campbell Bower they provide a wonderful soundtrack to this classic horror musical. I will forgive you for this one, Tim.

10. Adventureland

Rock me amadeus!

(images found on Google image search)

scrapbook

First image was an experiment for my White Fawn illustrations which I didn't get to finish because of my operation. The other two are from my scrapbook, images from magazines.

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

Candy

Ohh how I am going to miss visual studies. It's one of the few times when I actually enjoy the work I do because I know it doesn't have to be anything and it just.. is. This is what I did in my final lesson and I really love painting like this, I kind of want to use it in my work but I don't really know what to do with it!

For my final project of second year (aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh) I'm going to illustrate a fairytale called The White Fawn, it's full of princesses and diamond encrusted palaces and fairies and fawns and .. crabs weirdly. It's really trippy and it's gonna be fun, hopefully I'll combine the style I used in my collages with the paintings and create something really mad. Maybe I'll even be able to draw a fawn after it!

I've also recently been loving a website that I found on stumble called WeHeartIt, which is basically an online scrapbook of photos, illustrations and pretty much any visual material from websites in a collection. Each user has their own "heart" that they fill with images that are inspiring to them - my heart is here - I have images of my own hearted onto here too so there's more fun there.

Next week is my final week in the second year studio, and then another two weeks and I will be finished. Scary! But exciting. Looking forward to my 21st in June and eventually having a summer, bring it on.

complete

Oh yeahh. One essay - finished. One regret - I totally should have saved that subject for my dissertation next year, because as it turns out I only managed to get half of the information I wanted to discuss into the finished essay! gutted.

Because I've been working on that and my last project has been mainly photographic, I haven't really got much to show for my drawing at the moment, so I have been delving into my old drawings that I did many years ago that are still saved onto my laptop. This should be interesting!

I did these two in the summer before my foundation year, just some line drawings of random things. It's strange looking at old work. How it has changed!

Not much else is happening really, looking forward to summer now, not long left in the second year. Scary.

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.

sunday

So here I am. It's Sunday, it's about time I did my essay. It's time I find other things to do. Here's a new blog entry! Yahoo.

Well. First thing really is the same thing that everyone else is talking about. I recently started becoming interested in what is happening to this country, and the people that are meant to be running it. As I write we still have no government because the men are still in 'talks' to decide. All I can say is, don't do it Nick! Hopefully on Monday after these discussions we will actually have a decent parliament and something good will happen. I was amazed to see that my local constituency in the Midlands had gone to the blue side, after a long tradition of Labour support, but it was quite interesting to look at the map and see the red blob that is Birmingham and Dudley floating in a sea of blue.

Enough of this folly. You want pictures right? Here is a sample of my work from my LAST EVER visual studies! Sob! I am going to miss it greatly, as it is the only time I can piss around and cut and stick without it meaning anything. And my tutor is awesome because anything anyone ever does is always "ooh beautiful" and it makes you feel great! I got the materials for these images from various sources; from old etchings, an old newspaper article (the cat), old issues of vogue (the angel face), my own photos (the cupcake) and lots of collage paper textures. I really enjoy working like this and hope to employ this style when I take on my next project. I'm happy with these too because they look great once re-printed from the originals.

Lovely. Next thing I'm going to do is hopefully a fairytale, haven't picked one yet though. It's a bit scary knowing there is only about four weeks left of my time in the second year studio, third year is a scary prospect - hopefully they'll let me have a go at it.