'tis the season...

to be very busy. Excitingly, we're hosting Christmas for the first time this year... in a house we're moving into on the 21st December... at the end of what have turned out to be my and Nick's busiest weeks of the year at work...

Oh, and wedding planning as well. I'm currently embroiled in not-very-festive invitation designing.

So please bear with me for a little while and excuse any random or erratic posts until January!

Week Word: Desiderata

I chose this week's word, desiderata, which means 'desired things'. 

It got me thinking about the things that we want or need (often not the same things) and that feeling of longing for something that is, as yet, out of reach. But how yearning itself can be sort of bitter-sweet; how sometimes getting the desired thing makes you wistful for the period of longing and anticipation.

A little introspective for a Friday... I'm clearly in need of a weekend!

Visit the other participants to learn a little about their desires this week:

John at The Healing Seed

Carmen at Tales of a Biomouse

Helen at Autistic Inner Space (welcome!)

And I'm going to bounce the Week Word ball back to John to pick for us next week.

New Pen Excitement

I decided to celebrate selling the flat with the purchase of a new pen. Why yes, I am the last of the big spenders.


I like drawing with a dip pen with a lovely wooden handle, but they're not the most practical unless you're sitting at the desk where you always sit and have some tissues to hand. And aren't wearing white. And don't mind having ink all over your fingers for days.


(This could be more because I'm messy than the fault of the pen, but I suspect people invented biros for a reason...)


But I haven't managed to find a fine-liner I get on well with. Much like Goldilocks working through the pens of some bears, they tend to be too scratchy, too hard, or too faint.


I've been keenly keeping an eye out for any mentions of the pens people use on my daily forays through the internet, and finally found one that sounded good. So ordered it.


It's a Rotring Artpen with an extra fine nib. I ordered mine from here and it arrived super-fast. It only comes with cartridges and the ink isn't waterproof, so I've also ordered a converter and have some Noodlers Bulletproof Black on its way. I'm hopeful that it won't gunk it up (Danny Gregory uses it, and I think he's probably trustworthy...)

I've only had time for a few quick sketches with it, but so far it's perfect and exactly what I wanted.

Still, dark skies...

This is something I made months ago, but forgot to post. Useful on a quiet week!

I wanted an unusual gift for a friend, so I came up with the idea of creating an image and then getting the lovely and talented Emma to make it into a notebook.

She did such a beautiful (and speedy!) job. You can see some of Emma's other custom made notebooks here.

Coffee Break

I spotted these young ladies having coffee a few weekends back when we were in Balham and thought they were perfectly posed for a coffee-loving illustration.

For Balham Fans ( surely everyone - it's the Gateway to the South!) we were in Bertie and Boo at the time. Usually far too many buggies that cost more than my bike in there, but the coffee and food are lovely and sensibly priced and it feels nice to support local businesses.

Exciting Post

Getting post is nice. I'm always excited when an envelope arrives that has handwriting on rather than the address in a plastic window, so I try to remember to send cards to my friendsandrelations in the hope that they also can get excited.

I don't like sending rubbish cards though, which can often mean lengthy visits to the larger branches of Paperchase trying to find something both suitable and entertaining. So I've recently started drawing my own. You can buy a pack of eight blank cards for the price of one proper one, so it's the economical choice, and at least this way I won't have chosen the same design as someone else!

This was for Nick's birthday. It's the recipe for his favourite pudding... Making it into a card we could stick on the fridge afterwards and therefore have no excuse not to make seemed like a gift that keeps on giving!

A card for some lovely friends who recently got engaged in Morocco...

And one for a new baby.

Week Word: Scent

Emma chose this week's word, scent.

I've gone with the rather old fashioned interpretation of scent meaning perfume. (Does anyone still call it scent? I can only imagine my grandmother saying it!)

I've worn the same perfume for years, Angel by Thierry Mugler. It's a slightly controversial one, as I know a lot of people really hate it (you can read some amusing reviews here and here) but I think it's very dependent on your own skin chemistry. I don't like it in the bottle or walking past the display in a department store, but I do like it on my skin. 

Apparently its 'notes' include melon, coconut, mandarin orange, cassia, jasmine, bergamot, cotton candy, honey, apricot, blackberry, plum, orchid, peach, lily-of-the-valley, red berries, rose, tonka bean, amber, patchouli, musk, vanilla, dark chocolate and caramel. That's a lot of stuff to go wrong, but on me I think I get the last four and that's it. Much nicer.

I've also never had anyone recoil in horror, and occasionally people do tell me I smell nice. So I'm going to stick with it. (I also can't find any other perfumes that don't smell like either Impulse Body Spray circa 1998 or everyone's grandmother on me...)

Anyway, a watercolour sketch of my current bottle. 

And visit Emma to find out what other scents we have this week.

Instagram Tree

On Saturday I mentioned the instagram tree I'd made, and I thought it might deserve a post all of its own.

It's not really a how-to, as it's probably the easiest thing in the world and telling anyone how to do it seems a bit patronising! But I'm sure there are other people out there who've jumped on the instagram bandwagon as wholeheartedly as I have, and wish there was something else to do with all those beautifully filtered pictures.


You can get them printed straight from the app, Firebox do it for example. But it's not cheap and perhaps, like me, you don't upload all the pictures you take?



So... transfer your instagram pictures from your phone to your computer (I have an Android phone and just have to plug it in and drag them over). You can then upload them to your preferred online photo printing service. (I used photobox, but I think they're all much of a muchness and I'm sure you can find discounts if you shop around - they should be pennies per image, plus postage.) If you order them as 5x3.75" prints you'll get pictures with plenty of white space around them... just cut around them into squares or allow a border with a thicker edge at the bottom and they look like polaroids!


Tiny tiny pegs are available from Amazon in all sorts of colours (or I'm sure I've seen them in Paperchase or big craft stores before). 

I actually already had the tree - I'd used it for my Easter decorations - but it's just a useful bit of branch I found, cleaned up and stuck in an old flower pot filled with dirt. (You could probably use clay or florists' foam or something instead if you don't want to get grubby.)

Then just peg your pictures to your branches. 

Voila - instagram tree! And easy to update and change with your newest pictures as you take them.

More bits of the Barbican

I've finally managed to finish my Barbican illustration, pulling together all the sketches from our field trip.

I originally planned for it to be black and white, with just the people in colour, but I think I like this coloured version better. The black and white seemed a little bit too subdued for a building as interesting as the Barbican.

Week Word: Treat

I chose this week's word, and went for 'treat'.


It was Nick's birthday last weekend, so I made him a chocolate cake. On further thought, I'm not sure it really counts as I think treats are supposed to be a bit out of the ordinary and we do eat quite a lot of cake...


However, he got to chose what sort of cake it was and it didn't contain any stealth vegetables. Apparently that made it a treat.

It was Nigella's Devil's Food Cake which I find is a really useful store-cupboard recipe. (As opposed to the ones she thinks are. Her store-cupboards and mine are clearly very different.) But with chocolate butter cream rather than the frosting she uses as Nick is physically incapable of eating too much butter, and as another birthday treat I promised not to mention cholesterol for a few hours.


Go and visit Foxy Bakes and The Gift Shed for other Friday treats. And I'm going to tag Emma to choose next week's word.

Sunday Sketchblog #16

... and just some more of me I'm afraid. 

Pencil

Single-line drawing

Water colour

I promise I'll have some different subject matter for the next few Sundays!

Sunday Sketchblog #15

Whilst I'm off enjoying myself, this Sunday's sketchblog is just going to be some more of my self-portraits. I haven't been managing one a day, but a couple a week has been achievable.

Yes, but do you have a flag?

If there's one thing we seem to be good at in London at the moment, it's flags...

Bond Street, with added flags.

I'm afraid it's going to be rather quiet around here for a few weeks as we're off on a transatlantic adventure! I've scheduled a few posts, and we're not going off any beaten tracks so I might manage the odd update in transit, but apologies if this turns into a travel blog for a little while...

Sunday Sketchblog #14

This is, obviously, a sketchbook page from when I was thinking about last week's Week Word. I decided it looked a bit too much like it belonged in an 80s hairdressers, but I do quite like the black and white.

Week Word: Forgotten

I chose this week's word, after forgetting for a while...


My forgotten thing is a bear. Despite being quite grown up, whilst I lived on my own I always slept with a bear. Admittedly he'd usually end up on the floor by morning, but he was always somewhere around the bed.


Now I live with a man, and the man says there is no room in the bed for the bear. I suspect he has a point. So the bear lives on a chair and gets covered in socks and bags.

I was going to work this up into something a bit more polished, but time is not on my side so I've decided to embrace the sketchy.


Go and see what other people have forgotten this week...


Emily at Ready for Adventure
Heather at Free Spirit
Kirst at CameraKiki
Emma at The Gift Shed

And a late one... Peggy!


And I hope she doesn't mind, but I'm going to tag our newest Week Worder, Kirst, to pick next week's word! Pop over to her blog to see what she chooses.

Sometimes...

I mentioned our sometimes it's good to lie project a while back in a Sunday Sketchblog, and here's my finished image. 

I love how far it's developed from the original sketches! I'm also pleased with how the ink work has turned out as it's a new medium for me and I've found it quite fiddly.

Sunday Sketchblog #13

This is from our Calais trip. I must admit, I don't like travelling by ferry very much: too many people, not enough seats, strangely recycled air (despite being at sea and surrounded by windows) and an oddly pervasive smell of chips.


So, to survive it, I plugged in my earphones and drew the 'view'.

Pop and see if Emma's got a sketch for us this week.

Week Word: Glimpse

Heather chose our word, glimpse, this week. 


A glimpse seems to me to be about seeing something quickly, something you might not have been expecting, and something that might be a bit ambiguous.


Rather than drawing the thing that's been spotted, I tried to catch that moment when you glimpse something and instinctively move to try and see it better... to see if that really is a murderer behind the door, or just a lurking dressing gown. 

Anyone got any favourite mistaken glimpses? Two of mine: Nick spotting a spaceman having a fit at a party which turned out to be some balloons , and a friend who once was sure she saw a dead unicorn on the side of the motorway. Actually some sand bags...


Go and visit Heather to see what other people have been glimpsing this week.

My (Undead) Sister

This isn't what I did last night at art class, this is what I did yesterday to cheer up my sister. 


You might think that painting her as the undead wouldn't be very cheering, but then you haven't met my sister. She went to a fancy dress party looking like this, and I suspect she'd do it all the time if she had the chance (and didn't work in a bank...)

Sunday Sketchblog #12

I've set myself a new challenge. 


You know those people who take a picture a day for a year, or who post what they're wearing every day? I'm going to try my own version... a sketch of myself each day.


Not sure how long for... the little Moleskin notebook I have has sixty pages so hopefully I'll fill it. Oh, and only weekdays, unless I'm feeling very creative. I need no-plan days!


Here are some of the last week or so.