Hullo dear readers, happy Monday and fear not, I am still in the land of the living! Sundays may as well be workdays; it seems Mondays now are dedicated to exhaling after what has been a series of mental weekends. It has been a massive few weeks all round really, what with workshops, the first Parap Arts Festival, the usual round of markets, starting my five pieces to enter into the 2012 Bologna Illustrator's Exhibition, a day of distraction when I convinced myself it would be a great idea to start making art dolls again (right in the middle of starting said Bologna project, mind you!), and a rather large preoccupation with the chaos that was previously my house. How do people do all this and still hold down day-jobs and raise families?
Here's the progress on Operation Nesting Sans Baby Plans Because We Have a Mad Cat, starting with our loungeroom. The brightly coloured frames we picked up in Brighton when we were in the UK; the bowl of fruit in the pink one is a drawing of Dave's. Pretty wonderful, isn't it? And in the larger frames, gorgeous artwork by the very lovely Nicoletta Ceccoli. My favourite is the one in the white frame above our bed, who makes sure we sleep sweetly. We're planning on painting the studio over the next few weeks, now I've cleared a mountain of crap out of there (ie. closed the cupboard doors on it), which at least might save poor Dave coming home to a kitchen table entirely covered with paints, paper, or, last week on the day I decided the play dolls, synthetic fur. It looked a little sinister in fact, like a swan had had rather a bad anxiety attack and mistakenly decided it might be a good time for preening. Also not a great day for me to wear black.
In other news: for those of you who missed my post a few months back about the Bologna Book Fair, it's well worth looking into the Illustrators' Exhibition, perhaps the most prestigious award for children's illustrators the world over. Besides a rather boggling sum of prize-money and the publishing opportunities awarded to the overall winner, the publicity afforded anyone who gets themselves in is fantastic. Check out last year's selected illustrators to see the width and breadth of the world's best. And then, read the rules of entry and start on your own entry for 2012! Be aware that you need to have a fixed number of five pieces, and I would say, from my observaytions of entrants over the past two years, very very tightly realated to each other in composition, theme and style. And while it is notoriously one of the most competitive prizes to be accepted into, I have made a promise to myself I will enter every year regardless- why don't you do the same! I figure it will be a pretty wonderful day when I finally do get my work shown there and well worth the wait.
This and a few other commissioned pieces have kept me pretty busy painting and drawing-wise these past few weeks; alas, there's not a whole lot of my hard work I'm able to share just yet. This little one though, I managed in a few productive hours of stall-sitting. This isn't a subject I draw too often (and I won't point out the irony of this particular picture with this particular post if you won't), but her pose and faraway look suggested she might be waiting for something special to arrive . . .
Hope you have a brilliant day everyone!
Mel x
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