definatalie.com

• Yes, I was so impressed with August’s desktop that I decided to adapt it for my Twitter background. “That fancy lady” indeed, have I ever left you with any doubt?!

• I found this on Tumblr (can someone tell me how I can post my animated gifs to Tumblr successfully?!) and was struck by
a) the fancy teacup
b) the fancy Jurassic Park style wobble of the tea inside.

• These custom re-upholstered chairs are gorgeous – and by Melanie Porter. I probably can’t afford an amazing piece by Melanie, but I can crochet! Maybe I’ll make a few pillows. Mmmmm.

• This is what all my childhood dreams consisted of. Living in a tree house. An actual tree house – not the silly ones that are mere centimetres off the ground in the name of “safety”. Pssh, safety. This photo is by Avi_Abrahams on flickr but I can’t find the precise photo page because a lot of people on Tumblr don’t believe in crediting their sources correctly. GET ON THAT, people!

• HANDERPANTS, guys… HANDERPANTS. I would like to see a lacy g-string version, and a polka dotted cottontail version. With fancy edging.

• Florence and the Machine’s album Lungs is totally doing it for me right now. The video clips are lovely too – but Universal in their wisdom don’t want people embedding and blogging about their lovely but TOTALLY OVERCOMPRESSED video clips. Go check out the videos for Rabbit Heart and Dog Days and squint your eyes and pretend you can see all the fanciness.

For this month’s wallpaper I listened to the people, namely Mem, who asked for the little sections back so they can compulsively sort their icons. I admit I hadn’t been doing it because I completely forgot – one month I totally left out the calendar too! If you can forgive me for being forgetful, I can give you a desktop with 100% more little sections for your desktop icons than last month’s.

To download one of these wallpapers, click the link to go to the flickr page where you’ll have to go to “All sizes” to download it and pop in to your background.

1600×1200

1680×1050 – widescreen

320 x 480 – iPhone

240 x 320

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
You may not upload this desktop to other websites, nor may you use it for any other purpose than to wallpaper your desktop. This also means it’s uncool to alter it and reupload it somewhere as your own work. Soz

Finally, my new portfolio site is up at natalieperkins.com! Nick and I have been really busy this year with various things and a sad casualty was my portfolio site. It was taking so long that one day I decided I wanted to redesign it entirely, and I came up with the white layout. I didn’t want anything too fussy, except my art in those big fancy frames!

You can also go and take a look at Forth Thread, who have taken it upon themselves to feature me. Thank you guys Click the image to be taken to my feature page with an interview.

I just picked up three of my beautifully framed pieces from Bizarre Framing and dropped them into KILN Gallery for The Illustrators show, a group exhibition I’m so chuffed to be part of. I saw Nigel Buchanan’s gorgeous giclee prints lined up against the wall, and said hello to Shaun Campbell and his fancy car as he was bumping in an installation. The show also includes Jim Tsinganos, Brett Lethbridge, Ron Monnier, Courtney Brims and Lucia Masciullo – some incredible names in Australian illustration that I’m rather honoured to be included with!

Now I shall present to you a taste of The Illustrators!

Nigel Buchanan

Jim Tsinganos

Shaun Campbell

Brett Lethbridge

Ron Monnier

Courtney Brims

Lucia Masciullo

And little old me!

Come and take a look this Friday night if you’re local. Tomorrow the KILN site should show all the pieces in the Illustrators show in the online gallery, so if you’re in an art buying mood you can get a heads up! The show runs from Friday 31 July for three weeks.

I’ve been featured on two awesome blogs this week and it isn’t even really Monday. Oh it is? Well… shit.

The lass behind Young, Fat and Fabulous is Gabi, and I’ve known her for quite a few years on this here internets! I’m really stoked that her blog is enjoying such success, and very honoured that she asked if I’d like to be a YFF girl of the moment. Daww!

When I posted some more of my images that poked gently at whimsy, Daydream Lily thought they were hilarious and posted them on her blog – which is full of whimsy!

You can buy these as prints now! Click on any of these images or head over here to buy one.

• Animated gifs that are fancy! Go see this full screen – so awesome it will make your nose bleed.

• Amy Winehouse – Me and Mr Jones. I love Amy Winehouse without shame, she is an incredible vocalist who writes the most poignant lyrics. This song is one of my favourites just to belt out randomly at any given moment and because of that, it’s fancy.

• Directors Masashi Kawamura, Hal Kirkland, Magico Nakamura and Masayoshi Nakamura developed one of the most inventive video clips I’ve ever seen for Sour by using the band’s fans to create the video. It’s so finely choreographed – now that’s thinking with your fancy!

• Dame Mary Barbara Hamilton Cartland – fancy by name and fancy by nature. This lady is one of my heroes, and I’ve never read any of her books. I just love her incredible countenance, and I hope to grow up to be just like her.

• Ice cream cookie sandwiches! I’m not a huge fan of ice cream, but Makia sent me a link to Bakerella’s blog on Twitter and I had to post it because Bakerella’s food photography is so edible.

• I found this video the other week because I was on the hunt for calligraphy demonstrations, and I was stunned at the confidence in this artist’s hand. Letterarte does some beautiful work, and you should check out his channel for more!

• This. Just because it’s hilarious.

So for a while I’ve been yearning to do calligraphy. I have a couple of books already, but I was confused as to what sort of pen I should buy first. Also, money was an issue, ha. When I found a bit of extra money in my PayPal account I decided to have a look around JetPens (my favourite pen store!) because I needed to stock up on Pilot Hi-Tec-C pens. I came across the Pilot Parallel Pen and was intrigued… after some intense googling I decided that these were to be the pens I would start with! Lots of people rave about these pens and say that they are excellent for both beginners and professionals, however the most crucial factor in my purchase was cost – they are an awesome buy at US$11 each!

I had been anxiously awaiting my package from JetPens for over a week, and today I went down to check the mail and saw one of those yellow missed delivery slips just sitting on the top of the letterbox for the whole unit complex. Peering at the name on the slip, I nearly cried when I saw it was for me! The delivery person had mis-read the unit number on the address, and attempted delivery two days ago to the wrong unit. Boo! I’m glad that the residents of the other unit put the slip out for me to claim, even if there was a risk of it flying away. I’d been getting anxious!

6.0mm Pilot Parallel Pen – for this review I used the black ink

3.8mm Pilot Parallel Pen – using the red ink

The Parallel Pen is so named because the ink flows through two parallel plates. I’m not sure how other calligraphy pens work, but this is genius to me! The ink flows SO quickly and smoothly, I was quite surprised. Though one (small) continued annoyance is that I have to hold the pen at precisely the right angle in order to get a decent looking line without any gaps. I am a total noob, so hopefully this gets better as I get better!

The other thing is that the Pilot ink doesn’t work very well with plain old cartridge paper – as you can see here, there’s feathering and bleeding all over the place.

When I moved to a scrap of Arches Aquarelle paper, the result was much prettier. I just have to make sure I get my angles right! You can turn the pen and write with a corner of the nib for a very fine line, something I was quite chuffed to learn! Just make sure you’re using a sturdy paper because it ploughed through the cartridge paper when I tried it!

Another delightful thing about this pen is the Pilot mixable ink! I bought a packet of a bunch of colours, and I’m looking forward to trying them out when my penmanship improves To mix the colours you just press the nibs of two pens (filled with different coloured ink) together for a few seconds, and then write! You can see that even after most of the black has been wicked out, it still hangs around. I’d suggest cleaning the nib as soon as possible to avoid muddied ink colours. I bought some Noodler’s Bulletproof ink based on a few glowing recommendations, but I think I might end up using that on my drawings mostly!

I’m pretty pleased with my purchase… now’s the fun part – improving my hard core calligraphy skills. I’m fairly convinced that Pilot are my favourite pen makers right now!

I’ve never been very big on cooking, and since being diagnosed with juvenile diabetes I developed a strained relationship with food. It’s a bit of a chore, really. Gorging on a delicious treat needs to be calculated against the amount of insulin or exercise I will need to do in order to bring my blood sugar down to an acceptable level. A low blood sugar means I have to force feed myself even when I’m not hungry. I guess it’s because of this strange and forced friendship with food that I never really got into cooking… which doesn’t really make sense but it’s something I’ve just realised in the last 6 months or so.

When I first started learning about Health at Every Size principles I realised that my relationship with food would have to change. In order to eat intuitively I’d have to actually drop my food defences and think about the things my body wanted me to eat. A part of my self motivated “food counseling” has been taking photos of the things that I make. I’m also a big fat perfectionist, so I find myself making really fiddly things instead of just slopping stuff on a plate. Maybe I should work on that too

I started by making cupcakes, because everyone was making them and I wanted to join in. They’re fun and it’s easy to do pretty and creative things with them, but I think I’ve almost exhausted the humble cupcake. It was by making cupcakes that I discovered the joy of sharing food – something I have never really experienced until I started baking. Some people assume that I make these cupcakes just for myself, but they don’t see how I share them with my friends and family whenever I go visit!

In the next few months I want to learn more and more recipes, and take photos along the way of all my results. I find that when I take a photo of something I can properly document it and pat myself on the back! It might sound like a very simple sort of thing to most people, but I really struggle with food sometimes and I’ve found that cherishing my meal has helped me so much. Maybe a similar approach can help other people who feel similarly… but at the very least you can make pretty things to eat, share and reflect on!

You know those gorgeous images you find of vintaged flowers, betraying some kind of longing on the part of not just the creator, but whoever posted it? Well, I took some photos in my friend’s garden, and after having a fiddle in Photoshop they reminded me so much of this sort of image, as well as the image below, that I decided to apply my sardonic wit to the photos I took. The only problem was, that I had wanted to use an uppercase sans serif vs script like the creator of the image below had done, but I couldn’t remember who had done it, let alone where on the internet I’d seen it!

field by f-letter

I decided to forge ahead and have a play, regardless. It wasn’t until just half an hour ago, many hours after I posted the finished images on flickr and tumblr, that I finally struck upon the images that f-letter created, and I was stunned at how similarly I had picked the typefaces. I think I have a great memory for lines and shapes, but not much else

This month has been crazy busy: I’m setting up a business with a friend as well as trying to keep on top of all my commissions and personal art work. It’s definitely wonderful being wanted!

I came across this video portrait of Milton Glaser by Hillman Curtis on the Drawn! blog and I was struck by something he quoted from Lewis Hyde about gift exchanges in primitive cultures that serve to stop people from killing one another because they create a common link. I have been thinking more and more lately about how what I draw is often a gift I give to people. I don’t mean a “gift” in a trumpet-blowing or “this is a mystical creative gift from the gods” sort of way, because y’all should know that’s not what I’m about! The gifts I give people through drawing and making are the labours of my efforts and time, and also the amount of wrist pain it takes for me to commit something to paper. It’s a kind of gift that stands separate from the value of “good” or “bad”, it’s a gift from me to someone special. You know like when a child draws you something, and you feel so honoured to be receiving it? I feel honoured to be around my loved ones, and I like to give them gifts of my making because I want them to feel like they are in receipt of an object that means something. Of course, I also want them to think of me fondly

The gift may be kept for 10 minutes before being thrown in the bin or for a lifetime in a treasure chest, but it can’t be kept forever. It’s just a “thing” and only really as effective as words, in that they don’t last very long either, however I am much more comfortable drawing my feelings than speaking them! The idea is that the intention or the motivation is special, and helps develop better relationships. They don’t last forever either, but for as long as our lives last, we can live peacefully.

Now I am very curious to read “The Gift” by Lewis Hyde! I’d also like to read “Drawing is Thinking” by Milton Glaser. So many books, so little money!