Today is my Dad’s birthday! I’m not sure I’ve posted photos from when I was a little girl, but today is probably the best day to do this because my Dad’s moustache was hilarious and there’s no better day to make fun of your father than [...]]]>

Today is my Dad’s birthday! I’m not sure I’ve posted photos from when I was a little girl, but today is probably the best day to do this because my Dad’s moustache was hilarious and there’s no better day to make fun of your father than his birthday!

The day I was born. Look at that mo!

Dawwww. And taken with a proper Polaroid camera, none of this Poladroid business!

A photo from more recent years to show his fashion sense (and facial hair) situation has improved! That’s my Mum behind him, I guess I get a lot of my ~~unique~~ personality from them. :P

Happy birthday Boonge!

Today is my sister’s birthday! I made her a head piece out of a remnant of sky blue satin and drew her this card. Sometimes I think it’d be a lot easier if I just bought presents from the shops!

Happy birthday Manda.

Today is my sister’s birthday! I made her a head piece out of a remnant of sky blue satin and drew her this card. Sometimes I think it’d be a lot easier if I just bought presents from the shops!

Happy birthday Manda.

Annnnd I wanted to leave a photo of her dog, Stanley. He is adorable but such a troublemaker!

I bought some books from Book Depository the other week and two of them were typography related, Mike Perry’s Hand Job and The Handy Book of Artistic Printing. I really relish these books because I don’t often by them for myself, and I’d been eying [...]]]>

I bought some books from Book Depository the other week and two of them were typography related, Mike Perry’s Hand Job and The Handy Book of Artistic Printing. I really relish these books because I don’t often by them for myself, and I’d been eying them for a while! As a result, all I can think about is lettering and typography right now and I wanted to share with you my favourite lettering and typography artists.

Daren Newman

Allison Carmichael

Adam Hayes

Marian Bantjes

Ray Fenwick

Chris Piascik

Deanne Cheuk

Adam Garcia

September is a month I always seem to look forward to, and not for any particular reason… it’s just that the weather is nice, friends have lovely social gatherings, people sing songs about September and it’s all just rather agreeable, really!

To download one of [...]]]>

September is a month I always seem to look forward to, and not for any particular reason… it’s just that the weather is nice, friends have lovely social gatherings, people sing songs about September and it’s all just rather agreeable, really!

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.

1600x1200px

1680x1050px for widescreens

320x480px for iPhone

240x320px

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 :(

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! [...]]]>

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 :(

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 [...]]]>

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 :P 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!

For most of the world, it’s been July 1 for a fair wack of the day but I’m skidding under the door Indiana Jones style for the rest of the globe… here’s July’s desktop!

To download one of these babies, click the link to go [...]]]>

For most of the world, it’s been July 1 for a fair wack of the day but I’m skidding under the door Indiana Jones style for the rest of the globe… here’s July’s desktop!

To download one of these babies, click the link to go to the flickr page where you’ll have to go to “All sizes” to download that sucker and slap it on your background.

1600×1200

1680×1050 – widescreen

320 x 480 – iPhone

240 x 320

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 :(

I’ve said it before, I’m very lucky to know Kate O’Brien and even luckier that we can muck around in her studio. We ended up going for a 1980s portrait studio vibe replete with vaseline screen filter and bad perm. Then I [...]]]>

I’ve said it before, I’m very lucky to know Kate O’Brien and even luckier that we can muck around in her studio. We ended up going for a 1980s portrait studio vibe replete with vaseline screen filter and bad perm. Then I applied my pens to create Fancy Lady magazine: Australia’s leading monthly periodical on fancy beauty, fashion and lifestyle.

I changed my Twitter user picture late last night, and since then I’ve had a gamut of reactions from “THAT’S AWESOME” to “that makes me vaguely uncomfortable”. For some reason, I have a tendency to relish in making people feel uncomfortable. Maybe Kate and I should do a whole series of really skeevy portraits, and actually compile a real Fancy Lady zine. haha!

I have discovered that a big part of what I do involves buttloads of time and love. People must think I’m crazy for spending hours drawing tiny lines or baking things from scratch, but it’s one of the only ways my primitive consciousness knows how to [...]]]>

I have discovered that a big part of what I do involves buttloads of time and love. People must think I’m crazy for spending hours drawing tiny lines or baking things from scratch, but it’s one of the only ways my primitive consciousness knows how to properly convey love and affection. A small part of me frets that people don’t value what I do – I worry that people throw away the things I make for them as if they were Hallmark products, but in the end I have no control over that. The only thing I really have control over is my love, and even if they did throw away my gifts I’d still spend time making them.

I have been incredibly busy lately, which is awesome, but I fell behind in making cards for Mother’s Day. So yesterday was spent drawing furiously… and making cupcakes. I finished icing the cupcakes and gluing the cards about half an hour before we left to have lunch at my sister’s place today… I was frazzled and half resentful because I feared how my gifts would be received. I needn’t have worried – my family always appreciate what I do, and I am so grateful for that because otherwise I’d be one bitter headcase :P

Thanks to the women in my life, including most of all – my Mum and Nana. You are brilliant, and my very limited vocabulary can not express how much I am indebted to you for helping me become who I am.

If you want to show someone you really think they are tops but you can’t express it in words, print off this recipe and make them some amazing cupcakes. They’ll get it :)

These are a few of my [...]]]> Lately I’ve really been getting into hand lettering. I’m totally inspired by Marian Bantjes, Linzie Hunter and Chris Piascik amongst a few others. For a long time I’ve felt either overwhelmed or just flat out imprisoned by computer fonts, so I’m enjoying the freedom of shaping my own words.

These are a few of my recent favourites from the Hand Drawn Type pool on flickr.

I could study Chris Piascik‘s letter forms all day – his ability to form unique letters knows no bounds!

Linzie Hunter‘s darling work! This is my favourite, because it’s totally girly and completely appropriate to the subject.

by Natasha at vemod.no – I was gobsmacked when I saw her cute physical portfolio the other day!

by Francisco Martins

by pulluptheroots

by Gemma Correll

by Jon Contino