definatalie.com » magazine

Some typographic things and a bug.

Natalie — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 05:56:21 +0000

When Alex Louisa let me know that my Lovely postcard was used in this month’s issue of Home Beautiful magazine I was pretty surprised. I’m glad the stylist liked it enough to include it (though it’d be cool if it was attributed, just saying!)

This is what I do on Friday nights. I’m not a rager and you won’t find me at a party; no sir, I’m right here drawing and mucking around. After noticing that my clients seem to want me to do a lot of script lettering, my friend Viv challenged me to draw something like this. Instead of rendering it by hand I decided to take it into Illustrator, because I haven’t done much lettering work in the program for ages.

Yes, it says “Script is borls”. Interpret as you wish :P

I found this beetle crawling around the hibiscus the other day. It’s nearly time for Christmas beetles, but this isn’t one of those… I wonder what it is?

Print is dead, long live print!

Natalie — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 06:25:38 +0000

I’m always very chuffed to be asked to be part of anything printed, whether it be a zine or a magazine because it means people are holding something that my lines embellish, acknowledging it and sometimes even keeping it for a while. Physical objects are important and they take up space in the real world, even if they are just ephemera in the scheme of things.

Lee from Eat Sleep Draw did an interview with me for the third issue of the magazine. The cover is pretty fantastically gruesome!

Greg asked me to contribute to the Survival issue of Absent Cause. It’s a REALLY REALLY interesting zine, if you want to buy a copy head over here.

My regular lettering spot on the cover of Peppermint Magazine. It’s really awesome to see people loving Peppermint so hard, especially when print is supposedly dead.

This is one of my favourite bits of Peppermint lettering so far!

It’s nice to share

Natalie — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:34:39 +0000

Rayna of Radical Cross Stitch made this kick arse video for the No Clean Feed effort. It worked well enough to force Kevin Rudd into putting off the legislation for a couple of years. Horahhh!

Two Whole Cakes/ Fatcast
A new podcast by Lesley of fatshionista.com and Marianne of therotund.com in which these two amazing women talk about fat politics, reactions to their being “fat” in the media, and other stuff. At the time of posting, Lesley and Marianne have just put up Fatcast 1.5 on “The Fat-o-sphere”!

Start To Draw Your Life
Michael Nobbs has released a free e-book for people who have always wanted to start drawing but were a bit hesitant about it. I highly recommend it! So many times people say to me “Oh I wish I could draw” and they don’t realise that they actually CAN draw!

Total Body Conditioning
I’ve been lucky enough to catch a few of Tasha Fierce’s posts around the bloggiverse, but I wanted to direct your attention to this post in particular. Tasha makes the excellent point that accepting your body also means accepting your feelings about your body – even if they’re negative. And you know, in the world we live in, a lot of them might be negative. Lots of people ask me how they can go from feeling negative to feeling A+ AT BODY ACCEPTANCE and I think we all forget that you just can’t gloss over the negative stuff. Let’s own our feelings, recognise that they exist, and work through stuff.

Black AND Asian (and Jewish?)
Tiara posted this link on Twitter earlier today and I’m really glad she did, because even though I’m white and Australian I learnt a lot about history, race relations and systematic racism as well as just how much apparently “conflicting” minority groups in America have in common.

Are you tired of Sassy yet? THE ANSWER IS NO!
I never thought I’d have anything in common with Tavi, but it seems both of us are new to Sassy magazine. Recently I’ve seen a lot of reminiscing about the publication and I feel a pang of sadness that I never had access to it. I was at the right age to have drunk it right up, but it just wasn’t at any newsagency I ever visited. Instead I put up with wall to wall body and female negativity in Dolly, Girlfriend and Cosmo et al. I’m tempted to track some copies of Sassy down now but apparently they are pretty expensive on ye olde ebay :(

Australia is untreatable gonorrhoea hotspot, says WHO
“THE World Health Organisation has warned of a rise in “untreatable” gonorrhoea, after a spate of multi-resistant cases were detected including in Australia. ”
Three words: PRACTICE SAFER SEX.

Design*Sponge posted a rad twig push pin tutorial. I was going to make a tenuous pun about it being totally “twee-g”, but I won’t because I respect you. They are terribly twee though. I wanna do it!

A day for doodling

Natalie — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 23:26:12 +0000

I haven’t really had time to work on any personal art in the last few months and I worry sometimes that if I don’t take time out for myself that I’ll forget about all the things I want to say and draw. Yesterday I took a day off to recover from some busy weeks (and yep, the holiday!) and thought I’d take my pen to the latest issue of frankie which has ample space for doodling facetious little things.

I read popular culture a lot more deeply these days, and while I avoid most of it, some things are still palatable – frankie being one of those things. It’s not without its problems, in particular I find it to be quite homogenous in the sort of people it represents (white and young and left-leaning and fairly financially comfortable). When I do my little snarky doodles I’m not mocking the models themselves, rather I’m asking questions of the branding and positioning of the magazine itself (and any other magazine I doodle on!) So I submit these doodles without comment for you to think about and perhaps discuss in the comments between yourselves :D

Featured in How magazine

Natalie — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 23:05:55 +0000

One rather exciting thing that happened recently was that I was one of six featured lettering artists in How magazine‘s 25th anniversary issue.

See, there I am! The write up was really lovely too and made me feel all busy and important. If you’d like to read the page I was profiled on, take a gander over here. Thanks How!

My work in print

Natalie — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 01:04:47 +0000

I was invited to submit some of my older work to Gestalten publication Hair’em Scare’em, and today I got my contributer copy. The book is full of fantastic illustrative and photographic work from a huge variety of artists – I was really impressed with it, and myself for being published alongside such great names!

That’s my stuff on page 74!

Tabitha actually sent me my issue of Forth Thread the other week, but I hadn’t gotten around to blogging about it. You’ll have to excuse its rumpled demeanor, Australia Post must have handled this with their elbows!!

There’s the Bearded Lady of Brussels!

The zine has heaps of young Australian talent – you can buy a copy of the first edition “This Ain’t Digital” here.

Kelley from Peppermint Magazine sent out my contributer copy of issue 4 and this lovely diary!

2010 is going to kick arse! Am I right?

Augmented Reality and Esquire magazine

Natalie — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:11:13 +0000

I just stepped into the 21st century the other week: I got an iPhone. The best part about having an iPhone is having an iPhone – they’re just so lovely and sleek and well designed. It’s like having the internet by my side, where ever I am (so long as I have Optus coverage!) I’ve used the Epicurious app to look up recipes, found my way to the airport with Google maps, and freed up about two hours a day where I don’t have to sit at my iMac.

The one app I’ve not downloaded is an augmented reality app. I’m not entirely sure I want my reality augmented, because it’s hard enough trying to separate the fact from the fiction. Governments lie to us, the pictures we look at aren’t especially truth, and anyone with enough money can bias anything. Augmented Reality has scared me, insofar as it could just be another veil to rip off. Luckily, at the moment, Augmented Reality has kept itself to small, amusing and sometimes useful things – like this month’s issue of Esquire magazine, demonstrated in the above video.

I can’t deny that it’s cool – it’s actually really super awesome in terms of providing even more content. I just worry that if I choose not to opt into Augmented Reality, that I’d miss out on things – and I’m the sort of person with enough privilege who can choose to opt in and out!

What do you think? Have you seen any other cool/ scary examples of Augmented Reality?