Thursday 26 February 2009

A rubbish cup of tea to celebrate good news

Well it had to be done...
Heres the rubbish picture I should've done to start with to set this blog off in tea slurping style...
But better late than never, eh?
Amusingly I have discovered that it's not just me that finds themselves very tea-centric, it seems half the folk on Folksy are too!
Heres just a few of the many examples you'll find there if you pop over for a visit



My particular favourite is one of a great set of prints by 'Sparklehen'... the funkiest teapot in town, you gotta love it :-)



So anyway, I digress.... what's all this merry midweek tea slurping indulgence in aid of you might ask...well, a few posts ago, I mentioned that I was sending off a new batch of Rubbish pictures to Great to be Green, the lovely eco friendly emporium, well I did...and Hooray! they've all sold already! It's a Wallop record. So I'm preparing for another week of rummaging through the bin and covering the kids with pva glue every time they need their cardi's zipping up, for a whole new set of pictures for March. In the meantime though - I reckon a party ring or two is called for to celebrate and mark the event in the tea blog style. Cheers! :-)

Monday 23 February 2009

You can never have too many bunnys


It's easter in 48 days! As if you hadn't noticed the shops filling up with creme eggs...
To celebrate and try to actually add some stock to the Wallop shop on Folksy, todays additions being uploaded this very morning are Easter bunny cards.
More to follow... when I've unstuck my fingers. These guys maybe small but the mess to product ratio is not relative! :-)

Saturday 21 February 2009

Not only is it rubbish. It's also going to be a whole load of poo.

I've been gazumped from my own drawing table by my particularly enthusiastic, self styled apprentice 7 year old daughter... A situation with it's downsides (ie trying to persuade her not to steal all the best bits of green packaging for her flower picture or we'll be eating soya beans for the rest of the week so that I can finish off my own latest creation...) but also advantages. Firstly, it takes a 7 year old to tell you, very honestly indeed, whats working and what just like soooo isn't. Plus she thinks the whole rubbish picture should be recycled including the base sheet the collage sits on, not just the materials used to create the actual image itself. She's got a point. So I set myself a little research project as to what I could use... Besides what else can I do but surf the net for ideas when I can't get elbow room at the workbench or glue pot?

It's amazing what you can just stumble across on the internet isn't it. I was thinking about making my own sheets of paper from mulching the food packaging that I don't use in the collages... but I think this is something more suitable for the summer and looks particularly messy and not compatible with my compulsively tidy husband, so that idea is on the back burner and whilst googling all sorts of paper products and recycling methods. I think I've found the best solution. POO.

How brilliant is that? Paper made out of poo. And not just any old poo. Elephant poo. No sh*t. well actually, yes sh*t. Lots of it. From real life big old flappy eared Sri Lanken elephants.

My googling has led me to Paper High, a Brighton based company providing eco-friendly handmade paper products from India, Nepal and Sri Lanka. They describe their paper production as:

All handmade paper is made using a fibreous material, and is boiled and beaten to make the fibre pulp. With elephant dung paper, the elephant has done the pulping for us, leaving us to collect the dung, clean it by boiling and steaming so all bacteria are killed, then putting the pulp in a shallow mould as usual. The coarseness of the paper is entirely dependent on the elephants diet, again making no two sheets identical.

I was delighted to find Paper High and they have been very helpful so are going to be the new official suppliers to Wallop for all my new poo requirements! :-)
I'm looking forward to my first batch of paper arriving so that I can crack on and create my first completely recycled Rubbish-picture-onto-Poo masterpiece. I can see the by line now: Perfect to be hung in the smallest room in the house?

And the best bit of this latest addition to my eco plan? My apprentice is now so busy rolling around on the floor laughing, I can get my desk back.

Monday 16 February 2009

Open for business - The Wallop online shop on Folksy



I haven't had so much fun playing shops in such a very long time.... but this last couple of weeks have been a joy.
I've discovered the world of Folksy.

"Folksy champions cool crafts and design talent. We marry up designers and crafters with buyers who want individual, quality stuff that's made with love"

What a great idea, and what an amazing bunch of people there are selling their handmade creations on that site.... Definitely worth checking out. Especially now that the Wallop shop is up and running and open for business!
All illustration commission work will still as ever be available through my usual website, but now I also have this handy arena to sell my existing gallery of rubbish pictures and the like.


In honour of the occasion and in line with my current general hippy urges, the latest addition to go in the shop is this little piccy, titled 'Treehugger'. It's the first time I've tried adding a child character into one of these collages and I'm quite pleased with how she turned out. Especially considering she's made out of carrier bags and a teabag box!

Saturday 14 February 2009

Great to be green


Today I am putting together the latest offerings of rubbish pictures which will be going on sale next week in Great To Be Green, a lovely independant eco gift shop in Holt, Norfolk.
It's been an interesting challenge as Clare Wheeler, the shop owner has asked this time for images to feature local birds for the bird spotting tourists that tend to pass through her shop... Not being particularly knowledgable on local Norfolk birds was one thing, then making them out of recycled stuff was another! Still, it's amazing the amount of black and grey food packaging one notices when one is half way through a particularly tricky 'avocet wading across marshland' :-)

Now I'm quite looking forward to easter, when I'll be back to chickens and eggs. Lots of eggs. Eggs are nice and easy!

A nice cup of tea and a sit down

As, obviously, tea drinking is close to my heart and this blog is something I'm going to be doing whilst slurping the good stuff... I've got to mention this lovely site:
a nice cup of tea and a sit down

and for those of you who are really trying to fill some time when you should be working....
Try the classic biscuit quiz!

Friday 13 February 2009

Flair Illustration


Thought I'd have a bash at entering the Flair competition this month. It's something I always intend to do and normally chicken out of at the last minute. The standard is always so high, with some amazing artists featuring their work. Well worth taking a look to see what's new and going on in the illustration world.
So... this is my entry: 'A rubbish hare day''

Seeing as I'm going through my rubbish phase at the moment, it seemed a good idea to choose one of these artworks to feature!

Flair is a competition run every month for illustrators, photographers, and typographers on the Creative Match website and is a great insight into whats new in the various industries at any given time.

Thursday 12 February 2009

What a load of Rubbish!


Second post... and quite enjoying this blogging malarky. It's the same feeling as I got as a kid every year when I got a new diary for Christmas and would long for the 1st of January to arrive so I could start writing all about my exhilarating life. I was 6 or 7 or maybe 8 and life wasn't hugely exhilarating to be truthful so the feeling generally wore off by about.... February. Still. I remember it well and this is it. Hopefully it won't wear off quite so quickly now I'm a grown up.

So today I'm working on my latest set of creations. I have recently started to try to be more eco friendly as and when I can, and this led to 'Rubbish Pictures' being born.

Rubbish Pictures are collages, of varying sizes ranging from A4 right up to big imposing poster sizes, made entirely of recycled household waste. Mostly food packaging and junk mail, but also old magazines and newspapers, all the irritating bits that fall out of your sunday papers into your corn flakes.... anything really that would otherwise go directly to the recycling bin or landfill.

I started with a picture or our dog Ned, created out of cheesy wotsits bags and moved on to a mermaid with a tail made of pink fruitella wrappers.... the mermaid led to another mermaid, which became a birthday gift. One birthday present led to a few more and before I knew it I was up to my elbows in glue and old stamps making an enormous ... peacock.

Now believe me, I have at several times stopped and wondered whether that 6 years of arts training, really should have led to this.... I may be turning slightly bonkers, eyeing up that 3 kilo tin of quality Street even before Christmas... not for the delights of a green triangle within, but the wonderful crinkly green foil it was clothed in and yes, I admit here I am, dishing out pink fruitellas till my kids teeth go furry all for the sake of finishing off just ....one more mermaids tail.

Its a strange life indeed.

Wednesday 11 February 2009

crash bang WALLOP!

Well.... heres a thing. Me with my own blog. A new Years resolution ticked off! I'm new to this so I guess the best thing to do to get the ball rolling is to introduce myself.

I'm an illustrator, you can visit my website, Wallop! to see lots of my work and more background information, but I'll summarize again just to save you lifting that finger....just yet anyway...

I trained as a graphic designer, graduated from the University of Westminster and the Royal college of Art and spent many years working at some lovely places, from Peter Gabriels' Realworld Studios, to the weather dept at the BBC!

Now I am Wallop Illustration, I produce illustrations and animations for websites, for books, for magazines, it varies from job to job and keeps life interesting.

My most recent project has been to start up 'Rubbish Pictures' a collection of eco collages, created entirely out of recycled household rubbish, junk mail, food packaging, all those annoying bits that fall out of the sunday papers every week.... you know the kind of thing.

More on those later....

First tea / blog break officially over - bfn.