Doodle anonymously. (But put your name on it!)

Hello. My name is Katie and I am a doodle addict. It's been 10 minutes or so now since my last doodle. I do like a distraction, as I'm sure most people who work alone do.... it's always nice to have something more fun to do that the actual something that you're meant to be doing. And so it was this week when I received my pristine t shirt through the post from Doodlers anonymous with the invite to scribble all over it and post the results to their gallery.

I gave myself an hour. There had to be a time limit or I'd have been there all day - but it was such a fun hour! Once you've got over the initial 'hmmm, what to draw, don't want to ruin it' thoughts - and just doodle, doodle, doodle.... it's fun. Therapy, I think.

Here's the results - odd that my doodles turned into a kind of bonkers town, complete with resident mermaid and one lone cow. Must say something about my inner self.... ;-)

For all those in need of some doodle therapy, (and I would recommend it to many of my friends!) get yourself a tshirt from here and start doodling!

Moon Rabbit

New for August: Another rubbish rabbit, this time a whimsical nightime bunny.
Todays rubbish picture is created entirely out of household recycled rubbish.
The background consists of fish finger boxes, a swimming pool timetable, and a couple of magazine pages. The moon is almost entirely created from a Poppy day information leaflet from last November and the rabbit consists of an article all about wooden floors, with a couple of wallpaper samples and a habitat kitchen brochure chucked in for good measure.

A Rubbish Mermaid

I've had a rubbish mermaid propped up behind my desk for far too long while I've been getting around to adding her to the shop over at Folksy. I've added her today, where she sits in all her glory next to a rubbish giraffe and a rubbish nice cup of tea :-)
Mermaids have proved popular characters for my rubbish pictures, one has even swam as far afield as New Zealand. There have only been a few made to date though because of the amount of time involved in cutting out all the individual scales on the tail: A detail which I think makes a big difference in the final outcome of the picture, but which also makes me cross eyed, sticks my fingers together with pva and basically sends me to the brink of insanity...

A particularly animated experience

Last week I was privileged to have been involved in Arts week at my local primary school. While I was preparing, I thought back over my own arts education and recalled that probably the most fun was had back at University where we produced, as a class, a short animated movie based on a field trip to Berlin. I don't actually recall many individual projects set at Uni, (most of it passed in a blur of fun and Snakebite n' blacks in the union bar), but that one I certainly do. It was hard work, that's for sure. Hours of drawing and aching fingers. Frame after frame of 2 o' clock in the morning tedium. BUT, the result was awesome. A huge diverse range of animations joined together that represented our trip exactly. The fact that I remember it so well, suggested to me that of all the projects I could set my Year 4 group of children during Arts week, learning traditional animation would be a particularly enjoyable and rewarding one.


We went over the basics, the theory and the 'perception of vision', we created storyboards, we designed characters and we studied how many movements would need to be made to make one second of animation for each child. And boy, we had fun. What a fantastic experience to spend 2 days with such an enthusiastic, upbeat, creative group of little people. They were unexpectedly prolific and by the end of the project we had between us created a huge stack of cells to be scanned in and sequenced together. The results though, speak for themselves. 24 children, who had never animated anything before managed to produce a beautiful sequence including characters, movement and morphs.

I am incredibly proud of their achievements and would love to do more of this kind of thing. I can so see why teachers are teachers. To feel so proud of a bunch of children, who do not actually belong to you, is just inspirational.

Everyone loves a giraffe...

Today is a giraffe day. No particular reason. I just like 'em. They make me laugh. Laughing at a giraffe is reason enough to blog in my books.

Today's rubbish picture consists of herbal tea bags wrappings, food packaging, an old Junior magazine, Sunday's Observer, and a holiday brochure which was quickly ripped up before I could drool all over it thereby ruining perfectly good bits of blue....

Day of the Triffids

I have a giant triffid growing in my garden. It looks like innocent rhubarb (but of the enormously massive freaky sized variety) and I swear it grows an inch every time you turn your back on it.
This winter it disappeared completely and since it's re emergence from the depths (The vigorous stamping on the spot where it had been last autumn didn't get rid of it for good as I'd thought....) it's grown to a whopping shoulder height already.... in just a matter of weeks!
I'm ever so slightly concerned it may well turn out to be carnivorous, the kids are looking particularly healthy and outdoorsey at the moment - am I tempting fate by leaving it be within striking distance of the sandpit?!

Anyone who knows Alan Titchmarsh or indeed anyone who knows anything about freaky giant potentially carnivorous rhubarb please feel free to get in touch with some tips n' tricks.

I swear it growled at the dog this morning....

Today's blog rubbish picture is a hastily put together watchdog-esque look a like Triffid consisting rather appropriately of a garden centre catalogue and various scraps of recycled food packaging and fabric.

Where have all the lost kites gone?

As a child I seem to remember it was a pretty standard feature of the countryside and parks to see old tattered tangled kites hanging in trees, alongside deflated footballs, the odd plimsole... Is it just me, or do trees these days seem remarkably bare of these things?
I have some theories, exasperated by walking the dog through woods crying out for a few oddities to be dangled in the branches, this morning.

The Wallop ponderings of the day then;

1. Children are taller these days. Or have evolved longer arms.
2. Children do not play out. Ever. especially near trees due to health and safety tree-might-fall-on-them issues.
3. Kites are not for children anymore. They have DS lites. Kites are for dads. Dads don't abandon them when they get stuck in trees because they're ridiculously expensive titanium clad whizzy ones from 'Iwantoneofthose.com' or some such and dads would rather chainsaw (probably also purchased from the same site) the tree down than leave their 'toy' for some snotty nosed kid to get hold of.

Regardless of the reason for their disappearance. I'd like to see more kites. Think I may force, ahem ... sorry, encourage my kids to make one this weekend even if just for the right of passage in watching it crash several times before getting stuck in a tree. For old times sake.

Todays Rubbish Picture is 'Lost Kite' and consists of frozen pea packaging, a Weetos box, a garden centre catalogue which was very timely shoved through my letter box just as I was looking for some more 'green'. The little girl is dressed in the lid of a Dunkin Doughnuts drive through box and a fetching pair of Ellas kitchen smoothie pouch boots.

Transforming art...

I have a snoring toddler lying across my mousehand. It's gone a bit numb and tingly but it seems such a shame to wake her and I'm quite enjoying the rare chance to sit and snuggle. Todays post must therefore be one handed and laptop based, so.... heres a thought.
A lot of my collages take a while to 'come into their own' - the first few hours of their existence is always a bit touch and go, because when I first begin work on them, they always look...well.... like random bits of rubbish stuck down with lots of glue. It can be a frustrating process, if you are a particularly impatient person such as myself, but generally it's worth carrying on and trying hard to remember the image in your head rather than what is oh so slowly appearing in front of you, until eventually the two pretty much match up. THEN, you're allowed to pop the kettle on and feel much better about yourself.
It made me grin to see this today then... http://lol.com.pk/2009/03/art-dont-miss-it/ and to think of the mixture of angst and excitement that this street artist must be feeling during the long process of making this amazing spectacle. I'm suitably humbled and have vowed not to get so irate waiting for my pictures to be finished in future. At least no one walks over mine when they're half way through!

A 'Rubbish' Photo shoot

It's a busy time for Wallop. Rubbish Pictures are taking off and the Wallop website is growing and going through a thorough redesign, to incorporate this blog for starters, expanding the 'oodles of doodles' section and bringing everything together in one place, now that I seem to have my fingers in so many pies... it seems timely.

Todays job was the fun bit though - the marketing photographs for Rubbish Pictures which will also be featuring on the front page of the new site, now that I have purchased the domain name, www.rubbishpictures.co.uk (coming soon!)

We had a glorious afternoon leaping about in a lovely Hampshire field and I'm chuffed to bits with the results...
Thanks have to go out to our lovely friends Flair and Martin, who not only allowed us to leap about in their field, but didn't question the fact that we wanted to. Or why we turned up with a giant peacock picture.
Thanks guys. You know you've got good friends when they'll spend their afternoon off sat in Sheeps poo for you....

Proper work...

Well, playtime sticking and glue-ing has had to come to an end temporarily, the Rubbish Pictures have been put aside to dry while I put my grown up Wallop hat back on for a while and do some 'proper' work!
The Lunchbowl Network is a wonderful school based charity set up in response to the plight of orphans in the Kibera slum in Nairobi.
They are ever growing and are currently updating and rebranding. I am privileged to have been chosen to look after their Brand illustration and graphic design requirements. It's an ongoing process, but the logo is coming along nicely with a few variations being worked on this week (my favourite so far shown here) and the 'school pack' of posters and literature will be following shortly. Do visit the Lunchbowl site for more information on the fantastic things that this organisation does

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! :-)

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.