A Rubbish Popcorn Dog

In the midst of the crazy pre Christmas season, This week there has been a little beam of sunshine in the form of a project commissioned for the aptly named 'Sonny'.
This latest Rubbish Picture has been created to commemorate the naming ceremony of the very gorgeous young man whose face can be seen peeking through the camouflage of blue hues in the background.
Rubbish Dog is made out of popcorn wrappings, (just the right shade of brown) a Fat Face Christmas gift catalog and appropriately, a bag of Wagg Dog food. The background consists of packaging; from tea bags, Marks & Spencers Salt and Vinegar crisps, Rich Tea biscuits and some random NHS Swine Flu leaflets which the paper boy obviously got bored with delivering and just shoved in their entirety through my door instead.

A truly wise owl is made only from rubbish

Todays rubbish picture is a wise owl perching on a 'Raw Cola' cardboard packaging branch. The Owl consists of various articles from an old Living etc magazine, a lawn seed box and a fertilizer bag. The sky is a plethora of food packaging - embarrassingly mostly microwave popcorn and fish fingers - the staple diet of school holidays ;-)

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...

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....

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.

Happy St. Georges day

Todays Rubbish Picture is in honour of it being St. George's day today.
This dragon was produced entirely out of a frozen peas packet, (which it turns out are very fiddly to cut into tiny scales!) sweet wrappers, the cover of The Gaurdians' weekly TV Guide magazine and he's sat upon dogfoodbox mountain!

It was produced for a little boy Theo, for his birthday, and as a little extra, I made sure there were some blue tinted photographs of the young man himself incorporated into the sky.
He's now immortalized in Rubbish!

Running dogs

I have a very dull dog. Don't get me wrong he's beautiful, he's friendly, he's quiet, he's great with kids and is very low maintenance. I love him to bits and in most ways, he is the perfect pet in fact. But in the interest stakes.... he'd rate pretty low.
He sleeps a lot does our Ned. You give him a ball, he might raise one eyebrow at you briefly, you give him a chewy, he'll bury it for later....when he's less tired.
My dog does....nothing. Official. He sleeps for approximately 23.5 hours of the day.
So why is it I wonder that Ned has his very own fan club of adoring friends and neighbours? Why do complete strangers chat to me every single morning whilst we're out on a daily walk (The 0.5 hour of the day not accounted for above)
It's because Ned is a whippet that's why. People, I have discovered, just love whippets (or maybe people actually love greyhounds and a whippet is just a mini me greyhound so it kind of counts). These dogs have something about them that makes folk go 'awwwww'.

Testament to that is the new range of Rubbish Pictures I am making up at the moment to restock my Folksy shop. Folksy allows you to manage your items. Once you have added an item you can see how many hits it has had. Within minutes of this latest rubbish picture entitled 'running whippet', Seven people had checked it out and one had even been so kind as to make it one of their favourite items. More than one per minute?! How very lovely and it proves my theory , you just gotta love a whippet.
The first few of the new series of pictures will focus on the running variety as that is when they're at their most impressive, but I think I may have to add at least one or two at some point, of their natural state which is illustrated by Ned right now. Spark out. With a big doggy smile on his chops.

A house on a hill

Spring is here. The sun is shining. My 'proper' work project is very nearly complete and I have 5 entire days left until school holidays and chaos reigns...
The glue is out, the stacks of old papers have been sorted into colour piles and the food cupboards have been raided for all their colourful and oooooh so unneccessary wrappings. Rubbish Pictures are GO. again.
I have been neglecting my little shop over at Folksy of late and so the first few pictures will be appearing there and I shall do my utmost to actually getting around to doing a little bit of marketing this time, rather than just leaving them to stagnate.
Heres the first:http://www.folksy.com/shops/wallop. It's made entirely out of bits of food packaging and a leaflet thrust into my hand on the way out of the local swimming pool, that would have been thrust straight back again, had it not been a rather nice shade of 'sky blue'....... ;-)

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....

Teapots, bunnys, mermaids... what next?

Todays ponderings have come about through cabin fever mostly... My young apprentice is centre of attention again this week after a day in hospital on Monday having her adenoids removed. She was such a brave girl and has well deserved her entire week off school being pampered and cossetted. But, maaaaan a week is a long time when you're 7 with a sore throat and it's an even longer time when you're the one kept firmly inside away from germs and sources of infection with a boooored 7 year old. (actually.... on reflection, with 2 siblings in the house there's probably more chance of infection inside these walls than out.... but hey, I'm sticking to what it says in the leaflet!)

So.... to spare my sanity after the first 7 loops of High School Musical 3, (plus obligatory bloopers and behind the scenes hilarity), I've snuck into my den and have been creating away like a crazy lady, making the most of this enforced at home time to fulfil a new order of rubbish pictures for next week. But then here comes the dilema...
What exactly to create? An 'open order' is a wondrous thing. A customer who would like 'some pictures', similar to the last batch, but the subject can be 'whatever I fancy'. Wow. After years as 'Wallop' - illustrating for children's publishing in it's various forms, I have become very used to being dictated to exactly what is required. In this pc world we live in, each project generally requires a child of each gender, colour, height, weight, you name it and so artwork briefs are notoriously precise. When they're not, it inevitably means a reworking and so it's become ingrained to try to understand exactly the clients requirements first before ever setting pen to paper or mouse to...erm.... table.
So now I'm all of a wobble. Teetering on the edge of an 'artists block'? Dithering over the possibilities.... So far the Rubbish pictures portfolio has been pretty diverse featuring mermaids, dragons, dogs, cats all sorts... but how to know what will be a best seller? What should I do next, now that I can do....anything? I'd love to know - suggestions on a postcard please.... (or just in a comment would do and would save a stamp :-) )
In the meantime - I'm trying hard not to be distracted by the warblings of the delectable Troy Bolton and concentrating on a few more pre easter bunnys and pre mothers day teacups. Just to be safe.

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.