Magic Jelly

Accidental Beauty & Organised Chaos

Maybe beauty is too grand a word for accidentally organised clutter, but even so, I thought these little dogs (picked up a few weeks ago from a flea market) I'd put to one side of the hellish mess I call my work table, made a nice little arrangement deserving of a photo! The collage on canvas behind them is a little work in progress - I must get around to finishing it!

The piccie below is another accidental arrangement from a few months ago. I was idly fidgeting while talking on the phone & made this little scene on my desk. The thing the tinsel tree is sticking in is a grubby lump of blue-tac with the word 'please' pressed in it from my 'please do not bend' stamp. Notice my blog on the screen behind it?

I've been flat-out busy lately, but for all those involved in the Paper Chase, I am madly collaging the nights away & will update the gallery & post some of the finished collages hopefully this week! Last count, I think I'd received about 30 packages!

What else have I been doing lately? Well, I've listed some new things in my Etsy shop. I thought I'd try & justify the extravagant purchase of stamp making equipment by making some to sell as well as for myself. I'd like to expand the selection, but here's what I've got for starters. I'm granting buyers a license to use them commercially, & all the designs will be exclusive to the range. I'm also gradually taking product photos so I can list a whole lot of buttons, magnets, keyrings, etc. The multi-packs that I've listed so far seem quite popular!

I'm also making hay while the sun shines (ie. using my gocco before supplies finally run out) by doing some new gocco prints, including some pieces for a gocco exhibition in October that I'll tell you all about later.

I'll be back to post about the Paper Chase later in the week!

Brimful of Interest, Excitement & Skill

Look at this great board game my friend Mark brought home for me from a secondhand market a few weeks ago. You're all invited to come around to my place on a rainy Sunday afternoon & we can sit on the floor & play Fairyland & have fizzy grape juice & ginger cookies. Hooray!

Well it was just a matter of time I suppose...it looks like I've been tagged by the well-preserved & fabulously talented benconservato & illustrator extraordinaire Racheal Anilyse. I won't tag another 7 unsuspecting bloggers, but here are my 7 random or weird facts about myself:

1. When we were kids, my sister Jo & I used to have a cardboard box with a human skeleton, a scary black wig, & a bunch of spiders (that escaped from our bugcatcher) in it.
2. Jo & I used to play a game we called The Chocolate Nun. I'm not sure there were proper rules, but it involved hand signals somehow...& I think one of us wore a cape.
3. As a child, I was obsessed with the trappings of bureaucracy & made my own stamps & forms. I glued homemade library cards in the backs of all my books.
4. Ironically, this obsession was later quelled by 12 witheringly boring years spent working for the Tax Department.
5. My family nickname is Weanie Beans & has many, equally embarrassing, variations - Beanie, Beans, Queenie, Queena, Kreenie, Reenie...& my Mum's personal favourite...Beans On Toast.
6. I'm a neurotic perfectionist. People deliberately move my fridge magnets a fraction of an inch, just to torture me.
7. I have slept through the room adjoining my bedroom being ransacked by a crazed burglar, & a speeding car careening through my neighbour's living room wall (the resulting evacuation attempt by the Fire Department, due to a gas leak, didn't stir me either).
   

So there you are! 7 things you didn't really want/need to know about Magic Jelly! Jot them down...if I ever become famous, they may crop up in Trivial Pursuit.

In other news...Dick & Dora have featured me in their blog...thank you! They also have an Etsy shop & make fab jewellery! And Fric de mentol included one of my Benediction collages in an Etsy Treasury list that made it to the front page. Hooray! Thanks Julian for getting a screenshot for me (a bouquet of parsnips is forthcoming) - it appeared in the middle of the night here in the Southern Hemisphere, so I would have missed it. Fellow Etsy sellers Anna Laura, Sherry Truitt & Salmon Street Studio also kindly let me know about it - thank you! It's so nice to see such a great collection of artists make the front page - it was an honour to be among them!

Finally, thanks again to everyone who took part in my giveaway - the winners' prizes are all in the post & on the way to their letterboxes.

Toodle-loo for now!

My Favourite Circus Fonts

I collect fonts of the Circus/Sideshow/Carnival/Wild West ilk. I tirelessly trawl the depths of the internet to find them.

Here are 12 of my favourites, & I've spared you the trouble of searching for them...

• Big Top
• De Louisville
• J F Ferrule
• URWWood Typ D
• Cast Iron
• Circus
• Pointedly Mad
• Armenian Circus
• Hoedown
• Romantiques
• Coney Island
• Abilene FLF

A Collage a Day

In an effort to kick start my creativity for the new year, I'm committing to making a collage a day for at least two weeks.

Take a look at my enticing box of papery goodness...old letters, receipts, maps, books, some gocco test prints of mine, & other miscellaneous bits & pieces. I've also cut up a nice little pile of 6x6" card blanks ready for my first collage in the morning. Can't wait to start!

I created a Flickr group that anyone is welcome to join who'd like to get busy with scissors & glue. No need to set strict parameters for yourself if you don't want to - it's all about having fun - so come & play!

I'll post the results in my blog as well as upload them all to the Collage a Day Flickr Group.

Yay!

I Love...Mary Blair

Hands up who's a lifetime member of the Mary Blair Appreciation Society (if there is such a thing)? Meeeeee!!!

I've loved Mary Blair since I was little & first read I Can Fly. Isn't it funny how kids study things so intently? Well I know every brush stroke of every illustration from that book, & when I recently got hold of a first edition copy & flicked through its pages for the first time in over 30 years, it was like being dumped over the head with an ice-cold bucket of 'OMG, I remember that!' My favourite picture was the one I've featured here, of the little girl as a make-believe worm in her fuzzy green beret & matching cardie. I wanted an outfit just like it when I was 5 - so stylish!

The beauty of Mary Blair's work is that it's just as fresh as it was 50 years ago, & her influence extends into the 21st century with so many artists (either consciously or otherwise) borrowing a little something (or a lot) from her style.

There's so much I could say about her work - about her amazing instinct for colour, how much I love her textures, the way she uses paint, etc, etc - but what I love most is her energy & spontaneity, the boundless sense of joy, & most of all, the memories her art evokes.

If you'd like to find out more about Mary Blair, Wikipedia is a good place to start. You can also check out some more of her work at the ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive & Cartoon Modern.

The illustrations I've posted are scanned from my own collection as follows...

Top Left: from the front flyleaf of The Golden Book of Little Verses by Miriam Clark Potter, first published 1946.

Top Right: also from The Golden Book of Little Verses.

Centre Top: from I Can Fly by Ruth Krauss, first published 1950.

Centre Bottom: Two spot illustrations from The New Golden Song Book, first published 1945.

Bottom Right: from the endpapers of The New Golden Song Book.

Four Chimneys & a Great Dane

A bit dark & gloomy today - warm & balmy, with a storm brewing. I walked to the post office, & on the way back took photos of chimneys.

This dog was awfully interested in what I was doing, & not quite sure whether to bark at me or not.

Little Things

When my sister Josella & I were kids, we used to collect little treasures such as toys from cereal boxes, Christmas crackers & vending machines, & keep them in tin toffee boxes (we had one each) which we called our 'Little Things Box'. We'd spend hours looking through our prized collections, & sometimes we'd swap pieces. I remember in particular, a pink plastic poodle I loved, & a tiny deck of playing cards. I wish we had kept those relics of our childhood (remember Bretodeau's boyhood stash in Amélie?) - I'd love to see them again!

I still collect plastic toys & keep them in vintage cigar boxes. Here's a small sample from my collection. Some were bought from Covetable Curiosities' & A. Bel Emporium's Etsy shops. The rest I found foraging at secondhand markets. I love my collection of little things!

Sunday on the Lawn

Check out this voluptuous little number...it's from a 1950s outdoor setting that I made my friend buy last week. I'm really good at convincing people to buy things...I'm that little cartoon devil that sits on your shoulder & whispers, "Go on...you know you want to..."

He did want it, but just needed that extra little push.

There's another chair & a two-seater. I just love those curvy lines & curlicues. So elegant & fine, like an ink drawing. In fact, it reminds me of mid-20th century illustration that has that organic sketchiness & spontaneity, & lots of curly lines. Much like the work of one of my favourite illustrators, Mary Blair (I'm planning a little Mary Blair tribute in my blog soon!).

I think I'm going to sit out in the garden in the sun & draw this chair...

"Everything you need, you carry around with you."

So I thought I'd explain the significance of that phrase & why I had it written on a bracelet (see previous post). A few years ago I was going through a particularly stressful time where I was constantly in worry mode. I woke up one morning with this sentence in my head..."Everything you need, you carry around with you." I don't know where it came from - whether I dreamed it or picked it up somewhere - but I like to think it was my inner-wisdom sending me a little message to help me put things back in perspective & stop fussing about inconsequential things. It was the inspiration behind this picture (top right), which was one of my very first vector illustrations when I was learning how to use Illustrator.

And so started my fascination with masked women. There's something so powerful about this image - I keep drawing it over & over again. She turned up again in Giddyup & more recently, my Benediction series.