Nail Art On Another Level

 

1911

theillustratednail

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Pretty crazy but oh so cool. 

Enough said. 

Beci Orpin's Lovely Pop-Up Shop

Over the past 2 weeks I had the opportunity to do a placement with my favourite Melbourne-based designer, Beci Orpin. Never would I have even dreamt that this would be possible, since I've always thought that independent designers probably don't accept work experience students anyway. I remember rockin' up to class one day and it turned out that she was the special guest speaker that my lecturer spoke about! Hearing how she first started to where she is today was absolutely inspiring. After the talk, somehow I secured a placement with her. I don't remember being as stoked as I was then in my entire university life haha, since she is, afterall, one of my design heroes :) I won't hide the fact that one day I'd like to be just as awesome as she is in design. 

First half of the week was spent at her home studio. Kinda surreal how I didn't get to just work with her, but to actually get to know her family and even her cats and....her son's goldfish. 

Second half of the week had us working at the studio/ shop of Harvest Textiles, as Beci is having a residence at their shop. Got to meet the Harvest Textiles bunch and also designers like Emily Green and Dawn Tan, who both work at a space within the shop itself. 

Beci's pop-up shop has been opened since last week. It looks really cute and it's definitely worth a visit. This week's opening hours are:

Monday 27 June - Sunday 3 July, 12- 4pm

The closing party will be this Sunday, 3 July 2011, 1- 4pm. So do pop by and say hello to her. She's so friendly! Not to mention everything she has in the shop is absolutely adorable.

Address is Harvest Textiles, 512 Lygon St, East Brunswick. There is eftpos/credit card facilities too. 

Some shots of the shop :)

 I love this embroidery!!

 Work space

Beci at work

The placement was really good and I enjoyed every bit of it. One thing that I miss now is.....

 .....her grey little kitty, Tio. On the last day of my placement he came up to me, snuggled on my lap and fell asleep there :( ....and he kept purring as I scratched him. Think he totally surrendered to my charms coz it had its neck extended and belly upwards...

Tio....my first cat-love :(  

Oldie But A Goodie

We all know that pencil, gouache, watercolour and ink have been used for centuries already. Yet one thing that I love most about these traditional drawing medias is how artists nowadays can still produce beautiful and contemporary illustrations with them. 

As powerful as computers can be in helping illustrators produce artwork now, still, a humble pencil gives an edge to an artwork that the computers can't.

In this post I just wanted to share some boards that inspired my work for the post just before this.

The illustrations here are all not mine but works of many talented illustrators that I greatly admire.

 Works of Kelly Smith, Bec Winnel and Laura Laine

 

 Works of Krista Hout, Lorelay Bove and Catherine Campbell

Works of Kelly Smith, Catherine Campbell and Laura Laine

Gotta Love Digital Printing

When I was over in Sweden last year, one of the most valuable experiences I had from the exchange was being able to print digitally on fabric. 

This was a student project which allowed the students to have complete freedom and reign over what we wanted to experiment and achieve, as long as it is textile related. Some of my friends tried embroidery and knitting. I chose fashion illustration, something that I first did when I was 14 years old. The entire process was just soooo fun!! I loved every part of it!! Loved researching and reading blogs of illustrators and had much fun just drawing, experimenting and learnt that even a tiny stroke to the eyes or mouth (for example), could greatly alter the facial expression or look to the illustration. 

This project was meant to spread out over a period of 2 months but I had to condense much of the experimenting and designing leading up to the final outcome to just 2 weeks...because I squeezed in half a week of traveling to Spain into it with a friend, which was fun :). The 2 weeks after the trip basically saw me being stuck in my room the entire time, playing and re-playing all my Pixar movies whilst frantically sketching. My friends were so nice to even cook for me during that time! Love them to bits. Too bad we're now all scattered at different parts of the world now :( 

My desk in the midst of design- chaotic

I put together the illustrations into two patterns. Here's the final outcome!

Tedious project with lots of work involved, my design diary for this was thick as. But oh so worth it :)

Softies for The Johnston Collection

Here's a product board that I did for one of my subjects. This time around, I've decided to not include any existing images from websites but rather illustrate everything myself, which was hard work, but it's one of the boards that I must say I quite enjoyed making.

What made me really excited about this idea is that the softies could be personalised by the kids as they PAINT on the softie! This idea was inspired by the softies that Mirka Mora did back in the 1950s onwards. I thought this idea would be amazing for kids since they'd like painting and this is like an artwork that they could colour in and carry around.

Presentation date has been postponed to next week. Hopefully everything turns out good.

Boys Bedlinen for Dryen

I've been quite busy working on all my final year's assignment. It's been quite interesting so far that our assignments now clients that are actually not made up but do actually exist. Last year when I was away in Sweden, we've had projects with Linen House and Zimmermann. This semester, we have a design project with another major bed linen company again!

We have a choice of choosing between adults and kids range. Realising this year that my strength lies in illustration and recently have developed an interest in character design, I was straightaway attracted to doing kids' range. Since I've done design work for little girls, thought I'd try out for little boys. 

The theme?? Monsssstttterrrssssss rrawwwwwr!!!!

Here's a small screenshot of my work so far. My new Mac Pro is already lagging due to the size of the file. It would have crashed I guess if I did it in Photoshop...

So far, quite pleased with the result though this could be only the basic version of my pattern. Gonna try different backgrounds and fillers so that'll take some time again to do.

Hope you like it! :D

Till I return, I shall be MIA for a while...

Carven SS 2011

Absolutely knackered down by assignments and I've procrastinated on blogging more than I should've. What's new, ugh!

Whilst researching for my assignment, I stumbled across Carven! Talk about finding new love! Their pieces are so absolutely pretty and timeless. Not to mention that they're all in my favourite colours- nude, black and white. Oh so wearable. 

 Images from Carven

I'd definitely love wearing the black dress at the top right corner for a nice, Friday dinner date. The dark beige, cropped jacket and dress (3rd from top left) and the short, graphic day dress (3rd from bottom left) would be ideal running around doing errands in them, maybe with comfier shoes and switching to heels for a night out.

I looked them up if they had any of them selling in Melbourne and guess what, Belinda (in GPO) sells their pieces! I'm still a student now and yet employed, maybe could save up for a small splurge next time...that is if I can get around blowing maybe a couple of hundreds on a top or dress. But hey, they're still definitely worth checking out ;)

I've finally uploaded my photos of my work in Sweden into the computer. Now this post was meant to be about that. But editing is a real pain and can take hours for someone as particular as me. Everything needs to be in order and perfect...well, almost.

Pretty Leopard

Here's what I found on my floor few days ago- my first pair of leopard printed shoes from Bardot, unworn until nearly a month after its purchase.

 

Bought these as mum chucked out two pairs of my flats as they were really dirty and disgusting :( 

They look so pretty :)

I must say that I wasn't really that open to wearing pieces of prints as such, as I thought it'll come across looking too matured or worse, trashy. 

This changed when I got to Sweden. Animal prints, especially leopard prints, plus other crazy prints are commonly found in H&M and other fashion retailers around there.

Now I own two scarves, one from Weekday and the other from Dotti, a maxi, rayon skirt from H&M and this shoes in this print :) It's nice to add a little texture to the outfit that otherwise would look quite flat.

The woolen scarf from Weekday or MTWTFSS is really cool! When you lay it flat it looks like a jumper but with a huge hole cutting from one arm, through the neckline, to the other arm, but it's actually a scarf. It's still somewhere floating around the sea at the moment. I shipped it over along with other excess bagage you see. 

Maybe a photo of it next time :)

Dinner Date in Carlton

Can't believe a year has passed since the last Valentine's, since those lovely cookies that Jon's mother baked for me for Valentine's. If you read my valentine's post last year, I would proudly say that we didn't resolve to just giving hi-5's only, we actually went out for a nice dinner at some restaurant in Carlton! I'd say that's 100% my dearest's efforts. He made the reservation, drove us there and paid for the meal. Thanks sooo much hun! You rock!  

No presents, coz we decided to save. No cards, coz he left it at home and I was worse, I didn't even get one coz the shop I wanted to go into was closed for refurbishment and I didn't wanna spend 5bux on a card in Coles. So I bought some raspberry friands so we could celebrate three years being together.  That plan, however, fell through as my two horrible sisters, tired from a full day at work, ate both up!  

The interesting thing was the thought of one of them eating it, I won't name which one,  did come to my mind as I intentionally placed it at the corner of my bench top. Maybe it was God warning me bout it. But I took a chance coz I vividly remembered I said to myself, what are the chances of them spotting this brown bag here, piled on top of a bunch of stuff already? They'd be so hungry they'll just have dinner straightaway. So I placed them right there and without another thought, got upstairs to get ready. 

Guess I should have at least told my mum to keep an eye out for it. When I heard one of them running up and shouting "OMG are those friands yours????". I already knew what happened. My sister kept apologising after knowing that the friands were for that night itself. She felt so bad about it that I didn't have the heart to be annoyed any longer so I just told her to finish it. The other sister just capitalised on this opportunity and ate the other remaining friand.

So that was the short and tragic tale of my friands, which I never ever got to taste.

Anyway, I haven't done an outfit post for a long time so here's what I wore for dinner :)

 

Black mini dress worn as a top and belt from Supre, H&M maxi skirt, Bardot tribal necklace, clutch from Gina Tricot, black platform heels from Urban Originals

Spiky Snow

Didn't know snow could look like this...

Taken when I was taking a train to Gothenburg somewhere around mid Jan this year. It was my last trip to Gothenburg from Borås by bus :(

The texture and form of the snow stuck on branches really surprised me!