When you "heart" someone

I don't totally get why now you say I "heart" instead of I "love" but anyway, it is still nice to be 'heart'ed ;-) I was given this cute award by the lovely Monica - who I must admit, I whole-heartedly heart! If you don't know her work, you must go check her out Right. Now. Her artwork is the definition of beauty in simplicity.

the award rules are the usuals:
1-Display the logo on your blog
2-Link back to the person you received the award from.
3-Nominate 7 other blogs
4-Put links of those blogs on yours
5-Leave a message on their blogs so they know they've been nominated.

so thank you so much Monica! And now for the hard part...
I hereby heart:
cosas minimas, lucia masciullo, paula mills, laura zarrin, leah palmer preiss, courtney pippin-mathur, wynlen

Also, I was recently contacted by a design student at the University of Canberra to see if he could interview me as part of his course. I was naturally very flattered! He also had to produce a piece of artwork in response to mine, which we has given me permission to show here. The student, Bear, spoke about how my pieces can be like what a child would dream of, and he tried to capture that in his piece. Well done Bear, and thank you!

Here is Bear's piece:
in response to this one of mine in particular:

I-F: Detach

It's hard to detach yourself from watching the Olympics! They're everywhere you go. But our lounge room is a work site at the moment as we are fixing cracks, replastering, and repainting, and our TV has been placed somewhere in between the piano and the couch, covered in plastic. I can't wait till it's all done! But something tells me the olympics will be done by then too!

This is a piece I did a few years ago for a book about the Beijing Olympics. 2008 seemed very far away at the time!

Good News!

I am happy to announce that I have been contracted to illustrate a series of 4 board books! The publisher must remain nameless for now, but I am very excited for many reasons:

• it's a publisher I haven't worked with before

• they're board books so for really little kids which is the age I love illustrating for most (also board books have no gutter, meaning the pages lay flat so there is no 'loss' of space in the middle where the pages are bound)

• the books are all about being healthy, so they've got a really good focus

• the characters are animals! I've always preferred drawing animals than humans, but the last few books I've done have been people, so I'm really excited to get back to drawing animals again. Soooo.... let me introduce you to my main characters, twin elephants Ethan and Emily:

I've been asked to change their ears a bit as they are too round, but other than that, these are the little guys I'll be having fun with for the next few months!

I-F: Sail

You can sail on land, sea and in the air. You can sail to and you can sail from....
— Henry Van Dyke

What a lovely start to a poem that is I-F's prompt for this week. Unfortunately I couldn't find the rest of the poem anywhere, but this was enough of a prompt for me! I will let you decide whether he is sailing in the sea or in the air...

This week I-F is helping raise awareness about cancer, and here in Australia, August 22nd is Daffodil Day, to do the same thing. I would like to dedicate this illustration to my friend Brad who died of cancer way too young, way too many years ago.

#78

Here is a little something I did for my father-in-law's 78th birthday, which is today.

I-F: Poof

I have to say this topic made me laugh when I first saw it. I suppose the obvious choice would be to do somthing disappearing, so I thought of magicians and fuzzy bunnies, then thought well maybe the bunnies with their 'poofy' tails were poofy enough!

Just a quick one as I am a bit under the weather the last few days.