Conference countdown...

Well it's T-minus 1 week to the SCBWI conference in Sydney. This time next week I'll be settling into my hotel room ready for the conference to start. This conference takes place every two years and is the only major SCBWI conference in Australia. I have never been before so am very excited to attend!

I'm slowly but surely getting all my goodies ready...

I picked up my updated business cards and new promo postcards recently:

I'm very happy with how they turned out. I think they are all tying in nicely together, along with my newly redesigned website too. The giraffe is a bit of a mascot for me (as you may have noticed!) and he has always been on my business card. It just so happens that my latest book features a giraffe as well, so she has made in onto my postcard this time.

So this is the baby and toddler... next is... the Mother..... The Portfolio!

How much can one obsess over an inanimate object? A fair bit it turns out.

I decided to squeeze in a new portfolio piece. Since most of my work is sweet, cute and happy, I wanted to do something a bit more moody with some darker emotions. Here is the sketch:

new portfolio piece!

I have just finished it and did another time-lapse of me painting it (woo!) so if I get a chance to edit it together before I go I will post it soon.

Either way I'll be doing another post about this piece and my conference portfolio soon so stay tuned....

Website is live and book is released!

Well it's a pretty exciting day for me as my brand-spanking-new-crying-with-joy-website has finally sprung into the cyberworld, along with the release of my latest book-baby.

Please check out my new website at the same ol good address of

www.kimflemingillustration.com

it's got a fresh new look, lots of new work, links, behind the scenes peeks and all sortsa good stuff. I'd love to hear what you think of it, if you'd like to come back here to comment, or on Facebook or twitter.

Along with the new work on the site is my latest picture book through Scholastic Australia: 'Mummy You're Special To Me'

This is indeed a very special book to me because I was working on it while celebrating my first year (and Mother's Day) as a mum. Each page opening is of a different baby animal with their mum. It was really one of those dream-come-true books that came at exactly the right time in my life. I was able to pour so much motherly emotion into it (even on very little sleep sometimes!) and this book will always be dear to my heart.

I'll be having a book launch for it at the Hill of Content Bookshop in Melbourne in May, (curiously, just in time for Mother's Day, imagine that) and then some of the illustrations will be exhibited at the Hunt Club Gallery in Deer Park as well as back at the HoC later in the year. So stay tuned for details on those!

I really hope you like both the website and the book. I've worked hard on both of them. Really I have! It's no joke, even though it's April Fool's Day! (also the day my parents got married. Fitting somehow...)

Coming soon...

Coming soon to a website near you…

Some major revamping going on behind the scenes at kimflemingillustration.com.

stay tuned-- a few more practice sessions and we'll be ready to rock the house! :-)

And another!

For a wedding present this time :)

Tree for Liz

Here is another commission I did for my friend Liz and her lovely family. And I have a few more on order too.

These are getting fun, and much easier using stamps (hand-carved by me as well as machine-made)

I'm thinking about offering this as a "service" on etsy.....

hmmmmm...... stay tuned....!

Jonah Charlie Tree

This is a commission for a present for a little baby boy. I hope he likes it!

I've been experimenting with using hand carved stamps (all the blue leaves) -- something I've been wanting to do for ages. I've even had the tools hanging around for YEARS and never used them. So finally they have been inaugurated. It's pretty fun but I definitely need to practice! 

This Is Melbourne

I've got a piece in the upcoming This Is Melbourne exhibition, as part of the Fringe festival. It's my first completed piece since my little boy came along! I will post it here soon, but for now, consider yourself invited :)

Caitlin from Pesky is curating, and has a list of all the artists on her blog, here. The exhibition includes works by Shaun Tan, Andrea Innocent and Tracie Grimwood to name but a few!

Back in action

Sorry for being missing in action for a month now! I had a good reason. This is what my studio has looked like for the past 3 weeks.....

We did a bit of bookcase shuffling in our house, and unfortunately the bookcase destined for my studio completely collapsed mid-shuffle! (thank you, IKEA.) So it took a little while to find something else (thank you, ebay). and now things are looking much better....

which is perfect timing as I am just starting a new book project! huzzah!

So it's good to be able to see my desk again.

Spacedog

In between book sketches and book paintings, I squeezed in this commission for a little baby boy called Ethan. I hope he likes it.

Here is a reference photo I was given for their boxer dog. How funny is this!

Oh also, my blog has been kindly featured here, on Be@home's 'Best of the Web' - thank you very much!

IF: proverb

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step"

This little polar bear is on a long journey. I'm going on the long journey with him, and together we've only just taken a few baby steps.

I'm putting together a story about this guy to submit to the agent I met at the SCBWI conference. I've done three paintings so far -- and I am happy with them, but I have been going around in circles about the next ones, so for now it is back to the drawing board. um yes, that pun was intended.

I redid this one in my current watercolour style. The original was acrylics:

hope you like!

Ahoy! Painting animation

I've been wanting to do something like this for a while:

this is a little animation of the stages of the watercolour painting of 'playing pirates' that I started some weeks ago.

the colour difference at the end is because most images were taken with a camera except for the last which was professionally scanned. (painting was too big to fit in my scanner)

I used the animation capabilities in Photoshop for this. It was pretty easy, but I had to take the smooth fades out because it was making the file size too big. What do other people use to make videos/slideshows for the web?

(i hope it works!)

work-in-pirates

I've gotten into the habit of doing a quick colour study in Photoshop before starting a new painting. I generally work out a colour scheme using either the Kuler plugin in Photoshop or the colour scheme designer which is very cool, or sometimes I'll even take it from the collage paper I want to use. Here is the one for Ashton's pirates painting which I am keeping in primary colours:

here's how it's looking at the moment:

Website update!

I updated the folio section of my website with some new work. It was about time!

I added in cover previews of the four book series I worked on in '08 and finished up this year: Healthy Active Bodies published by Five Mile Press. Hopefully I'll have news soon about when they'll actually be available in stores.

But probably before then (crossing fingers, holding breath) I should have some news about my next imminent book project.... (eeeee!)

News!

I am very excited to finally announce that I will be working on illustrating a book with author Karen Andrews! -- be sure to check out her blog, she writes very humorously, and often! It's a great blog for mums (or wannabe mums like me ;-) -- So..... it's called Surprise! and is a wonderfully unique and engaging book for 2-5 year olds. Karen is open to me posting updates and sketches (not giving away too much of course!) but I thought it might be fun to track the progress here and give you an insight into the way I work. We all work differently, and I think it is so important and informing to see how other people do things.

For instance, Alicia is also working on a book, and she has started on the storyboards as a first step. For me, I prefer to work on the characters first (so I know who I am dealing with!) and then the storyboards. I think the more I can draw the characters and get to know them the better, so that's where my mind begins. I've already done a bit of this work, so I will post this soon. In fact, I've decided I will do regular postings, so feel free to check back for Surprise Mondays when I will post my ideas, issues (hopefully not!) and progress with the book... and I would love to hear your comments, questions and insights too!!

I finally took the plunge and updated my Blogger template (which I had been putting off for oh... a year now?) so that I could have the labels list on the right hand side there. So in the future you can just click on the "Surprise" link to see all the posts relating to the book. In updating, i had to recreate my links list, so I'm sorry if I've missed anyone! But these are all the blogs I check pretty regularly now, so I hope you get as much enjoyment out of them as I do...

See you soon!

I-F: 100%

This is 100% the same composition as my last IF post for "soar"!


I have been going through a colour crisis lately. Ever since I read Penelope's post on colour, I've been looking at my own work differently. I tend to go for the really bright, happy, punchy colours, but sometimes they are so bright that they look a bit fluoro and garish.

When looking at other IF entries for "soar," I took careful note of which ones I liked, and a lot of them had really earthy palettes. So I thought I'd try something different, but using a previous composition so that I could really compare the two.

So what do you think??!! I've wanted to update my illo-of-the-month for January on my website, but not sure which one to choose, so please help me decide!! Leave me a comment and let me know which one you like best - bright (soar) or earthy (100%) ?

new medium, new work

what's that you say? acrylics? didn't that girl only do watercolours?

well yes, a bit of a change for me here, and I'm really excited about it. I haven't painted on canvas in ages and never with acrylics, but I decked myself out this week and got into it - and I'm loving them. They don't dry nearly as fast as I thought they would, coming from an oils background (though I did have some choice moments talking to my canvas when trying to blend colours - 'no, no, not yet! stop! damn.' )

Anyway, my friend's sister is opening a homewares shop in Brisbane where she's going to have a "kid's corner" so these are heading up there to warmer climes (although it was beautiful in Melbourne today - bring on Spring!)

I'm really happy with the way they turned out. I think the bits of collage work well and make them feel a bit 'special'. Canvasses are great because you can just hang them straight on the wall and don't have to mess with framing which can be expensive. These ones have the thicker edge so they look good hanging without a frame, and I've varnished them so they are well protected from sticky little fingers. I'm thinking I might start approaching some kids shops in Melbourne too. you never know what might happen!

I've decided to 'market' this new style under my lil-kim bloggy name, so I'm going to have this little easel which only stands about 4 inches tall near the paintings. and it's time to make up some more business cards too because I'm all out! time for a freshen up anyway....